Chollima Korea

An Inside View of Totalitarianism and Leader Cult

This account is the result of a trip to the People’s Republic of Korea in early 1971. The author spent a month there on invitation of the North Korean government, to report, as one of the first journalists from the West, on the communist wonderland, already in those days shielded off from the world at large. It was a time when in Europe, as well as in America, diverse Maoist groups believed that they could learn from “the Great Leader and Helmsman Mao” and his small Korean “brother” Kim Il Sung how to counter hunger and squalor in the Third World. In the face of unrestrained capitalist exploitation and the misery in the Third World, it was no wonder that authoritarian youths, and some who were no longer so young, were again looking for Leader figures, who should deliver the world. One of these was Kim Il-Sung. His books were read in the universities in the West and used by communist groups as propaganda material. It was pre-cisely because almost nothing was known about North Korea that his example could work so radiantly in the minds of unknowing paradise searchers. In the time which has gone by, except for a lot of squandered cement and steel, which transformed the façade of the country, while the rest of industry that North Korea once had, is today apparently reduced to missile and atomic armament, the account of the frozen up Leader state, so conserved over the years, has lost none of its relevance.