9 ms·

North Koreans speak secretly to BBC from inside closed country

101 points by radicaldreamer 3y ago

EricE 3y ago
[flagged]
- tonmoy 3y ago
  Just because something really bad exists doesn’t mean we should stop trying to be better than what we are today.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Ah yes, the classic "you aren't currently hanging from the cross, so there's no reason to talk about ways the world could be better" argument. It's so intellectually lazy. Why not say what you actually mean: "I like the way things are, I don't care that other people are mistreated, and I wish everybody would shut up about it already".
  - m_stone_code 3y ago
    I think it reads more like a specific criticism of the term "Systemic". North Korea being a very clear example of what systemic harm looks like, to the point of people starving to death because the societal systems are designed to keep the population in a state of near starvation and desparation.
    - vinyl7 3y ago
      The west will be there soon as inflation and wealth disparity continues to increase
    - OldManRyan 3y ago
      A bad critique of the term. Systemic harm isn't binary.
Reubend 3y ago
> Like most women in North Korea, she is the main earner in the family. The meagre wages men earn in their compulsory state jobs are all but worthless, forcing their wives to find creative ways to make a living. Really interesting! Economic policies have created a system where women earn much more than men on average. I think that's quite rare globally.
- iJohnDoe 3y ago
  Can’t tell if this is clever propaganda to put a positive spin on this by using the words “much more”. They are still starving to death. “Much more” is relative in this case. The men are paid state sponsored wages and it’s not enough to survive on, literally. Women only make more because they are selling black market items to keep their children and families alive, and to keep their neighbors from starving to death, which, as the article says, is not even possible anymore.
- awiejrliawjer 3y ago
  This is not in any way a victory for feminism, or for anyone else. The men are basically slaves, and the women are considered to be too inferior to be slaves so they do black market work.
- ha-ckernews 3y ago
  1. read the room; and 2. this is one of the most tone deaf comments I've ever read.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Pretty sure it's satire.
graypegg 3y ago
I think when looking back through history, the continued torture of the entire North Korean population is going to be one of the most tragic events of the 21st century. Despite the regime originating earlier, it feels to be most tragic now; long after any maligned geopolitical reason for the regime to exist has since disappeared. It’s something we don’t think about often currently, because it’s almost become a joke. The crazy hermit kingdom. But I really feel like we’ll look back at how we ignored it for so long shamefully. I don’t know what we could be doing though of course. I hope that will become clear soon.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  What would you have the world do? Tens of thousands of Americans died trying to prevent it in the Korean War. Even if North Korea didn't have nuclear capabilities, it's asking for Iraq 2.0 (dictatorship threatening others, populace under severe oppression)
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    I would have gave MacArthur whatever he needed to win.
    - ksherlock 3y ago
      He wanted nuclear bombs in NK and China.
      - nickff 3y ago
        Do you have a citation for that? The only sources I've seen have said that others suggested offensive use of nuclear weapons, then scapegoated MacArthur when the studies were leaked/released to the public.
      - kneebonian 3y ago
        I maintain that the second greatest mistake the US ever made was not giving McArthur the bombs he wanted.
iJohnDoe 3y ago
Do the sanctions prevent other countries from providing humanitarian aid? Russia helped North Korea previously, but has been strained in years, plus the war probably further strains any aid. China could certainly help, but that relationship I think is also strained by North Korea not being able to pay their bills for crucial resources to keep the lights on.
- awiejrliawjer 3y ago
  The sanctions from outside generally don't limit outside countries from providing aid, but the north korean government closing its borders clearly does. They've never allowed foreign aid workers in generally, and now they've evicted pretty much all foreigners. As the article says, they don't want anyone to understand how much better life is in other countries. Even when foreign countries attempt to send them aid materials no strings attached, the government typically stockpiles it for the benefit of those in power. And yeah, the argument of "other people have it worse than you so you have no right to complain" is lazy self-serving garbage.
  - CrackerNews 3y ago
    Countries like NK view foreign aid with skepticism over possible espionage, unfortunately.
- kneebonian 3y ago
  This is mentioned in the article, even when foreign aid is brought in the state ensures no one gets it or knows that it exists, holding it back for the powerful, so that their people don't start to understand how good the life outside of NK is.
Tade0 3y ago
