Allahpundit links to the above surreal video of the funeral motorcade for Kim Jong Il and asks, “One thing I wonder about Orwellian spectacles like this: Who’s the intended audience?”

The people crying might believe that the outside world is impressed by their tears, but does the leadership, which has a better sense of international opinion, understand how creepy and contemptible this looks to its enemies? It’s the most pitiful, cultish case of Stockholm syndrome on this scale that we’ll ever see (I hope). Or is the spectacle not aimed at foreign audiences at all but exclusively at the inmates of the North Korean gulag? These lines from Michael Totten stick with me: “Especially in full-bore Stalinist systems like North Korea’s, would-be dissidents feel like they’re completely alone, that no one else has any idea the emperor is naked. That’s why these regimes will mobilize massive state resources just to locate and punish a single graffiti artist. It’s critically important that everyone who hates the government feels like they’re the only people who do so.” If you’re a dissent-minded North Korean watching this clip, that’s precisely how you’d feel.

The day after Kim Jong Il’s death was announced, John Derbyshire wrote at the Corner, in a post that was the source of the first half of our headline above, “More often than not, those North Korean tears are real:”

There were similar displays in China when Mao Tse-tung died. In conversations over the years I’ve asked many Chinese friends & relatives who were adults at the time whether they wept, and if so whether sincerely. The answers fall into three groups.

Those three groups, according to Derbyshire, are “Sincere weepers,”  “Swept-alongers,” and “The Awkward Squad.” Regarding that last group, Derbyshire writes:

A few have told me: “I pretended to cry, because I might have got in trouble for not crying, but it was fake: in my heart I hated the s.o.b. and was glad he’d died at last.” Those few all had a certain distinct type of personality: skeptical, contrarian, prickly, stubborn, and antisocial — the Awkward Squad. The first job for anyone serious about being a totalitarian dictator is to identify these people and hustle them off to the camps. They are only a small minority: the rest can easily be manipulated. There were similar displays of collective grief when Stalin died. The movie The Inner Circle gets a good scene out of it.

Speaking of movies, if you ever get chance to view it via DVD, Netflix or one of the cable movie channels, don’t miss Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the 2005 dramatization of Scholl, her brother, and colleague Christoph Probst. The three were guillotined by the Nazis on February 22^nd of 1943 for having dropped anti-government leaflets out of the third floor onto the atrium of a building on the campus of Munich University less than a week earlier, in the wake of the Nazis’ monumental losses at Stalingrad.

See also: Robert Harris’ brilliant summation of the soft evils of detente.

And if sounds at first glance like too harsh an assessment of the implications of what Gorby is saying, just a reminder — here’s CNN’s workers’ paradise-style video look at North Korea last year:

As Steve Barton writes at Newsalert, “Go to the 10:05 marker in the video: Rachel Maddow says she’s ‘someone who’s roughly to the left of Mao.’”

It’s just a quip from her little red joke book — I think — but add to Maddow’s expression of her worldview, table-pounding Lawrence O’Donnell who said “I am a socialist,” and “I live to the extreme left,” on the air last year at MSNBC.

Back in 2007, the New York Times dubbed MSNBC “a liberal version of Fox News;” a description that network executive Phil Griffin tacitly concurred with, saying that network finding its ideology “happened naturally,” which it would express overtly in its progressive-themed “Lean Forward” campaign last year (which as critics noted, has an echo of Mao’s Great Leap Forward slogan as well.)

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that “commies love concrete,” which, if she isn’t kidding, might help to explain Maddow’s otherwise incongruous love of mid-century dam building efforts now eschewed by the rest of today’s environmentally correct far left, including those who staff her employer, General Electric.

But hey, give credit for Maddow and O’Donnell for not biting their Mao Tse-tungs and coming clean on some level about their far left ideology. In its own socialistic way, it makes for a refreshing change from most old media news outfits. At CBS, for years, Walter Cronkite uttered “That’s the way it is” before signing off, his Solomonic vow towards objectivity, before retiring to host fundraisers for an organization devoted to bringing about one-world government. His successor, Dan Rather, clothed his own claims to objectivity inside such goofy Ratherisms as “I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. [Ideologically,] I don’t know what that makes me.” Before being forced out over Ra^therGate and retiring to host programs on HD-Net, the cable network owned by Mark Cuban, who produced a spate of anti-Bush movies in the naughts, professed to voting for Obama in 2008, and ran the ‘Truther” “documentary” Loose Change on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not to mention Rather hosting fundraisers in recent years for far left The Nation magazine.

Of course, perhaps the most objective response to MSNBC’s far left collective ideology came from a rather unlikely source:

“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”

There are no journalists on MSNBC’s nighttime lineup? No kidding, Reverend Bacon, no kidding.

