A while ago we lost touch with our American friend and co-blogger, Ivan.    And for some years we have known him to be secretive about his work.

Over the past two years or so, he told us he had moved back to America.    But now he has told us the whole truth, that for the past several years he has been working as a journalist for North Korea’s internet journal,  “Happy News For Foreigner Who Love Dear Leader”.

We take our friend Ivan at his word, at face value, when he tells us that for the past several years he has occasionally visited America for conjugal visits with his fiancee the exotic dancer Hypatia De La Pink – who, Ivan tells us, was released from prison in 2007 and is now on probation  – and we take him at his word, at face value, when he now tells us that the reason why he has finally left North Korea and his extraordinary position as a Western journalist in North Korea, striving to “reform North Korean journalism from within”, is because of his love for his fiancee, Hypatia De La Pink (exotic dancer at the Kit Kat Klub somewhere in Idaho, USA,  in booth number 10).

And Ivan assures us that he remains on good terms with his former employers, the Propaganda Department of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), and Ivan remains proud that he did his bit to help North Korean journalism to become more open and more progressive.

Therefore, in closing, Ivan dedicates this song to all of his friends in North Korea’s Department of Propaganda, and he promises that he will continue to write about North Korea even after he moves back to America, in ways of which his North Korean friends will approve, because now his credibility as a journalist or PR man depends, and will always depend – in all countries – on his keeping good relations with his most recent employer of the past several years, North Korea’s Department of Propaganda:

(Disclaimer:   This is satire; Ivan is a fictional character.    But this satire is based loosely on some real-life events.)

Has anyone noticed that the anti-vulgarity campaign actually started with Zhang Ziyi’s ass? We thought we’d seen it all: Zhang Ziyi’s ass in the settings of serious art movies, on the cover of trendy magazines, on the laps of sleazy boy friends … and the list goes on and on … Even Ivan wants to have a tattoo of Zhang Ziyi’s ass on his ass. No one in his wildest dream would foresee Zhang Ziyi’s ass finally being placed as a gag on Chinese netizens’ months. What did you just say about Zhang Ziyi’s new role in the CCP Propaganda Publicity Department?

Chinese blogger Yuci says it all. (There is no need for me to provide a translation.  The gist of it has been covered in my summary above.)

章子怡的屁股，终于来堵屁民的嘴了

鱼刺

我很失望，甚至于绝望。整治网络低俗之风，自章子怡的屁股开始，从高尚、严肃、公平、爱民的旗帜下几经盘桓、表演、试探、欲擒故纵、装模作样……，终于将板子最终打在以凯迪网络为代表的言论时政和民营商业网站屁股 上。章子怡的屁股，终于拿来堵屁民的嘴巴了。

In a recent thread about the East Turkestan (Xinjiang) dissident Rebiya Kadeer, Catherine mentioned with approbation some earlier words by her interviewer,  Australian journalist George Negus, on the widely supposed need for a journalist to be “fair and balanced.”  Negus dismissed that popular supposition as twaddle.  Good on him!

C.S. Lewis, one of Tolkien’s inner circle, wrote about the critical role of moral cowardice – often masquerading as “balance” – in the effectuation of actual evil.  It is explained by the demon, “Uncle Screwtape” in “The Screwtape Letters” (1942), a fictional, often satirical series of letters by a Master Demon advising his apprentice nephew on the techniques of leading Human souls to damnation – techniques more subtle and less dramatic than are popularly imagined.  In letter 29, Screwtape writes: 

Now this is a ticklish business.  We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice … If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing into the Enemy’s (God’s) hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.

 

(Screwtape continues):  This, indeed, is probably one of (God’s) motives for creating a dangerous world – a world in which moral issues really come to the point.  He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply ONE of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.  A chastity, or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger wil be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.  Pilate was merciful til it became risky.

This observation of how easily pretended virtues – including pretended virtues of “fairness and balance” – yield to perceived threats to personal interests, explains much, or perhaps most, of the behaviours of Western journalists, academics and other Western agents of information or disinformation in China.  Like Pontius Pilate, the most they have to lose is not their lives, but merely their perceived personal privileges and prestige.  And unlike Pilate, their own governments are immeasurably more just and merciful than the Roman government of Pilate’s time, not to mention that the Chinese government tends to treat Westerners with kid gloves except in cases of the most extreme offenses against China’s Party Line, for which the worst conceivable penalty is usually mere deportation back to their own free countries.  Pilate probably would have suffered worse sanctions from his own government for acquitting Jesus of his alleged crimes, than any Westerner in China today would suffer from any government, including China’s.  Personally I have more sympathy for Pilate than for the Western hacks who are overly “fair and balanced” toward China.

The following scene from the 1973 movie version of “Jesus Christ Superstar”, featuring the arrest, Peter’s denial, and the trial before Pilate, is a fine illustration of what Lewis was talking about:

After you watch enough CCTV (China Central Television) or read enough Xinhua “news” agency press releases (one of the principal sources of Chinese information for Western journalists in China – go figure), you begin to recognise a handful of mass-produced phrases as the essential ingredients of every product churned out by China’s Propaganda Department, now euphemistically called in English the “Publicity Department”. They changed the English translation from “Propaganda” to “Publicity” because they finally figured out that in the West there is – or at least used to be – a widespread belief that propaganda makes people stupid. Just like advertising and “public relations”. In a way, it’s true that the name change is a distinction without a difference.

At any rate, one of the Propaganda Department’s essential phrases is, “happy life”. It ranks perhaps third or fourth among those stock phrases, as in the following bit about the “happy life” of the Uighurs of Xinjiang who happily are prohibited from practising their ancient religion of Islam or teaching it to their children, and their happy life is cultivated all the more by confiscation of their passports:

Chi Chongqing [Party Sec'y Xinjiang Tourism Admin], “This activity is a good opportunity to show the prosperity and stability of Xinjiang, as well as the peaceful and happy life of its people.”

Then I remembered a special Ren and Stimpy cartoon, and realised, “Hey, the Propaganda Department ain’t so bad! Ren and Stimpy work for it! And as they’re both good North Americans, we ought to take the words and messages and implications of North American “public relations” agents in China a BIT more seriously, yeah?

Click the green link below, green in remembrance of the religion of the Uighurs, as green is the traditional colour of Islam, one of the religions the Propaganda Department is striving hard to exterminate. Here are Ren and Stimpy, good North Americans working for China’s Central Propaganda Department:

REN AND STIMPY: HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!!!