Cheer Like Your Life Depends On It!

It looks like the hardest page in a Where’s Wally? book. You know the one, towards the back—usually the last page—that requires you to find our bespectacled friend among a sea of red and white. At least that was my first thought; however, I doubt the people I’m talking about would know who Wally is let alone where to find him.

With the start of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, North Korea has sent a delegation of cheerleaders. You may have seen them: 230 in total, all women, dressed identically and almost exclusively in red and white and waving Korean Unification flags.

For the next two weeks these cheerleaders, or as they’ve been called by just about every major media outlet, Kim Jong-un’s ‘Army of Beauties’, will have a captive global audience as the regime’s propaganda machine breaks its borders and branches out. They cheered their hearts out as the Korean ice hockey team—featuring players from both the North and South—were thrashed by Switzerland and then by Sweden with chants that were strangely hypnotic..

Used for so long within North Korea’s borders, this type of propaganda—synchronised chants and pantomimed fandom—attempts to humanise a country and its leaders. Despite the country's horrendous violations of human rights and well-known love of missiles, these cheerleaders seemingly espouse to the rest of the world ‘We love sport, too!’

But beyond an understanding, an appreciation even, that they are simply cheering for their country, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a novelty act. From the perspective of a foreigner the result is comical, a politic stunt that equates to quant and out-dated chants and kitschy—if somewhat charming—fandom.

Sport is the most innocent form of nationalism. Drawing together different people, you wear your team or country’s colours and you belong. You are part of a specific subset of society—one of many that exists within society itself—that accepts you as ‘one of them’.

It provides a socially acceptable outlet for the more malignant by-products of this blind loyalty: for anger, jingoism and bias. But for all the anger that sport can incite, it can produce an unadulterated joy; for all its jingoism and bias, an appreciation of the ‘other’.

Perhaps most of all sport, rather ironically, is a celebration of the opposite of nationalism's worst facets, a push back against established orthodoxies: of stunning individuality over boring uniformity, of imaginative creativity and self-expression over repetitive repression. And in this regard the subtleties seem lost on the North Korean cheerleaders, blinded by political dogma. 

Through all this highly-synchronised and naïve cheering, the overly enthusiastic waving of Korean Unification flags, I’m not sure North Korea gets it. Or maybe they just want a place to belong, if only for two weeks.