By TEE NGUGI

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The scenes on TV showing the reunion of families separated by the Korean War were astounding. There were siblings, now in their seventies, separated when they were children.

There was a scene of two elderly sisters crying on each other’s shoulder.

In one scene, a woman, probably in her nineties, recounted how she lost sight of her husband and son as they fled to South Korea. For decades, she did not know whether they were alive or dead until this recent meeting with her now elderly son. Her husband had died in the intervening years.

There were many variations to this narrative, but the constant theme was loss and despair, and the indescribable joy of reunion.

Then there were the heartrending scenes of the old people saying goodbye, knowing that it was the last time they were going to see each other.

The fact that these people live just a bus ride away from each other, yet had never met and, after this reunion, would die without meeting again is a terrifying reminder of what must be the most inhumane creation of the 20th century – the totalitarian state.

North and South Korea are the same country separated by a border. But the difference between the two is the same as that between night and day.

North Korea is a totalitarian state, where every facet of life is controlled by the government. In his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell might as well have been describing life in North Korea.

In the novel, the country of Oceania is ruled by the omnipresent Big Brother. The citizens of Oceania are controlled by intrusive state surveillance, propaganda, and lies, and the perpetual mobilisation for war.

The regime systematically kills the attributes that make people human: Family, love, compassion, independent thought, creativity, free will. Oceania is an industrial complex that churns out human robots.

The novel, however, does not say to what end this is done. The chilling conclusion we arrive at is that this is done in order for the regime to perpetuate itself. In other words, the goal of the state is to achieve itself.

Thus, the North Korean regime under its “founding father” Kim il-Sung, his son, Kim Jong-il, and his grandson, Kim Jong-un, has no purpose other than to perpetuate itself.

The founders of the 20th century’s so-called communist states had argued that capitalism was not sustainable due to its own contradictions. They proposed a new system in which the means of production would be owned by the state on behalf of the people, sharing profits equally among the citizenry.

They further argued that government would be more democratic as opposed to liberal democracy, which they claimed was controlled by the rich in order to serve themselves.

Yet all the communist countries ended up like Oceania. Joseph Stalin, in creating his version of Oceania, murdered hundreds of thousands of people and imprisoned millions of others. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, The Gulag Archipelago, is a harrowing depiction of life in Stalin’s hellholes.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime killed millions in its mad drive to reverse industrialisation and create a communist agrarian society. In the former communist East Germany, people were recruited to spy on their family members.

The closest we came to recreating Oceania in Africa was Mengistu’s brutal experiment in Ethiopia. Other countries, whether professing capitalism or socialism, also tried to achieve totalitarianism. Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, and Zaire under Mobutu were notable in this endeavour.

Ironically, it was communism, with the exception of holdouts like North Korea, that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, not capitalism. However, capitalism is increasingly being hijacked by profiteers who care about nothing except their profit.

The global financial crisis of 2007-8 was caused by this extreme form of capitalism. Noam Chomsky, a famous critic of the excesses of this system, raised the alarm over the growth of financial products that add no value to the real economy, but only function as tools of profiteering. Every year, billionaires are minted by this system, while billions of people remain in abject poverty.

Today, eight billionaires control more wealth than half of the world’s population. In Kenya, 8,000 billionaires control two-thirds of the country’s wealth. This is not only immoral but practically unsustainable.

Therefore, even as the images of Korean family reunions remind us of the evil that is totalitarianism, and that the world must do more to bury this system, we must also remember that uncontrolled capitalism spells doom for all of us.

Tee Ngugi is a political and social commentator based in Nairobi.