Believing anything that North Korean news reports is a dangerous game, but this one appears to be true: Kim Jong Il, monstrous ruler of North Korea, has died. Maybe yesterday. Maybe on a train.

Big question now, what happens next with the totalitarian regime that Kim inherited from his father, and was apparently trying to pass on to one of his sons? And will U.S. diplomats now rush in, as they did during North Korea’s last succession, in 1994, with aid and deals that help shore up the regime during the vulnerable stage of transition? Or will they do the right thing, and look for ways to finally bring down the horrific system which since the late 1940s has enslaved North Koreans and threatened the Free World?

At last, an opportunity for North Korea to enter the 19th century. But will they take it?

Update: Not surprisingly, lots of action on Twitter just now. Josh Trevino wins the Tweet of the Year award: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.” Meanwhile, Pejman Yousefzadeh links to Pyongyang Rose’s video meltdown and quips, “I feast upon your tears:”

Click here to view the embedded video.

More: What happens next? Allahpundit links to a 2006 Robert Kaplan article in the Atlantic on that very topic and adds:

How loyal will the military be to new supreme honcho Kim Jong-un? On the one hand, the old guard was reportedly fulsomely obsequious towards him when the regime started rolling him out last year as the heir apparent. Could be that they were acting that way simply to avoid being sent to Camp 22 by his pop if they didn’t, but it could also be that his pedigree as a Kim is enough to warrant absolute devotion. Remember, this is a country so deeply, insanely cultish in its worship of the leader that Kim Il-Sung — Kim Jong-Il’s father, and a man who’s been dead for nearly 20 years — is technically still president. (Hitchens famously described this more-Orwellian-than-Orwell arrangement as a “necrocracy.”) On the other hand, is the North Korean military really going to take orders from … this guy? C’mon.

South of the border, “This is S. Korean president Lee Myung-bak’s 70 birthday today. Surprise!” Chico Harlan of the Washington Post notes, in an endlessly retweeted item. “Best. Birthday Ever,” as Trevino adds.

Flashback: Christopher Hitchens on North Korea, a nation he dubbed “Worse than 1984,” back in 2005:

One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell’s 1984was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. (“Hmmm … good book. Let’s see if we can make it work.”)

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell’s dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no “free-world” propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

From ABC back in 2007, what it’s like to be “Born and Raised in a North Korean Prison Camp.”

Reminder: In the comments below, a reader praises CNN’s coverage of Kim Jong Il’s death. But I wonder what the network’s founder is thinking right now?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: Via Michael van Poppel of Breaking News Online, “North Koreans weeping hysterically over the death of Kim Jong-il.” Exit quote: “I will change sorrow into strength and courage and remain faithful to respected Comrade Kim Jong Un:”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: Ed Morrissey links to a 2010 video from CNN on Kim Jong Un; whose breathless tone dovetails rather well with Turner’s views above — and sounds like pro-German or Russian propaganda from the 1930s. Or just about any CNN report involving a totalitarian dictator (or Barack Obama) since the network’s founding:

(If video above doesn’t play, it’s also currently online here.)

Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a “tremendous event,” the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. “The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.” He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth,” wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: “If the doctrines…of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly”—he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations—”are hurled into the people for another generation…then nobody should be surprised when…brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non–brothers…will appear in the arena of the future.”

“The death-struggle between Hitler and Stalin exercises a lasting fascination because it represents a moral singularity,” Richard Fernandez wrote this past weekend at the Belmont Club. “It is a narrative of how men and great states act when they are completely unfettered by such considerations as humanity, morals or even sanity:”

The psychohistorical attraction of the Eastern Front is that it provides the only actual recent laboratory in which we can observe men who are like gods. On the Eastern Front  one could order the death of millions; order the burning of entire nations; send however many people one liked into concentration camps. One could order ‘subhumans’ from the Soviet eastern republics to walk over minefields to clear the way for tank armies. The only constraints were resources.

But of morals, there was none. All other historical tableaus restrict the writer’s palette. Only on the Eastern Front, in the battle between Hitler and Stalin, were all colors completely unrestricted. It was where anything goes. Lincoln Steffens was wrong when he said, after visiting Soviet Russia that “I have seen the future and it works”. The real future of Communism, the portrait of its ideals carried to the ultimate limit, were the Eastern Front and the Downfall.

If I were to do the doctoral dissertation today, my premise would be different. It would not be to identify the specific operational decisions which if done differently would have resulted in the “victory” of Nazi Germany. That would be to miss the point. It would be to ambitiously claim that Hitler never knew what victory was.  Could not have ever known what victory was. Although Hitler’s plans were operationally expressed in start and stop lines, I would argue that in a very real sense Hitler was grasping for a metaphysical goal. There would always be something else. My claim would be that deep down inside Hitler — and perhaps Stalin — were making war on God.

