Ben Macintyre (Continuación)

For the past six decades, North Korean music lovers have had little to sing about. Like everything else in that dark and shuttered country, music is part of the system of communist oppression presided over by Kim Jong Il: “Dear Leader”, tyrant and, inevitably, musical expert.

Mr Kim is said to compose his own music, of a spectacularly dreary and self-idolising sort. Back in 1968 he set down the inviolable principles of North Korean music: there should be no “uproarious Western music”, but only “lively and militant marches” celebrating his father, Kim Il Sung.

The last concert that Kim Jong Il attended included such catchy hits as No Motherland without You, with the lyrics: “Even if the world changes hundreds of times, people believe in you, Comrade Kim Jong Il!…  Seguir leyendo »

With his press conference this week - in which he declared “With Carla, it is serious” - Nicolas Sarkozy emerged as the undisputed winner of the Silvio Berlusconi Award for Europe's most embarrassing politician.

The French President's popularity ratings are plummeting just as (and because) his love life is taking off. This has nothing to do with French attitudes to sex. French voters expect their leaders to have complicated love lives. Presidential affairs are an unwritten part of the constitution, an accepted perk of office. Sarko's blooming unpopularity has nothing to do with his two divorces, or Carla Bruni's record of liaisons amoureuses with slightly knackered British pop stars.…  Seguir leyendo »

I have visited few places more peaceful than Eldoret in Western Kenya. To white settlers, this sleepy corner of Africa was “64”, because it was 64 miles from the railhead of the new Uganda railway. Before colonial times, the area had been occupied by the “Sirikwa” tribe, then the Maasai, then the Nandi. Voortrekkers from South Africa put down roots here, followed by other white settlers, and Asian traders. My memory of a visit to the town many years ago is of a picturesque and placid intermingling of tribes, races and colours.

Earlier this week, a murderous mob from the Kalenjin tribe drove a group of terrified Kikuyu, including children, into a church near Eldoret, and set fire to it.…  Seguir leyendo »

Assassination may be the most extreme form of censorship, but it is not necessaily the most effective. Political murder changes history, but it seldom changes minds.

America would not be the same place today if John F. Kennedy had lived. The murders of Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin are central to any understanding of the course of modern Middle Eastern history. The world would be quite different if Reagan had been shot and killed, or Lincoln had not.

Yet it is undoubtedly true that political assassination rarely achieves the goal the assassin hopes for, and sometimes produces effects that are the reverse of those intended.…  Seguir leyendo »

Gillian Gibbons languishes in a Sudanese prison on account of a teddy bear named Mohamed. But the animal at the heart of the bizarre events in Khartoum is not a bear, but a goat; specifically, a scapegoat.

In Old Testament times, a goat was ritually driven into the wilderness during Yom Kippur, taking it with it the sins of the people: Leviticus 16: “And the Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.” A scapegoat is the innocent person held responsible for the misdeeds of others, to divert attention from problems or shield the guilty. Sociologists describe scapegoating as “an effective temporary means of achieving group solidarity”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Only the Japanese truly know how to create a meal to die for. I know this, having once diced with the Sushi of Death, also known as Japanese pufferfish, or fugu. I was living in New York in 1985 when the US Food and Drug Administration relaxed its rules to allow the import of pufferfish for the first time. A particularly sadistic foreign editor thought it would be amusing to make me go and eat it, and see if I survived.

This ugly, spiny, inflatable fish is one of the world's great delicacies: Japanese poets extol its flavours, lovers consider it an aphrodisiac, and every year a handful of people die from it, for in addition to being remarkably tasty and very expensive, the fugu fish is fantastically poisonous.…  Seguir leyendo »

King Charles I once asked the chief librarian of the Bodleian Library in Oxford if he could borrow a book. He was told, politely, to get lost. A few years later, as the wheel of history turned, Oliver Cromwell also wondered if he might take a book away from the great collection, to read it at his leisure. He received exactly the same answer.

Roundhead or cavalier, king or commoner, no one could take a book out of the library. Its books were not for lending, but for consulting. The library was a temple of learning, where scholars might come to read and learn.…  Seguir leyendo »

The fate of the Burmese junta is written in the stars. That, at least, is what the Burmese junta believes. For one of the odder and most revealing aspects of the brutal military gang that rules Burma is its faith in astrology.

When the junta moved the capital from Rangoon to a malarial town deep in the jungle, it did so because an astrologer employed by Senior General Than Shwe had warned him of an impending catastrophe that could only be averted by moving the seat of government. The same astrologer asserted that the most auspicious moment for the move would be November 6, 2005, at 6.37 in the morning.…  Seguir leyendo »

When you have excluded the impossible, Sherlock Holmes pronounced, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

A fine notion. Elementary. But quite wrong. If you rule out the impossible, you are left only with what is possible; indeed, an infinite number of possibilities, only one of which is the truth.

