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Foreword

Possibly the most bizarre true-life setting for any kind of story, North Korea is a country where it’s always easy to spot someone absolutely creepier than any conceivable zombie, since his image is plastered everywhere. It is arguably the only place on Earth that could qualify as an actual, physical, "alternate reality", and nothing like it – ie, that bad -- is known to have ever existed before. The reality parts of this story are less believable than the zombie parts and even more horrific, but they are documented in multiple unrelated sources. Otherwise, I, too, would probably believe in the existence of an actual zombie population somewhere in the world before I’d believe the stories about the Kim regime. In fact, I would prefer it, but Kim Jong-Il is the sad reality we’re stuck with.

NK will probably make the news a lot in 2012. If you’re not familiar with the country and its extremes, The Juche Express might serve as a hopefully entertaining primer to what life is like there now. It’s as authentic as I could get it, from the quotes to the honorific titles. I could have even put in footnotes. None of the reality parts are exaggerated, and the implied suggestion that the reader decide whether or not North Korea would actually be better off with a zombie event leading to accelerated depopulation may be ironic in nature, but it’s also a tough call … a very tough call.

"Charm lies in one’s ideas, not in one’s looks."

                                                                                  ---------- Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il

In North Korea, life was to be used up until nothing remained. That was about to change, but not like anyone thought.

North Korea was a land of darkness on many levels, each serving as a fitting metaphor for the innumerable midnight horrors to come, but the truly nightmarish thing was that the Plague didn’t really change everyday life that much for the citizens, as they were used to nightmares. It was a country run by madmen who, after 50 straight years of obvious failure and progressively destructive regression, still saw no reason to change their objectives or methodology. Or it was a country run by calculating sociopaths who believed in slavery and didn’t care about anyone else’s suffering as long as it wasn’t theirs. Either way, it was absolutely the worst place on earth that didn’t have to be.

Juche was the philosophical ideal and national goal as envisioned by Great Leader Kim Il-Sung when he set up the North Korean state after WWII and wanted to distance it from traditional Soviet and Chinese communism. Juche means total self-sufficiency and self-reliance, without any foreign interference or even influence. North Korea would provide its own food, clothing, shelter, and defense. It would re-do its own heritage from scratch and re-invent its own wheel. Everything. And any problems North Korea ran into during this transmutation – like its complete absence of oil fields -- would be solved by North Korea alone. It was rumored to be the inspiration for the classic TV series Gilligan’s Island.

In support of Juche, no foreign products were allowed in the North Korean market – at least not with the identifying labels still attached -- and it was unlawful for the citizens to purchase anything from any entity except the North Korean government, which owned and ran everything.

Although Great Leader took great pains to legitimize his philosophy academically by invoking history when he formally wrote it up in 1955, none of it was actually referenced or annotated in any kind of informative way, so Juche was more like "the world as I see it … without actually looking."  The treatise was redundant double-talk that belabored the obvious and provided absolutely no explanations, leading the typical foreign reader to query: What the hell is this? and I don’t have to read the rest of it, do I?

"The Juche idea is a new philosophical thought which centers on man.

As the leader said, the Juche idea is based on the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything. The Juche idea raised the fundamental question of philosophy by regarding man as the main factor, and elucidated the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything.

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