> They must attend their weekly Life Review Session, compulsory for every citizen. Here they admit to their mistakes and failures, whilst reporting the shortcomings of their neighbours. This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around? My parents lived through communism and even during the worst days of the system it wasn't this bad - chiefly because it was impractical to put so much effort into exerting control over the population. You could get jailed for being at the "wrong" student gathering - just like my dad was more than once, but that was it. They would eventually release you because even the most corrupt representatives of the system had better things to do with their time. I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?
- jraph 3y ago
  > > They must attend their weekly Life Review Session, compulsory for every citizen. Here they admit to their mistakes and failures, whilst reporting the shortcomings of their neighbours. This is agile/scrum's sprint retrospectives, for every aspect of life and even more often. Seems horrible.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Call it therapy, charge $200/hr, and people will be lining up at your door to do once a week for an hour.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  Think about life under Stalin or even worse, the Khmer Rouge. People will always find a way to justify even the worst cruelties.
- bitwize 3y ago
  > This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around? Totalitarianism kind of tends to take the same shape no matter the initial ideology. It's kind of like how crabs keep spontaneously re-evolving across genera. To me it sounded like the "struggle sessions" of communist China, or "sec checks" in Scientology. St. Augustine showed us that it's much easier to keep control of a population if you can infuse them with guilt and get them to police themselves (and each other). Other cults and states just applied that principle in different ways. > I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead? For the Workers' Party of Korea, if the country gets run into the ground doing the right thing that beats a thriving country living outside the rules of Juche.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
North Korea runs contrary to my intuition about dictators. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of regicide, but most dictatorships, even among the most horrific, represent some sort of misguided attempt at benevolance. Killing dissidents? Sure, they're getting in the way of your utopian plan. Failed economic plans that lead to famine? Well, the idea had some justification, better pivot to avoid further harm. Hell, even overtly fascist ideologies have some subset of the "common folk" that they attempt to promote. North Korea's leadership doesn't seem to have any interest at all in the wellbeing of the populace. I'd expect radical, top down changes to be common place until they found some solution that didn't have almost half of the country malnourished. Yet they just seem to double down, consistently.
- awiejrliawjer 3y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jhbadger 3y ago
  In Kim Il-Sung's (the first of the Kims) time there was some sort of attempt at improving the lines of the North Koreans (as ineffectual as it was), but certainly in the reigns of his son Kim Jong-Il and his grandson Kim Jong-Un, it does look like power for the sake of power. I suspect at this point there is a fear (not just from Kim Jong-Un but also the higher ranks of the military and administration) that any sort of reform will lead to them not only losing power but also their lives.
- lordfrito 3y ago
  > represent some sort of misguided attempt at benevolence This is the image dictatorships sell to their poor, uneducated, and ill-informed public. The reality is much worse. Rulers tend to make decisions that benefit those who they share power with (no man rules alone). Dictatorships thrive where there are abundant natural resources combined with an uneducated public. Democracies tend to thrive where a country's main resource is it's people. North Korea has neither. But those in power wish to remain so, and the cult of personality around "the ruler" and his benevolence helps maintain some form of control over those that are starving. Well that and a lot of guns. North Korea has a well deserved reputation for brutality and suffering. Checkout the video series Rules for Rulers. It's pretty eye opening, and helped me change the way I look at countries and geopolitics. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
jemmyw 3y ago
I remember years ago reading about someone from the north who had defected to South Korea after they were shown an episode of a SK TV show about two women fighting over a car parking space. Seeing a normal person in the country next door being able to argue over something so inconsequential because they already had every basic need met cut through. I'm sure SK tries to send propaganda information to the north. Maybe they should saturate them with bullshit first world problem complaints instead.
- CrackerNews 3y ago
  The harsh reality is that NK defectors could end up being second class citizens in the South or wish to return back [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/forever-strangers-the-north-korean-defectors-who-want-to-go-back https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/forever-strang...
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    Perhaps more harsh is that the entire population of NK cannot just defect south. A few people have managed. The only path would be an uprising and that will only work if it includes the military personnel and security apparatus. I never understand why those folks are ok doing what they do and being the tools of dictators against even their own family. But time and again we're shown people will do their job to the bitter end.
- Beached 3y ago
  they do, there are organized groups who send media across in many forms. black market South Korean dramas are fairly common
