Much like Saddam's promise to wage "the mother of all wars" on the
USA in Gulf War II, (when in fact the Republican Guard capitulated like
a fart in a bath), the rhetoric of the DPRK and the reality of a
toe-to-toe bout with Bush's nuclear arsenal are far removed from each
other.
The posters may depict a colossal Korean soldier battering seven
shades of shit out of the roof of the Capitol building with a fist like
a traction engine, but are the Koreans really crazy enough to think
they've got superpower credentials?
It doesn't really matter. From what the little information we
receive tells us, the reality is that life is grim for those on the
inside of country that has barely changed in the last 50 years. And
it's telling that the style has evolved from the socialist realism
style, the now almost-extinct Communist propaganda mode: the only place
the style flourishes now is in this anachronistic cultural hinterland.
Socialist realism began in Soviet Russia, when the proletarian
dictatorship decided that all art and culture should be owned by them
and directed toward state propaganda. In Stalin's day, any artists who
rebelled against the approved form and function were likely to get
packed off to the Gulag in Siberia. The style flourished in the USSR
all the way up to the beginning of the 90s, and was reapropriated by
other communist regimes as the cultural wallpaper for their
totalitarianist front-rooms.
DPRK Studies (http://www.dprkstudies.org),
a detailed web site and blog dedicated to all matters North Korean,
offers a fascinating insight into the self-image of Democratic People's
Republic of Korea through an online gallery of slightly older artworks
produced in Pyong-Yang by state-sponsored artists. It's a fascinating
array of socialist realist art and the monumental personality cult of
the leaders who have appropriated it for their own regime.
