I just watched an episode of the new BBC series, Holidays in the Axis of Evil, in which a reporter visits the world’s most evil empires, like Iran, Libya, North Korea and Cuba, and sees what they have to offer the holiday goer.

Tonight’s evil empire was North Korea, and it was every bit as surreal as I would have expected, and then some.

The reporter’s tour guide (and you can’t visit North Korea without one) walks him through one war museum after another where, predictably, the electric lights are always out due to perennial power shortages. She takes him to a bookstore where virtually every book (and there are lots) are either books by Dear Leader or his father Great Leader, or books about the two of them.

They visit the DMZ, where the tour guide explains how the Korean War began when the “US imperialists,” as they are always referred to, invaded North Korea. The reporter asks, incredulously, how so many North Korean troops made their way so deep into South Korea if they were simply defending themselves from an invasion coming from the south. Oh, that’s all propaganda, the tour guide blithely explains.

Most amazing, at least visually, was the reporter’s visit to the annual celebrations of Dear Leader, where 100,000 North Koreans put on this spectacular show in a huge stadium. Holding up diffferent-colored pieces of cloth, the masses create gorgeous and complex frescoes, one after another — I can’t describe it in words; anyone who has seen it knows it is quite beyond belief. Crazy, but beautiful in its way.

This really drove home just how bonkers North Korea is. In one scene that looked like it was going to be a bit normal, the tour guide takes the reporter to relax at the beach. Finally, something that kind of resembles life as we know it! But alas, the camera then zooms in on the fence behind the sandy beach — an electrified fence that the tour guide warns could kill a man. This is to protect N. Korea from American imperialists when they try to attack the beaches in scuba gear; they will fry on the fence. (It reminded me of the opening of Die Another Day, where 007 surfs his way onto the N. Korean beach.)

This is a great series; it renewed my faith in television. Don’t miss it.

It will be interesting to see how Andrew Sullivan responds to this article in the WaPo. Sullivan’s been on the rampage lately against ABC-TV for its recent interviews of US soldiers in Iraq who said on the record they believe Rumsfeld should resign.

What would Sullivan say about the White House’s apparent efforts to smear the ABC reporter by publicizing that he’s….gay? Not just gay, but also Canadian! (Can you imagine?) Read the article; it’s worse than you think.

This administration’s gleeful willingness to pulverize anyone it perceives as being in its way is frightening. What’s more frightening is that they seem to be getting away with it. Maybe I’m wrong; is there a lot of outrage back home about this in the mainstream press, on TV, etc.?

[Via the best news blog in DC.]

It’s interesting that on the US home page of Yahoo the story of Dr. Kelly’s death was listed for a couple of hours among the top stories and then vanished, while on the UK home page it’s been the No. 1 story since last night, with two separate entries in the top stories of the day. It’s all we’ve been hearing about on the BBC here in Asia, but if you go to the NY Times site, you have to scroll down to the International listings to find the story, well below the photo of Kobe Bryant and the day’s top stories. Interesting.

It’s apparent that in the UK, this is a true bombshell. I suspect there’s going to a wave of stories like this over the next couple of days, and Tony Blair’s battle will soon be a veritable siege.

The NY Times book review begins thus:

This is sure to be the most often repeated brutal detail from Jon Krakauer’s new book: that a Mormon Fundamentalist named Dan Lafferty spoke briefly to his 15-month-old niece on July 24, 1984, just before he killed her with a 10-inch boning knife. Mr. Lafferty explains to the author from his permanent home in a Utah state prison, “I told her: `I’m not sure what this is all about, but apparently it’s God’s will that you leave this world. Perhaps we can talk about it later.'”

Don’t get me wrong; as a member of a minority religion that has seen its share of intolerance, I am a firm believer in religious freedom and tolerance. Still, I’ve always had problems understanding Mormons, and this was exacerbated after I worked in a predomionantly Mormon office for nearly two years. (I can tell lots of stories about that.)

Anyway, check out the article and see why, in a world of many strange and outlandish religious sects and cults, the Church of Latter Day Saints stands out proudly as perhaps the most bizarre. And, at least in the US, the bloodiest.