They did not want anything so tangible as x more grams of bread, or y more liters of fuel for Ivan or Hans. Those were goals not worth pursuing. Neither wanted to gain something as mundane as a 40 hour work week, or two weeks of vacation for the populations. They cared nothing for meals, clothes — Hitler was a teetotal vegetarian — or works of art. Nobody was interested in increasing the leisure time available for barbecues and bowling. That language had no place in the world of the Titans. Both Hitler and Stalin were after power, power so pure they could never really grasp it in the form they desired it most. And that therefore the tragic events on the Eastern Front, involving though it did the deaths of millions, were really about nothing at all that you could grasp upon this earth.

That is an astounding claim, but today, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think the claim can be fairly made. Nothing permanent was achieved by that titanic struggle, that Downfall. It was strangely enough, a bad dream, as insubstantial as its goal. It left no permanent imprint upon the land after the barriers were down, when people went back to drinking beer and eating sausages and playing video games. People went back to the real and forgot about the nightmare.

Robert Harris’ brilliant 1992 novel Fatherland is as much an alternative history of the Cold War as it is an alternative history of World War II. The subtext of Harris’s novel is that Western Europe under the Nazis 20 years after the conclusion of World War II was the equivalent of the last two decades of the Soviet Union; Hitler is an old man, dissipation is rapidly setting into Germany, and a sort gray dreariness pervades the continent; bloated middle-aged men in suits and uniforms preside over a people going through the motions in an exhausted industrial economy. Meanwhile in America, most intellectuals have grown tired of the Cold War between the two super powers, and are eager to forget the Evil Empire, declare detente, and ask, “can’t we all just get along?”

Or as Harris himself told the New York Times, in 1987, when he first conceived of his book:

There were a lot of German tourists on the beach [in Sicily, where he was vacationing],” he said, “and if you closed your eyes, you could just imagine you were in the victorious German empire. Suddenly, everything came to me as a novel, the idea of a cover-up, a sequence of deaths, someone investigating them. I went splashing into the water, and by the time I came back onto the beach I had it written in my mind.”

Meanwhile, regarding the other side of the coin in World War II, Oceania has never been at war with the Eurasian Union…or has it?

It has often been noted that both the Senate and House investigating committees during this period blackened reputations with a reckless disregard for the truth, besmirching many who had never been Communists. This is certainly true. But it strikes me as much too narrow a criticism, implicitly conceding the right of those committees to investigate the private beliefs of American citizens and to penalize them if those beliefs were deemed erroneous. It accepts the basic mission, in other words, but assails the sloppiness of the execution. Harry Truman was more on the mark when he described the Un-American Activities Committee as “the most un-American thing in America.” Nobody, after all, was being accused of treason, or of terrorism. People were being investigated and punished solely for what they thought.

Within a day of his testimony, my father was dropped by his agency, fired from his job (he was a staff writer on the then-popular situation comedy I Married Joan), and declared persona non grata in the only profession he had ever pursued. An account of what followed can wait for another time; for now, it’s enough to say that he managed to scrape by, the situation slowly improved, and the first script to bear his name after his blacklisting, produced some 11 years later, won him an Academy Award.

Now, let’s flash forward to some time in the mid-’90s. Frank was invited to appear on an LA radio show to talk about his experiences of the blacklist. By then, Joseph McCarthy, the movement he led, and the blacklist that resulted were all in total disrepute, and my father agreed to the interview with the reasonable expectation that he would be treated as a victim of a deplorable aberration in American history.

That isn’t quite what happened. The interviewer began the dialogue by asking if my father would feel equal outrage had the blacklist targeted Nazis rather than Communists. Wrong-footed, Frank fumfered some sort of response. After the interview, both my parents emerged from the studio in high dudgeon. “How dare he?” was the gravamen of their scandalized indignation. And when they told me about the interview later that day, I made matters worse by suggesting the interviewer had posed a legitimate question. There was a distinct chill in the parental household for some time thereafter.

But it is a legitimate question. Unless one is prepared to defend Communism on its merits, or, alternatively, is merely defending one’s comrades out of a kind of tribal loyalty, then one is, I think, obliged to consider whether punishing people for their political beliefs is always wrong, or wrong only when it’s one’s own side that is being persecuted.

Now, I concede there’s one important distinction to be made here. Americans of my parents’ generation joined the Communist Party out of genuine idealism, no matter how misplaced. With 25 percent unemployment, Jim Crow laws in operation in the South and de facto segregation common elsewhere, and fascism on the rise in Europe and effectively unopposed by the continent’s democracies, Communism might have looked like a reasonable political recourse. Whereas it’s hard to imagine anyone becoming a Nazi out of anything anyone would recognize as idealism.

