Left learns from North Korean propaganda

DRIVEN by what she calls “capitalist despair” Sydney documentary maker Anna Broinowski took a taxpayer-funded trip to the North ­Korean workers’ paradise ­returning with a her new work Aim High in Creation! “Every time I turned on the news I’d see oil tankers washing up on pristine reefs, or a McDonald’s being built in a hospital, the mining giants doing whatever they wanted, and a coal seam gas mine had just been approved 200m from my house. It felt like capitalism was on steroids,” she said in one of many publicity interviews for her film. With that sort of attitude and a TV locked onto the ABC, it is little wonder that she was reading a book on film directing written by dictator Kim Jong-Il, the second supreme leader of risibly called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, when she felt the urge to explore the North Korean propaganda production. Nor is it surprising that the North ­Korean masters welcomed to their studios Broinowski and producer Lizzette Atkins. Funded by the Australian Government, the NSW ­Government, Screen NSW, the Victorian Government, Film Victoria Australia, the South Australian Government, Screen Australia and Unicorn Films, Broinowski was able to create her own anti-coal seam gas propaganda in the style of her North Korean hosts. Though she claims awareness of North Korea’s horrific history of human rights ­abuses, it did not disabuse her of her goal, nor did it seem to interfere with her artistic drive. “If you remove the brutality of the regime, which I didn’t see, it was serene and beautiful to be in a country with no ­internet, no advertising,” she told one interviewer. “I’m not an apologist by any means. I know it’s an evil, ­repressive place as well, where 200,000 people are political prisoners and it’s brutal. “However, I don’t think we’re getting the real story about the rest of North Korea. There was a purer, more innocent approach to fun than what we are used to in the jaded West.” Even the capital, Pyongyang “wasn’t the evil, diabolical place I had been led to expect,” she said. Serendipitously, while Broinowski was honing her propaganda as a favourite of North Korea’s totalitarian regime, another Australian, former High Court Justice Michael Kirby, was putting the finishing touches on a UN report into human rights abuses in DPRK which recommended that its leadership be charged and referred to the International Criminal Court. His commission found “an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as of the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association”. Justice Kirby, who chaired the UN commission, doesn’t share Broinwoski’s admiration for the propaganda machine. His report finds it is an “all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood to propagate an ­official personality cult and to manufacture absolute obedience to the Supreme Leader (Suryong), effectively to the exclusion of any thought independent of official ideology and State propaganda. Propaganda, the report notes, is further used by the North Koreans to incite ­nationalistic hatred towards official enemies of the State, including Japan, the United States of America and the ­Republic of Korea, and their nationals. “Virtually all social activities undertaken by citizens of all ages are controlled by the Workers’ Party of Korea,” it says. Those workers certainly know how to party, or at least, those favoured by the regime whom Broinowski was fraternising with do. She reports she drank copious quantities of Soju, local vodka, as she bonded with the cinematic crew. As a foreigner and a woman, she was fortunate that her powerful friends were able to shield her from the sexual and gender-based violence endemic in the xenophobic state, where victims are afforded no protection from the State, any support services or recourse to justice. According to the report, ­violations of the rights to food and to freedom of movement have resulted in women and girls becoming vulnerable to trafficking and increased ­engagement in transactional sex and prostitution. One wonders what sort of small talk Broinowski engaged in as she tossed back the vodkas with her hosts. Though hamburgers may seem scary to some Australian inner-urban dwellers, they don’t really compare with forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of ­reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. Perhaps there is a documentary to be made. If Broinowski is available, Justice Kirby has the script ready.