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When I hired a car and traveled along the North Korean border circa 2005 the driver told me about how the NK villagers would, in recent memory, go up in to cave
by contingencies 6y ago
When I hired a car and traveled along the North Korean border circa 2005 the driver told me about how the NK villagers would, in recent memory, go up in to caves on the adjacent mountains in winter and basically lie there starving and dying in a group because their clothing and houses were so poor (no windows, no insulation) and the nearby land so denuded of firewood that they would otherwise freeze to death. The ones who survived were seen lying in the sun near the river in the spring awaiting the return of energy. I understand the first edible crops in the area are immature fern fronds which poke through the snow. According to the driver, the women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive. It is likely these people have the same bone deformities.
- the_af 6y agoHow do you tell fact from fiction/propaganda in cases such as these? North Korea is so closed that almost everything that reaches us comes from its enemies or defectors. We want to believe the strangest things about that country. And sure, some of it must be real, but how can you tell? Did your driver personally witness this, or did someone tell him and he was simply spreading a rumor?
- linuxftw 6y agoHow do we know there even is a North Korea? Maybe it's completely fictional and one large propaganda operation?
- the_af 6y agoThat the country exists is not a controversial proposition. But when you hear bizarre claims, backed by no evidence but tenuous hearsay and no means of independent confirmation... I mean, surely some of it is true, but each single bizarre assertion must be considered with your skeptic hat firmly on.
- logicchains 6y ago>But when you hear bizarre claims It's hardly a bizarre claim if you've ever read an account of what life was like during the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor.
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- macinjosh 6y agoCommunism is real.
- gatlin 6y agoHow is that relevant to the parent comment?
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- vinceguidry 6y agoIf he heard it from someone who lives there that’s not part of the state, that’s a way more reliable account than you’ll get from anywhere in the west.
- the_af 6y agoHe said it was a driver that took him along the North Korean border, not inside North Korea. I took this to mean the driver was South Korean. A North Korean driver with unsupervised access to a foreigner seems unlikely, doesn't it?
- mannykannot 6y agoNorth Korea also has a border with China (and a short one with Russia), and both some elements of the post, and facts on the ground, strongly suggest that this is the border being discussed. I would guess that the driver was Chinese rather than a North Korean defector, but living close enough to the border to either have observed some of the specific things mentioned, or to be in a community where these observations were commonplace.
- the_af 6y agoYou're right! I hadn't considered that this was the Chinese border and the driver was Chinese. Makes more sense. That said, examining this critically: how would someone from the other side of the border observe people going up the mountain, going inside caves, and falling to the ground and dying in droves? Did he go inside the caves himself and found the corpses, and if so, why? If he didn't, how did he know how many died? Did he count people going in and going out the caves? Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border and saw a stark decline in population, and was the only possible explanation starvation in caves (vs, say, migration)? If this is something that's common knowledge in the driver's community, the question becomes how did this community come to "know" all of this.
- mannykannot 6y ago
- koheripbal 6y agoWhy would defector accounts be biased? They have little to gain by exaggerating their plight. ... and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another. Additionally, the number of NKers defectors in China is high - they aren't rare.
- the_af 6y ago> Why would defector accounts be biased? Experience with defectors from other countries, such as the former Soviet Union, shows they sometimes tell the truth, they sometimes tell false or exaggerated stories, and they sometimes tell half-truths. I don't know why North Korean defectors would be different. > and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another. This specific claim is about people going to die in droves to caves, not just about harsh authoritarianism or extreme poverty. That's why it must be considered skeptically -- because it seems just like the kind of thing we're prone to believing about North Korea given other news, but this is not enough to make it true. And once it gets repeated uncritically, it becomes the "common sense truth".
- mtnGoat 6y agoExcept going into caves is a valid survival strategy because caves are naturally warm. If you had no heat at the surface, going subterranean would make sense to sell warmth. They weren't going into caves to die, quite the contrary, they were going into the caves to survive.
- throwaway2245 6y ago> They have little to gain by exaggerating their plight. ... and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another. Defectors won't know any of this. It's expected that some would exaggerate unverifiable details, to ensure their safety. That wouldn't diminish what they actually went through.
- mattm 6y agoLook at Shin Dong-hyuk's story. I read his book "Escape from Camp 14" several years ago and then afterwards came to find out that a lot of it was misrepresented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong-hyuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong-hyuk
- philwelch 6y agoThis is exactly the argument that was used to dismiss evidence of the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocides.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThis is true. However, it is also a hard fact that defectors often lie and exaggerate.
- matt-attack 6y agoAnd it would have been just as valid to question. The reason we all now know the Holocaust was real isn’t because we just decided to believe 2nd hand personal accounts, but because we have massive amounts of physical evidence.
- philwelch 6y agoIf the Allies had accepted the first-hand intelligence reports they received during the war rather than dismissing them because they seemed outrageous and improbable, they could have saved lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report
- MathiasPius 6y agoAnd if the international community had been more critical of the US claims on the alleged weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein, 2 decades of war and the deaths of millions could likely have been avoided. It's not as black and white as that, and I believe some measure of restraint is valuable when making decisions that can have unbounded consequences. Sometimes making the right decision eventually is better than making the wrong decision immediately.
- the_af 6y agoBut there was evidence afterwards of both atrocities, from multiple sources. And some things about the Holocaust turned out to be myths, for example that the Nazis regularly made soap out of the body fat of their Jewish victims, and similarly regularly made lampshades out of their skin. It sounds plausible, because the Nazis engaged in so many horrific acts that why not this, but this alone doesn't make it true (and it turns out, historians today don't think this was true -- not a regular practice, anyway). In order to criticize a dictatorship you don't need to uncritically believe everything bad said about them. Some of it will be false. Always be wary of particularly outrageous claims.
- stickfigure 6y agoReputable sources have widely reported that North Korean men on average measure several inches shorter than South Koreans, and many defectors come across the border with signs of malnutrition and intestinal parasites.
- the_af 6y agoI do believe the living conditions in North Korea must be harsh, particularly in rural areas, and that many North Koreans suffer malnutrition. Like you mentioned, there is outside confirmation of these facts.
- contingencies 6y agoSorry I was asleep (in China). Fair question. Well, the guy grew up on the border: he was talking to us in Chinese ... this was not a major touristy area, it was between the Japanese railway that comes down from Tonghua to Ji'an (Chinese side) and Manpo/만포시 (NK side) at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.1369/126.1751 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.1369/126.1751 and the town of Changbaishan at https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.4239/128.1771 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.4239/128.1771. In this area you can literally look across in to North Korean villages and pillboxes, and in Changbaishan you can look across in to what I have read is allegedly the biggest NK town on the border. Along the way there is a failed attempt at building a train and the hills are denuded. Poverty is immediately evident. People are fishing with crap equipment because there is nothing else to do and they are hungry. Nobody has adequate clothing. I did not see glass. All the roads are dirt on the NK side. And so on.
- the_af 6y agoThanks for the honest reply! To be clear, I do not doubt the extreme poverty you describe.
- pampa 6y agoThat is almost like the decription from "The Three Body Problem" how the aliens in the three star system handled winter. I wonder if there is an asian folk tale that might be the basis for both.