"I think it is difficult to build the metro, but it is not to cut the tape."

I think the most interesting thing about this article on the Pyongyang Metro is the guidebook (why did they translate it into English?).

Now everyone with warm blood loves totalitarian propaganda. The pictures are extremely stirring, if you approach them with the right spirit. For instance:


And the prose is so cheerful and fatuous. It almost makes you wish you lived in North Korea where the workers love the Great Leader and the Great Leader loves the workers and the workers love one another. It makes you surprised they aren't kissing one another in those pictures, really.

A lot of people will tell you that vicious tyrranical governments put out materials like this to make their citizens love the country and look past their own hardships. A kind of an idea that propaganda is stronger than your own day-to-day experiences. I'm sure that is part of it but I am not convinced that that is the real reason for things like this.

Charles Dickens as always supplies the key :

"...Squeers covered his rascality, even at home, with a spice of his habitual deceit; as if he really had a notion of someday or other being able to take himself in, and persuade his own mind that he was a very good fellow."

I think that North Korea and Stalinist Russia and all those other lovely governments put out this propaganda to convince themselves that their people are happy. Governments aren't really as full of cynical bloodless manipulators as everbody thinks, and non-meritocratic governments even less so.

Probably the functionaries in the Korean government get worried every now and then that their people are a little unhappy (I hear that Kim Jong-il is really very nice). To reassure themselves that they aren't that brutal, the North Korean government has to make itself some nice pictures sometimes. The people, as always, are purely secondary.