Internationalism for the Living Dead

People always say that the world is shrinking with the Internet, but I feel it really reveals the vastness and isolation of our lives. Point, this article from the British Broadcast Corporation about how a Norwegian director, Morten Traavik, discovered a talented group of North Korea Accordionists.

Reread that sentence, then sit, and then reread the sentence because even now it makes my brain want to explode.

First off, Norway is actually allowed to talk to North Korea? For us, North Korea is a dark spot, a spot where our only contact comes from yelling into a megaphone at them from the Demilitarized Zone, only to have North Korea not respond. (Start at 3:00)

 

Yes, by the way, yes that was a 1960s Russian phone that North Korea donated in 1980. That is our idea of North Korea. Crazy old North Korea with starving people in concentration camps and a whole bunch of people marching,

or a bunch of people trained to do things in time with cards.

I mean both are impressive, but neither screams individuality, stardom, or freaking Norway. And this isn’t some traitor to democracy, brainwashed Norwegian. He looks like this:

This is a man who can go into North Korea regularly. A country we have to get images of from space to know what is happening there. And he has discovered accordion stars. Accordion, a German instrument from the mid-19^th Century. North Koreans use it to rock out.

It is like Morten Traavik says in the article, "People [in Norway] are amazed by their skills and also by the fact that you can have fun in North Korea. I think that insight really rocks a lot of people's established preconceptions about the country". In America, our whole view of North Korea stems from a negative place and stays there. And though many of those negative points are valid, it doesn’t leave room for anything else. This is an American point of view. We don’t get to see normal people living their lives in North Korea. All we see is a harsh, Big Brother face.

But if we lived in Norway, maybe we could see something more. Perhaps we could even visit this dark spot on the map where a sense of individual stardom expressed in a YouTube video can still happen. Though the internet gives us more information, so much of it is just static and noise that blurs out a real perception of the world. Sure, you can read news stories about another country, but you still won’t really know what is going on there. Because look at this:

And as much as I want to talk about the empty room or propaganda style landscape or symbolisms of the fake sunflowers, what really is there is talent and joy. For Norwegian pop. In North Korea.