Why? As Orrin Judd writes, “Pssssst…the Nazis were idealists, too.”

“The US need their own Perestroika – these changes have started now and can be seen in Obama.”

Mikhail Gorbachev on Twitter, November 9th, 2009.

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies. Every vital element of the Democrats’ coalition — unions, government workers, government contractors, “entitlement” consumers — requires constant increases in payments, grants and consulting contracts. Without those payments, they don’t sign checks to re-elect Democrats.

Like it or not, Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev: a man forced to preside over the demise of a political system he desperately wants to save.

– Richard Miniter in Forbes, July 18th, 2011.

(Concept via SDA.)

“Bob Woodward: Trump is the new McCarthy.” *

For a group that call themselves “progressives,” the left sure seems to spend every waking hour replaying the 1950s, doesn’t it?  (When they’re not reliving the 1930s, of course.) But hey, just as every television journalist is invariably the next Edward R. Murrow for 15 minutes, I guess it’s only fair that everyone is Murrow’s (rather belated) bete noire for the same time period as well.

Related: “Exclusive research reveals ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ viewers are the most Democratic in primetime TV.”

I arrived from Portugal as an exchange student in 1980, bringing with me the normal European prejudices. Jimmy Carter had been painted in Europe as a level-headed leader, a compassionate statesman. But all the promotion in the world couldn’t survive watching the man give speeches, or hearing of the infamous killer rabbit incident. And my European view could not survive coming in contact with American history books, which even then glorified FDR, the whole “the government saved us from the Depression” mythology.I didn’t object to the portrayal of FDR. I simply was not economically literate enough.

However, I was savvy enough to know propaganda when I read it.  I was disturbed by the palpable longing these texts revealed for an America in the 30s — an America that probably never existed. Even then it seemed to me what they promoted meant turning the clock back to a simpler — and dirtier, poorer, and more brutal — world. I could see we’d got from the ’30s to the ’80s through technological and social changes. This meant the changes weren’t the results of politics and couldn’t be undone by politics. The Democrats could pine for and promise the close-knit society of the ’30s, but they could not bring it back.Even if the ’30s were desirable (I prefer today), they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Obama doesn’t seem to have ever realized this. He moved in more rarefied circles than the Ohio suburb where I finished high school. You could say he was exquisitely educated not to see the holes in the myths about FDR.

He never got to be a normal person, in a normal environment. His isolation, as the product of a biracial couple, and two broken families, might also have made it harder for him to distance himself from the one security he had — the security of his echo chamber that surrounded him like a an amber bubble encasing dinosaur DNA.

I’ve read somewhere that you simply can’t make large changes in life outlook after 45. I’m not sure that’s true. I could give several examples of people I know who have changed their entire outlook on life after that age.

It is, however, unlikely that someone as thoroughly indoctrinated as Obama was can change his outlook. The narrative he grew up in covers every detail of life and provides a facile explanation for everything. Our arugula shopper knows nothing of the average person’s life and, let’s face it, is unlikely to ever figure it out.

He’s been brought into the present after a fashion, the ’30s DNA spliced into the DNA of a Clinton Democrat, so that he’ll make half-hearted gestures, like proclaiming — in contradiction to his earlier pronouncements — that he’s following in the path of Ronald Reagan; or talking about being a centrist; or disguising tax increases as cuts in spending.

But the end result always breeds true to his dinosaurian world view: He’ll favor unions because somehow, over the years, they’ve become associated with the 1930s (even though FDR did not approve of civil service unions); he’ll sell out allies for a SALT treaty, because it was very important in the 70s; he’ll try to expand train service because he has the odd idea public transport fosters the type of close knit communities we had in the 1930s; he’ll obsess over green energy, because Carter did; he’ll do his best to bring back make-work paid for by the government because he imagines that’s what we want.

In fact, throughout all of it, he thinks he’s doing what everyone — not just the people who brought him up — longs for.

And throughout his flailing around in a world in which he doesn’t fit, examples of this displacement emerge in his speech: Sputnik, Cleveland, cars which use up eight miles a gallon.

Sarah concludes, “If, like the restored velociraptor, he weren’t such a danger to the modern world, one would be tempted to feel sorry for our Jurassic President, wandering around in a landscape he can neither perceive nor understand because all his senses and training show him a world that no longer exists — and perhaps never did.”

Which dovetails rather nicely with the latest video from Bill Whittle. In the world of the dinosaurs, the Jurassic era was preceded by the Triassic period. But what came before our Jurassic president? Found via Steve Green, Bill goes down the rabbit hole to explore Barack Obama’s immediate ancestors and their Triassic-era proto-radical chic worldview:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.

“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.

But Maureen, it’s the other guy’s country.

Related: What would Sebastian Cabot do?