jraph 3y ago
I just can't understand what motivates so much violence towards a whole population. This is a mystery to me. Even if it's greed or something, how are you happy with yourself and sleep well when you are causing so much harm? I usually try hard to understand fellow human beings but I'm badly failing here.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  It's not any different from capitalists having terrible working conditions in their factories. Humans have an enormous capacity to ignore others' suffering as long as they have a good life themselves. And somehow they always find a way to rationalize this.
  - jraph 3y ago
    > It's not any different from capitalists having terrible working conditions in their factories Is it not, really? Have we read the same article? I hate capitalism, and I hate many consequences it has including horrible working conditions for some workers, sharp inequalities, terrible incentives like preferring to produce stuff in countries with terrible laws because it's cheaper and therefore promoting horrible working conditions and terrible environmental practices, etc. I see capitalism as a worldwide oppressive system. However, as a human being, I can see how capitalism can be applied in good faith by other human beings, and the things I listed being somewhat unintended consequences (at least I can hope so - and now we know the consequences I would hope we would move away from it). But this? (this is not a communism/socialism vs capitalism debate by the way, what this article describes is not communism or socialism. It's torture)
    - CrackerNews 3y ago
      Capitalism is best described as both progressive to the past and regressive to a better future it prevents. The tension of NK running a revolutionary and ideological state and surviving in global geopolitics led them down this path. The more ideological would see this as biding their time for their enemies to collapse under the weight of their contradictions. However, the people in this article want to live a better world now. Unfortunately, the world and realpolitik is messier than fulfilling human desires.
rekabis 3y ago
Sounds like a Conservative/alt-right/Christofascist fairy tale that they look towards for inspiration. They are certainly implementing the thin edge of similar repressions in places like Florida and Texas.
contingencies 3y ago
I've been to the border and spoken with Chinese who live there, the stories of death and poverty are horrific. I find it appalling that Switzerland knowingly welcomes the leaders children to educate themselves there and live luxuriously, as they do for many other regimes.
kneebonian 3y ago
> It is not just the police she fears, it’s her neighbours. There is now almost no-one she can trust. This is interesting. Reading a book recently called Ivan's war about the Soviet Union under Stalin one of the things it emphasized was the effort by the state to ensure no one could trust each other, to make sure each person felt isolated and alone. Remember the purpose of propaganda isn't to convince you of something it is to convince you; you are alone.
whatever230610 3y ago
[flagged]
foverzar 3y ago
Flagged. Pure propaganda, just as expected from BBC. The sheer amount of emotive epithets is a dead giveaway. It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit (unless you are the US citizen and your own government forbids you to) and there are lots of North Koreans outside North Korea in other Asian countries. There were much more until 2017 UN sanctions, restricting hire of North Korean workers. To understand the real reason behind the sorrow state of modern day North Korea, one has to simply acknowledge the fact that North Korea has been pushed into isolation by much more powerful actors for more than half-a-century. It's as simple as that. "Tyrannical rule of Kim Jong Un" has no tangible effect here. The only tyrannical actor here is an entity trying to achieve its political goals by making North Korea inhospitable. Unfortunately people are naive and arrogant enough to be convinced that this is actually a good thing, that it's worth it, and that they are actually helping instead of actually being the tyrant. It really strokes their egos - who cares about collateral! And all you really need is a nice narrative, woven of cherrypicked and properly presented pieces of reality. We're undermining a tyrant here, can't you see we've been doing this to you for generations for your own good? As long as it's a glorious cause, it's clearly all worth it! At the end of the day, if North Koreans want to live decently, they simply have to collapse their country and that evil regime. And don't worry, we'll totally help you how we helped Libya wink-wink /s
- Strom 3y ago
  > It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide? I would like to learn more about this opportunity.
  - foverzar 3y ago
    > So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide? I've said specifically what I wrote and nothing different to that. Moving goalposts? You'll need a guide to enter the country with a tourist visa, but beyond that it's up to your traveler skills, whether you can ditch the guide or where would they bother to go with you. There are also other kinds of visas, that don't imply a guide. Though I imagine it could be more challenging for someone faring from a western country. Convincing them that you are not here for some scandal and could be treated with good faith would probably be an issue. Nevertheless, for most people around the globe visiting Pyongyang is relatively easier than visiting New York. I don't suppose that not being overly tourist friendly equates to being a "closed country", do you?