Could conspiracy freaks ask for anything better than this? British scientist David Kelly, WMD expert who has been a key figure in the debate on whether the notorious British dossier was fraudulent or not, vanishes into thin air after taking a walk some hours ago, and a body is found outside his home.

Update on the blaring television — the body has been identified as Kelly’s. It will be a busy blog day.

I’m planning on moving my whole site over to Movable Type, so brace yourselves for some changes here. (I’m quite nervous, as I hear MT involves a steep learning curve, and I have enough trouble opening my email. Hope I’m not doing something stupid.) More over the next day or two.

Considering the abundance of free material on the Internet, I rarely pay for things here. One big exception is David (aka Orcinus) Neiwert’s magnificent 87-page analysis of what fascism is, what its telltale signs are as it emerges, and how it is taking on a vibrant new life in America today, thanks to propagandists like Rush Limbaugh.

You can download the entire essay, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis, as a PDF file from Neiwert’s blog for free, although Dave is requesting a $5 donation to allow him to devote more of his time to his writing. I gave $10, and I hope you consider doing the same.

In a space cluttered with bloggers trying to get themselves heard, the voice of Orcinus stands out as unique. Instead of tossing out links or offering quips on this story or that, Orcinus focuses like a laser on one of the most disturbing aspects of American politics today, i.e., the subtle and insidious shift of fascism from a marginalized phenomenon to something ever more mainstream and acceptable. His insights into how Rush and his clones are fanning the flames that fuel this trend are priceless. And it’s great reading, too.

I know I tend to gush whenever I talk about Orcinus, but that’s for a good reason: it’s one of the very best blogs out there, and the only one that is carefully monitoring the freeper movement and its quiet but steady spread under the current US government. So get your free copy, and consider making a small donation for a very important cause.

I’ll never forget an incident from the mid-80s, when I was walking through the Columbia University campus with my late friend Roy, then working on his MBA at Columbia. We walked past a student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and a Madam Mao button.

When Roy saw this, he told me to hold on, walked over to the fellow and shouted loudly (paraphrased): “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you walk around wearing a button honoring the lady who was most responsible for the Cultural Revolution? Do you have any idea how many people were tortured or killed because of her? Have you ever heard of the Gang of Four and what they did to China? Do you have a brain? Did you think before you put that button on or are you just trying to show how cool you are? Well you’re not cool, you’re an asshole.”

Roy was never one to hide how he felt, but it was certainly unusual for him to lose his temper and burst out like that. The frightened student didn’t say a word, but slinkered away as fast as he could (Roy was 6’5″).

I was surprised at Roy’s reaction because at the time I didn’t know as much as he did about the Cultural Revolution. Now I understand. Back then, China was of little interest to me; all I knew was that Mao & Co. had sent a lot of professors to the countryside and attempted to destroy all vestiges of Western culture. I had no idea how vast its scope was, how many iterations it took and how it sought to wipe out not just Western- influenced culture but all culture, aside form the culture of Mao. I didn’t really know who Madam Mao was.

I’ve caught up with history over the past few years, and being confined recently to a hospital bed for five days followed by a week at home gave me time to learn even more. I decided to immerse myself in books about China, with strong focus on the Cultural Revolution. I read three books in all.

I mentioned earlier that I read Grass Soup, the poignant diary of a “rightist” sent off to work in labor camps for his bourgeois beliefs. It puts you right there in the camp with all its inanities, funny, sad and outrageous.

Then I went on to the epic Wild Swans, which chronicles the lives of three women, the grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter, the author of the book. The most impressive part of the book is its first two hundred pages focusing on the grandmother, a concubine to one of China’s last great warlords. In harrowing detail author Jung Chang describes what Chinese women had to undergo to have their feet bound. I didn’t realize that the pain was so enormous for the woman’s entire life, nor did I realize just how lowly a woman’s lot in China was, that she existed strictly for ornamental purpose and to please the whims, however brutal, first of her husband and then of her sons.

