Trawling through teh BoobToobz on a Saturday evening is usually a dreary experience, but sometimes you do come across a gem or two that makes the effort worthwhile. One of these popped into my feed, thanks to the YouTube algorithms that evidently have noticed that I like videos about history and politics.

This one is from a very good channel that looks at historical places, events, and phenomena through half-hour documentary videos, narrated by a laconic bald-headed bearded Brit. It’s a winning combination – as I have often discovered, being able to speak in, or at least convincingly fake, a British accent, automatically makes you sound far more intelligent.

The video in question is about the infamous – or, uh, not infamous, if you’ve never heard of it – Ryugyong Hotel building in Pyongyang.

Now, I realise full well that because of the oddities of the Korean language, that probably seems like someone trying to talk around a mouthful of kimchi, but it is in fact a real place, and is very much a part of North Korea’s tragic history:

There is a lot to explore within that story about the dangers of socialism and the way that it can reduce a once-functional country to absolute starvation within the span of a single generation, but all of you already know this – socialists know damned well by now that I consider shooting them to be a form of self-defence, after all.

What interests me about the Ryugyong Hotel, though, is the manner in which it reflects the grandiose ambitions of the dictators who build such places.

Whether we are talking about Kim Il-Sung, or Mao Tse-Tung, or Stalin, or Nikolae Ceaucescu, they all share a common trait: extreme ambition coupled with absolutely no aesthetic sense whatsoever.

Longtime Readers know that I have spent quite a bit of time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I love both cities for their architectural and human beauty. Moscow, in particular, is a very interesting city in terms of its architecture because the city centre contains a complete mix of both the old classical and Baroque styles of Russian architecture, and the grandiose but brutally utilitarian designs of the Soviet era.

Some of the most magnificent buildings in Moscow were built during Stalin’s time. There are seven of them, in fact, and they are known as Moscow’s Seven Sisters.

Here is a picture of the main building of Moscow State University (Московский Государственной Университет), at the Lomonosov Campus in western Moscow. I personally took this picture in 2017:

That picture doesn’t even do the sheer colossal scale of the damned thing any justice. Take a look at this one to get a better idea of how gigantic that monstrosity is:

And here is the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building (Жилой Дом на Котельнической Набережной), a staggering construction along the Moscow River which is really quite spectacular to view when you take the river cruise – which I highly recommend, it’s a great way to impress a Russian girl on a date:

That’s another one of my pictures, taken one rather cold autumn night. During the day, it looks like this:

You can immediately see the design trend among these Stalinist designs. These colossi were built to give an impression of overpowering size, strength, and might – in order to disguise the extreme weakness and poverty of the regime that built them.

And this is Hotel Cosmos (Гостиница <<Космос>>) right off of Prospekt Mira, close to the Moscow Olympic Park and right near the Museum of Cosmonautics (which is, to use a highly irritating Shrilennial term, SUPER AMAZEBALLS) and a roughly 15-minute walk from the ВНДХ exhibition fairgrounds:

Here is another example from Romania, a country that I haven’t been to (which I hope to rectify someday soon). This is the Palace of the Parliament, which the dictator of Romania ordered built at tremendous expense. It is the second largest building in the entire world – bigger, if you can believe it, than the Peterhof, the Palace of Versailles, and Buckingham Palace. It is the heaviest building on Earth. And its total cost is – you might want to sit down before you read this – over $3.6 BILLION.

This is what it looks like:

Once again, you get a very clear idea of what the dictator in question was aiming for: extreme grandiosity to cover up the reality of a shattered and broken nation.

This is the true danger of having an edifice complex. This is the reality of succumbing to socialism.

Every great nation has a great capital. Washington, D.C., is packed full of grandiose buildings. So is London. So is Paris. And Tokyo. And Moscow. And Berlin, and Rome, and Singapore, and so on down the list.

Here’s the key, though: most of those cities have ancient history and heritage behind them. Those buildings were built by proud and strong nations with powerful economies and, often, tremendous military might.

Those buildings are grand and great because the nations that built them are the same.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve walked down the banks of the River Thames in London marveling at the structures around me. Not once have I ever found myself thinking, “gee, the Limeys were really trying to cover up their own insecurities here”.

That’s because the Pommie Bastards were actually fully capable of building monuments like those, AND feeding their own people.

By contrast, a similar walk through noveau riche cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, or the capitals of socialist countries like New Delhi in India, make it very clear that the architects really were trying a little too hard to cover up the glaring lack of solid foundations behind their designs.

If you spend time in Dubai, in particular, you will be amazed at how HUGE everything is – but the big problem with Dubai is that everything there is totally soulless. The architecture is marvelous only for its sheer scale and size – but it does nothing to inspire the soul through beauty and elegance.

And that is the reality of our future.

Countries that adopt full-blown socialism will end up building the same palaces that venerate nothingness as the Soviets and ChiComs and Norks have done. And their people will starve in the streets just as the poor damned citizens of those totalitarian dictatorships of the past did.

Countries that go full globohomo will end up building empty and pointless tributes to mindless consumerism, of the kind that you find everyfreakinwhere in Dubai, Doha, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The lesson for those of us who love our nations and our people is clear.

Ignore the temptations of the edifice complex. Build strong and free nations that create beautiful and magnificent works of true art. Avoid the suicide pact of the globohomo cult that makes everything ugly and degenerate. Shoot communists on sight, and thereby avoid the tragic farces that socialist societies inflict upon their people in the form of gigantic architectural eyesores like the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.