European environmental groups

In my role as President of KIMO, I received an email from an environmental group in Vlores, Albania, seeking to affiliate with KIMO.

It is slightly outwith our normal area - given that KIMO covers the North Sea and the North-East Atlantic - but does this mean a twinning visit to the Land of Eagles?

When I was a student, and again as a trainee, when I had no money to go out at weekends I used to occasionally search through the shortwave radio stations for interesting broadcasts. The loudest were always the "Voice of America" and "Radio Free Europe", but they were never particularly interesting. Radio Moscow was always good for getting bored and falling asleep. But the real find was Radio Tirana, which I could just hear as the signal faded mid-sentence.

It was a throw-back to the really bad days of the cold-war - or so I imagined - with a steady flow of stories about tractor production, the detailed history of the glorious fight against the fascist forces of Nazism, the wit and wisdom of Enver Hoxha (which lost a lot, a hellofa lot, in translation) and a call for the overthrow of capitalism. All expressed in a mid-Atlantic/Slavic, twang but with a serious disregard for the rules of grammar.

It was hilarious, being so overblown and took itself so seriously, as the last bastion of the 'truth' in a world divided into two camps of (1) capitalists, and (2) those who had lost sight of communism and were allowing themselves to be corrupted with impure thoughts about new tractors, and were as bad as the Americans who they aspired to be, and wanted Coca-Cola and the oppression of the workers, and to not have to read the glorious words of President Hoxha which would show the true path to Communism, egalitarianism and equality and would result in the workers living in Nirvana.

This was especially funny given that Albania had - and still has - the highest levels of poverty in Europe.

The third camp - who were never mentioned - were China and North Korea, who couldn't be held up as models to follow as they had split from the true Marxist-Leninist path some time before, but were still trying to make anti-American communism work. These are the kind of schisms that only true students of communism or Free Church politics can understand.

It does appear that Kim-Il Jong has taken the old Albania model and successfully applied it to the North Korea state, driving the people into poverty and destitution and emulating Albania.