It was in these pages that I felt transported; I could feel the grandmother’s agony as she hobbled on her tiny feet and succumbed to the cruelties of her masters (her father, her “owner” the warlord and his wife), I felt I was in her house, watching her life disintegrate. Jung paints a magical picture, a huge fresco of life in China in the early 20th Century, and unfortunately the rest of the book never quite reaches such a high level.

The tale of Jung’s mother is what interested me most, as it brought to life the maddening irrationality of the Great Leap Forward, the famine of 1960 and the Cultural Revolution. It is actually a case study of one man (Mao) going insane, and insisting that the world’s largest population follow him in his insanity, resulting in the brain-death of an entire nation. The description of life during these years is superb if completely surreal.

Fascinating, but never quite so evocative as the earlier part of the book. There is also an annoying tendency on the part of the writer to paint nearly everyone else — all the side characters — as greedy, vindictive, selfish, even hateful toward Jung’s grandmother and mother (and, to a lesser extent toward herself). The three stars emerge as pearls among the swine, and this black and white contrast is so constant that one can only wonder how authentic it really is. One other comment, on the books stylistics: As the book moves from scene to scene, Jung has the habit of describing, in minute detail, the types of flowers and leaves that are present in an obvious but awkward attempt to create ambiance. I finally started to laugh out loud, waiting for the next description of the bamboo leaves wafting in the afternoon breeze. Not a big deal, but it did detract from what is for the most part an excellent read.

It was the third book that most captured my heart, and I am glad I read it last. I came upon Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress when my former employer in Beijing mailed it to me as a farewell present after I moved to Singapore. It describes the life of two young men sent to a remote re-education camp, and how their discovery of a suitcase full of classical Western books changes their lives, and the life of the object of their love — the book’s heroine, the little Chinese seamstress. From the first page, I was enchanted; there is something so simple, so sweet and so touching about the story, its characters and its tone, I couldn’t put it down. Just like Grass Soup and Wild Swans, it drove home the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, but its wonderful story and evocative characters bring it to another level of poignancy. If you haven’t read it, go buy it now.

Reading these books answered many of my questions about China during the 1960s and 70s, and raised several new ones. I admit, I didn’t realize just what a monster Mao was until now; I had a good idea, but I didn’t know it was quite this bad. After reading these books, one can only wonder why huge portraits and tall statues of Mao loom everywhere you look in China. Mao’s crimes are on such a grandiose scale, are so audacious and psychotic as to literally defy belief. The great mystery is why he retains his aura of greatness, why he is still revered to the point of hero worship. I don’t know, maybe it’s because we all need a leader to look up to. But when you read these books you really get a feel for just how intensely Mao was worshipped, to the point that one of the world’s great cultures surrendered its critical faculties and allowed this madman, this self-obsessed megalomaniac, take them down a path that would lead to a catastrophe so immense it is still recovering now, a quarter of a century later.

Eric Alterman offers the quote of the day:

It is almost too ironic to point out, for instance, that when the administration (in the form of Rice, Tenet, Cheney, and Powell) attempts to pooh-pooh the Niger lie by saying it was “technically correct” — they did not have sexual relations with that country — or was just one small piece of a larger case, that virtually every aspect of their case was a lie. The WMD threat was a lie. The al-Qaida connection was a lie. The promise of democracy and human rights was a lie. And as today’s front page Washington Post story (see above) indicates, they got stuck with the stupid Niger tale because everything they had been saying about nukes was a lie, too. “But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.” (And this to say nothing of the apparently clueless Bush who somehow forgot that it was he who ended the inspections regime, not Saddam.)

Be sure to check out that WaPo story Alterman cites. No wonder Bush wants to “move on.”

[Via Eschaton]

That’s what Mark Kleiman says it will be if the story told by Calpundit turns out to be true. And he (Kleiman) thinks that it probably is.

This is a complex and headache-inspiring story that I won’t attempt to retell here, and Kleiman wonders aloud why there’s been complete media silence about it. Calpundit says, “This just gets uglier and uglier, and I hope the mainstream press — having finally smelled blood — will follow this up. ”