This has not prevented an entire army of homemade Holmeses from setting out to tackle an unsolved case that has gripped the world’s imagination. We are drawn to the McCann story out of empathy and prurience, anxiety over the fate of a little girl and fear that there but for the grace of God go we.…  Seguir leyendo »

I had always imagined the Terracotta Army in the tomb of China’s first emperor to be the expression of one man’s sublime madness, a posthumous game of toy soldiers on a megalomaniac scale. Who but a lunatic would force an army of workers to build an 8,000-strong army from baked mud to march him to the afterlife? The photographs of the inhuman warriors always seemed to me slightly chilling, row upon row of identical imperial army grunts two millennia old, entombed by a dictator’s pride.

That was before I met them. Last month I travelled to Xi’an, stood in the vast hangar that houses the excavation site, and looked down on an ancient host, not of impersonal clay models, but of people.…  Seguir leyendo »

Standing in a Danish cornfield last week, a young Iraqi interpreter described to me what it feels like to be branded as a collaborator: the menacing stares, the neighbours who shun you in the street and spit as you pass, the threatening notes pushed under the door at midnight promising death to traitors, the isolation and the terror.

Like many university-educated Iraqis, this man began working as a translator for the coalition forces soon after the invasion of Iraq, and ended up on the payroll of the Danish Army. When the Danes pulled out last month, they took him with them, along with some 200 other Iraqis and their families who would otherwise face death at the hands of insurgent murder squads.…  Seguir leyendo »

Read the 1933 Times Editorial on Mein Kampf

Seventy-four years ago this week, The Times started serialising the worst book ever written. Adolf Hitler had dictated Mein Kampf in Landsburg Prison in 1924, while incarcerated for his attempted putsch against the German Government. The book would not be published in Britain until October 1933, but this newspaper obtained the rights to run exclusive extracts four months earlier.

The Times explained that it was publishing this vile, anti-Semitic rant on the grounds that “readers will find it illuminating as a psychological revelation [which] will show how Hitler came to hate the Jews”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Memory is a private library, collected by experience. In its stacks are the happy memories we cherish and revisit, and the slim volumes of recollection we had half-forgotten that return to us as we browse through the present. And in another section of every mental library are the unpleasant memories: the tragedies, the failures, the embarrassments and the traumas. Most of us try not to dwell too long in that part of our personal literature, but we are still drawn there from time to time, despite the pain.

Science is about to change that. New research has discovered that certain “amnesia” drugs can block, dilute and even delete unwanted and unhappy memories.…  Seguir leyendo »

Picking through the still-smoking ruins of Guernica, exactly 70 years ago today, The Times correspondent George Lowther Steer came across a handful of bomb cases stamped with the German imperial eagle. Here was final proof that the planes that had rained incendiary bombs on the Basque town a day earlier – April 26, 1937 – were sent by Nazi Germany in support of Franco’s Nationalists, to crush Basque morale.

Steer’s damning report in The Times, exposing the lie of German neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, ignited another sort of firestorm. “In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history,” wrote Steer.…  Seguir leyendo »

Little Red Riding Hood was a fantasist. She made up the whole story to explain why she was wandering through the woods in the middle of the night. She cried wolf, as humans have done since earliest times.

Sweet girl, no doubt about that. Terrific outfit. But the truth is that Little Red Riding Hood simply pinned her sexual fears on the usual culprit: the Big Bad Wolf.

Wolves do not eat grandmothers, nor anyone else for that matter. Incidents of non-rabid wolves attacking human beings are virtually non-existent. A wasp sting is far more likely to kill you than a wolf.…  Seguir leyendo »

How do you kill a poisonous idea? Do you lock it away, silence it and hope that somehow the venom will evaporate in the dark? Or do you let the evil out, expose it to argument and ridicule, and then watch it shrivel in the light?

I was glad to see David Irving walk free from an Austrian jail, podgier than when he went in, but no less pompous and pernicious. The British author and “historian” served 13 months of a three-year sentence for denying the Holocaust. Irving’s ideas are repulsive and wrong. A warrant for his arrest was originally issued in 1989 after he told an Austrian audience that the Nazi gas chambers were a “fairytale”; he also claimed that Hitler had sought to protect Jews, rather than systematically murder them.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Moon was always the reflection of our dreams. Only in the most recent fraction of human history have we known that it is a place, a rock, a thing, rather than an idea, a phenomenon or a god.

The moon was a veiled ghost, the deity of time and madness. It pulled the tides, measured out our months and perhaps too the ovulation of woman, the origin of human life itself.

We gave the Moon names, in every culture, and for every season: Harvest Moon, Blue Moon, Strawberry Moon. The Sun has no equivalent adjectival richness. For century after century, we gazed at the Moon and wondered what it was.…  Seguir leyendo »

Preserved in the permafrost of the Cold War is a piece of advice given by Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin’s master spy, to an apprentice agent. Sudoplatov’s career in the Soviet secret service spanned three decades of Stalinism, and few understood better the brutal and complex psychology of spying.When seeking to recruit a spy, Sudoplatov advised his underling that one should “search for people who are hurt by fate or nature — the ugly, those craving power or influence but defeated by unfavourable circumstances. In co-operation with us, all these find a peculiar compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential, powerful organisation will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.”…  Seguir leyendo »