This article is based on this dutch article of Martinus Benders
This poem was heavily censored by DeepSeek when I asked it to translate it into Korean. Which of course immediately illustrates my critique of communism: how on earth could those joyless blocks of flats ever represent a utopia? Shouldn’t we first reflect deeply before we end up locked in some traumatic response that essentially mimics capitalism?
Open poem to Kim Young Un
What the West did to you
a millennium of apologies would not suffice for.
Perhaps we should understand your entire country
as a traumatic response.
Still, I watched the video about your paradise,
and the thought that forced itself upon me was chiefly this:
the skyscraper, Mister Un, is surely
the ultimate capitalist invention, no?
Apartment blocks too. Cramming as many workers
into tiny boxes as possible, feudal logic at its best.
Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps —
that’s what my rich boss used to say.
And I believe he still says it,
and he loves to swing it like a threat.
Belts, skyscrapers.
Skyscrapers, belts.
Is that truly a genuine utopia, Mister Un?
It’s a nightmare
that I’ll be clapping along with Foreigner in 2025,
but it is also a dream.¹
How did the foreigner become the dream?
There is no longer a difference between
the foreigner and the skyscraper,
and the belt is no longer ironic.
¹ Footnote: Reference to the Laibach music video in which the band performs the song I wanna know what love is by Foreigner — a performance that eerily captures the totalitarian aesthetic and dream logic of North Korea.
It is perhaps Laibach’s best rendition ever: precisely because this is North Korea — the embodiment of the concept. I wanna know what love is.
Since the early 1980s, Laibach has claimed that a totalitarian core lives inside Western pop music. A core that likes to wrap itself in symbols of love.
The new cover I made yesterday for The Eternal Hazing is therefore nothing like agitprop — although? With some imagination, the apocalyptic ‘on/off’ switch becomes a sort of love symbol, and the outsider, who was a writer in the previous version of the cover — is still sweetly sitting next to the eye on the futuristic Big-Brother crystal.
Warm regards,
Martinus Benders, 29-04-2025