A few years ago I was lucky enough to pay a visit to North Korea. That sentence alone will rile many. Not many people have seen the inside of a country that is full of mystique and run quite differently to the way we are used to in the West. It is reported that many horrors take place there. When you visit North Korea, you see what the leaders want you to see, what they are proud of. The rest is off limits. The way our tour was presented was like this: Imagine you are going to the house of a friend who parents have died. They have made a shrine in their living room as a memory.  When you visit they will entertain you but would not expect you to poke around in their back bedroom or certainly go through the drawers. It would be, after all, disrespectful. As our tour went on we were able, though the trust of our guides, to talk to ordinary people, at the University, on the subway in Pyongyang, in the park where people were dancing and a marriage was taking place. Unsurprisingly, my lasting insight was that people are essentially the same the world over. They laugh sheepishly when they try to communicate in broken English, they stare then smile at these strangers they see so rarely, they move towards you not away from you. I have a wonderful image of my wife and I dancing with kids at a school and them all giggling at our ineptitude.

Then you have our leaders. People who have agendas of control and realpolitik. “You mock me, I kill you.” “You hack my systems, I threaten fire and brimstone.” Have we not progressed since we walked out of the cave 30,000 years ago? Today we have to watch this silliness play out in the global media. As usual it will come to nothing. But it will serve to ratchet up more tension, create deeper feelings of enmity and keep the spooks on both sides in business. North Korea may well be a paranoid autocracy. But why not give them a chance to explain themselves? They say they can prove they had nothing to do with the “hack” on Sony Pictures. Let them do so. Engage, don’t push away. Take up their offer.  We have nothing to fear. To do so, however, may expose an inconvenient truth. That it was not in fact North Korea but some “close cousin” with more on offer who we don’t want to offend. For as we all know, “Its about the economy, stupid”. It may be time for us to all grow up.

Bang Bang! We are all dead…

I am returning to one of my favourite subjects. Vladimir Putin is not shaping up to have a very happy Christmas. His hamfisted intervention in Ukraine, and the subsequent downing of a civilian airliner, ( widely assumed to be the work of the Russian backed insurgents,) did not put him high on Santa’s list. Since then he has decided that being a naughty boy will bring him the attention he clearly craves. He has been flying his airplanes close to the neighbours backyards and was rumoured to have sent a submarine into Swedish waters. Luckily the batteries on his remote control got it home before it was fished out. Now it seems his piggy bank is being squandered. Last night the Russian jacked up interest rates to 17%, to no avail. The rouble is well, ahem, in (t)rouble. Looks like he is going to blow all his pocket money before the big day. No Xmas presents for us then? Well maybe. The problem with Vlad is he is a bully. So when he doesn’t get his own way, he lashes out or comes a hunting. And the odd thing is that the Russian public is oddly tolerant of all these shenanigans, part patriotism and in part because there is nowhere else to turn. Putin has the run of the place. An imploding Russia is a dangerous one and bullies rarely learn empathy unless they take a beating. It’s playground stuff from the Russian leader, but dangerously unfunny. Keep your doors locked this Xmas.

Yee-har