I watched an interesting interview last week on CBC. It was a rebroadcast of a One on One with Peter Mansbridge from March 2003. The guest was Brian McKenna, a Canadian documentary filmmaker. He described his experiences while filming footage on a trip to North Korea. He and his crew were working on a documentary on the Korean war and Canada's part in it. The really interesting part for me was his description of the experience inside the country. His description paralleled Orwell's 1984 so closely that it was like having the book unfold in front of me. It has kept me thinking about it all week. The one thing in 1984 that really struck home with me was how ignorant the people were of anything outside their country. This is how McKenna described the lives of the North Koreans. Limited media and communications, censored completely by the government, allow the people no information about what the rest of the world is like.
For all my general dislike of the media, I still have to appreciate that the majority of it reflects some truth of the world, as distorted and skewed as it may be... and I wonder what it would be like to have truth written for me by a governing body whose sole purpose was to maintain its existence.
I am intrigued.
