Bombed with Bibles (2013)

The Halo Halo! Column from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing excites a Daily Mail hack more than a story about ‘Marxism’. And if they can fit in a bit about the erosion of Christian values too, so much the better.

‘North Korea executes 80 people in public ‘for viewing South Korean movies and owning bibles’’ ran the headline in the Mail Online (11 November). And while nothing we hear about the treatment of the working class in the North Korean dictatorship would surprise us, perhaps we should take this with a pinch of salt. The Mail got the story from a South Korean newspaper, the Joong Ang Ilbo. But, they noted, this paper could not confirm the deaths, but said its source is familiar with the internal affairs of North Korea, and had recently visited the country. Oh well, it must be true then.

‘Why the executions took place is difficult to ascertain’, the Mail informs us, but ‘they may have been carried out to quell unrest and stop capitalist ideology from growing, as they took place in areas of recent economic growth’.

Hmm, it’s difficult to understand the logic in the Mail’s thinking sometimes, but it’s hardly likely that the state capitalist dictatorship of North Korea would want to discourage its own economic growth is it?

But by now the Mail’s writer had the bit between his teeth: ‘North Koreans are forced to adhere to the Juche ideology,’ he went on, ‘a doctrine which mixes Marxism with the worship of North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung and his descendants’. Eh, what was that again?

While we agree, the ideas of the North Korean dictatorship must be a nightmare to live under (‘The Juche idea is the precious fruit of the leader’s profound, widespread ideological and theoretical activities, and its creation is the most brilliant of his revolutionary achievements’ for example), it has nothing to do with Marxism. (But if you’d like to wade through another 30 odd pages of the Great Leader’s ‘precious fruit’, all in the same vein, take a look at LINK).

It’s no secret that state brutality and severe poverty are widespread in North Korea, so surely these downtrodden people are not putting their lives at risk by illegally importing bibles are they? Well no, as it happens, they are not. Here’s another story from the Mail (10 November).

‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the New Testament: Christian group air-drops bibles over North Korea using 40-foot hydrogen balloons’.

Yes, despite Christianity being banned, and the death threats the North Koreans apparently face, one sanctimonious and arrogant bible thumper has so much faith in his own delusions that for the past seven years he has happily put these people at risk by inflicting bibles on them from the air, 50,000 of them last year alone. ‘These are the most persecuted believers on earth’ he said. Too bloody right they are.

‘In sending the bibles over the border to North Korea, Pastor Foley hopes that North Koreans will read the scripture and see that the ideology they are forced to believe ‘is all a fraud’ reports the Mail.

And hopefully, if they get a chance to read this absurd religious humbug without being arrested, they will realise what a fraud religion is too.

NW