A Visit to Panmunjom
A couple of years ago I visited Panmunjom for the first time. This is where Trump met Kim Jong-un, and where they crossed back and forth between the actual border between North and South in a nciely choreographed dance for the world Press. You can see the border in the picture above - a raised line running between the two blue buildings.
Panmujom is only a few miles from where I live, but you can’t just show up there, and have to take an officially sanctioned tour from Seoul, so I was part of a mixed bag of tourists, mostly Americans.
I noticed that the North Korean border guards convey old-fashioned swagger through their facial expressions and postures, as if they want to emulate actors from old war movies. This impression is increased by the cut of their uniforms, which seem to be caught in a time warp, circa 1953. In 2001, Christopher Hitchens had this to say about North Korea: “Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult”. The guards at Panmunjom apparently come from privileged and loyal families, and they are clearly an elite. So they tend to look well fed, and are often rather photogenic. Their South Korean counterparts, on the other hand, have adopted more contemporary Western role models, in line with the soldier persona that transformed the wise-cracking ‘GI Joe’ into a muscle-bound ’Rambo’, and now into a ‘Terminator-style’ robotic automaton.
The South Korean MP’s wear reflective sunglasses, and stand in modified tae kwon do poses. They try to look super- or non-human, while the North Koreans’ facial expressions and postures register as far more ‘humanistic’, in the sense that they are permitted to be decidedly more individualized in their self-characterization. It strikes me that these North and South Korean men are acting out the roles their respective societies value highly. In the case of the North Koreans, they strive to embody the state ideology of juche – signifying self-reliance or mastery, combined with absolute loyalty to the ruler. The South Koreans, by contrast, want to embody the alluring fantasy of the ‘cyborg’ - a being that is half-human, half-machine.
North Korean guards show their curiosity.