I had originally finished the final sentence of this column last Tuesday.
Because I consider completion of any kind a cause for celebration, I decided to shirk an assignment deadline and attend “Sounds of Music from North Korea: A Concert with Professor Cheol Woong Kim,” an event sponsored by the student organizations Liberation in North Korea, Korean International Students Association and Korean American Students Association.
Following this concert, I returned to my room and proceeded to sidestep the finishing-induced gratification I felt only hours ago — as well as that same assignment deadline — to rewrite my column.
To preface the following critique, I will first articulate my relationship to the concert’s general topic.
North Korea frightens me. The political infrastructure, social isolation and general moral framework have three distinct human rights implications.
First, the lack of a democratically structured justice system gives the government enough autonomy to commit human rights atrocities. Simply, extrajudicial cruelty can and does happen. Prison camps, buried in remote rural lands, are near-impossible to escape and have been compared to Russian gulags and Nazi concentration camps.
Second, the isolation North Korean citizens experience creates either overwhelming fear or overwhelming reverence for the nation-state. Either way, this isolation promotes reactionary radicalism.
Third, the lack of commitment to international sovereign standards of morality leads other nations to fear North Korea’s engagement with nuclear technology. The international adoption of passive deterrence as a means to deal with North Korean threats, as opposed to more active alternatives, is a byproduct of this fear.
So any time North Korea is brought up in conversation, my first reaction is to think of the unrelenting human rights violations and how any solution to stop their progression has been idealistic at best. That’s why North Korea frightens me.
The pervasiveness of North Korea as a source of comedy has been dangerous. Comedy functions to bring levity to situations in which it is both warranted and unwarranted, but the danger is acutely associated with the latter.
I know I have just made a risky correlation.
Freedom of speech is not only a constitutional right but also a fundamental dogma of the United States. Americans can be promised one thing absolutely: We have the right to hold beliefs and converse about them. And on the occasion that someone impedes these rights, there are sure to be free-speech radicals to defend you earnestly.
Of course, this is a terribly general conversation. Limitations do exist for speech. Speech can be contemptible. Speech has been the impetus for visceral harm. America’s emphasis on the First Amendment merely ensures that debates are about these limitations and where they exist. The First Amendment guarantees that such conversation about restriction stays a relative, rather than an absolute, one.
In light of this relativity, I’m merely commenting on how speech — namely comedy about North Korea — may not necessarily cause visceral harm but actively works to continue it. When levity is brought to a situation that neither solicits nor needs it, the perilous implication is normalization. Though I’m all too aware that violations occurring in North Korea are too embedded in a context of military conflict for activists alone to ameliorate them, these solemn matters should be thought of before Kim Jong Un’s sizable aesthetic, jokes of nukes and, most recently, James Franco’s folly.
That said, I will regress back to the conversation of Cheol Woong Kim’s concert and what I found so distinctly problematic.
Kim’s a funny guy. He was also a privileged North Korean child — one who drove a Mercedes and had his bouts with women and debauchery. Though not very evident from his piano performance at Brown, he must also be a very gifted and skilled pianist, as he attended both the Pyongyang Conservatory of Music and Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. His defining moment of rebellion against North Korean tyranny was when he attempted to serenade a woman through Western music and got caught doing so. To find freedom for his hands and autonomy over his music, Kim left his affluent Pyongyang life behind and escaped to China. His presence on the Salomon stage was a testament to his found freedom.
Now, this is not to demonize privilege. Nor is it to devalue the search for musical freedom. As a classical pianist who considered attending conservatory herself, I’m well aware of how essential liberation in musical selection is to a musician. Thus, this column is not to criticize Kim or his lifestyle, which was indeed more tumultuous than mine has been.
Yet the picture he painted of North Korea was not one that has aided the North Korean liberation movement, and I walked out of his speech-laced performance radically upset with the picture he did paint: one full of extravagance and only soft chastisement of what is an utterly corrupted nation.
Loosely translating his final words from Korean to English, Kim concluded by saying, “I do not have qualms with North Korean politics or infrastructure, I would just like to spread the value of having musical freedom and how essential that is.”
Is it a stretch to call this statement propaganda? Perhaps. But I for one have plenty of problems with the North Korean government and human rights atrocities that went completely unaddressed by this pianist-turned-defector.
Diana Bai ’16 may be reached at diana_bai@brown.edu.
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