[flagged]

tonmoy 3y ago
Just because something really bad exists doesn’t mean we should stop trying to be better than what we are today.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Ah yes, the classic "you aren't currently hanging from the cross, so there's no reason to talk about ways the world could be better" argument. It's so intellectually lazy. Why not say what you actually mean: "I like the way things are, I don't care that other people are mistreated, and I wish everybody would shut up about it already".
- m_stone_code 3y ago
  I think it reads more like a specific criticism of the term "Systemic". North Korea being a very clear example of what systemic harm looks like, to the point of people starving to death because the societal systems are designed to keep the population in a state of near starvation and desparation.
  - vinyl7 3y ago
    The west will be there soon as inflation and wealth disparity continues to increase
  - OldManRyan 3y ago
    A bad critique of the term. Systemic harm isn't binary.

> Like most women in North Korea, she is the main earner in the family. The meagre wages men earn in their compulsory state jobs are all but worthless, forcing their wives to find creative ways to make a living. Really interesting! Economic policies have created a system where women earn much more than men on average. I think that's quite rare globally.

iJohnDoe 3y ago
Can’t tell if this is clever propaganda to put a positive spin on this by using the words “much more”. They are still starving to death. “Much more” is relative in this case. The men are paid state sponsored wages and it’s not enough to survive on, literally. Women only make more because they are selling black market items to keep their children and families alive, and to keep their neighbors from starving to death, which, as the article says, is not even possible anymore.
awiejrliawjer 3y ago
This is not in any way a victory for feminism, or for anyone else. The men are basically slaves, and the women are considered to be too inferior to be slaves so they do black market work.
ha-ckernews 3y ago
1. read the room; and 2. this is one of the most tone deaf comments I've ever read.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Pretty sure it's satire.

graypegg 3y ago

I think when looking back through history, the continued torture of the entire North Korean population is going to be one of the most tragic events of the 21st century. Despite the regime originating earlier, it feels to be most tragic now; long after any maligned geopolitical reason for the regime to exist has since disappeared. It’s something we don’t think about often currently, because it’s almost become a joke. The crazy hermit kingdom. But I really feel like we’ll look back at how we ignored it for so long shamefully. I don’t know what we could be doing though of course. I hope that will become clear soon.

reducesuffering 3y ago
What would you have the world do? Tens of thousands of Americans died trying to prevent it in the Korean War. Even if North Korea didn't have nuclear capabilities, it's asking for Iraq 2.0 (dictatorship threatening others, populace under severe oppression)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I would have gave MacArthur whatever he needed to win.
  - ksherlock 3y ago
    He wanted nuclear bombs in NK and China.
    - nickff 3y ago
      Do you have a citation for that? The only sources I've seen have said that others suggested offensive use of nuclear weapons, then scapegoated MacArthur when the studies were leaked/released to the public.
    - kneebonian 3y ago
      I maintain that the second greatest mistake the US ever made was not giving McArthur the bombs he wanted.

iJohnDoe 3y ago

Do the sanctions prevent other countries from providing humanitarian aid? Russia helped North Korea previously, but has been strained in years, plus the war probably further strains any aid. China could certainly help, but that relationship I think is also strained by North Korea not being able to pay their bills for crucial resources to keep the lights on.

awiejrliawjer 3y ago
The sanctions from outside generally don't limit outside countries from providing aid, but the north korean government closing its borders clearly does. They've never allowed foreign aid workers in generally, and now they've evicted pretty much all foreigners. As the article says, they don't want anyone to understand how much better life is in other countries. Even when foreign countries attempt to send them aid materials no strings attached, the government typically stockpiles it for the benefit of those in power. And yeah, the argument of "other people have it worse than you so you have no right to complain" is lazy self-serving garbage.
- CrackerNews 3y ago
  Countries like NK view foreign aid with skepticism over possible espionage, unfortunately.
kneebonian 3y ago
This is mentioned in the article, even when foreign aid is brought in the state ensures no one gets it or knows that it exists, holding it back for the powerful, so that their people don't start to understand how good the life outside of NK is.

Tade0 3y ago

> They must attend their weekly Life Review Session, compulsory for every citizen. Here they admit to their mistakes and failures, whilst reporting the shortcomings of their neighbours. This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around? My parents lived through communism and even during the worst days of the system it wasn't this bad - chiefly because it was impractical to put so much effort into exerting control over the population. You could get jailed for being at the "wrong" student gathering - just like my dad was more than once, but that was it. They would eventually release you because even the most corrupt representatives of the system had better things to do with their time. I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?

jraph 3y ago
> > They must attend their weekly Life Review Session, compulsory for every citizen. Here they admit to their mistakes and failures, whilst reporting the shortcomings of their neighbours. This is agile/scrum's sprint retrospectives, for every aspect of life and even more often. Seems horrible.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Call it therapy, charge $200/hr, and people will be lining up at your door to do once a week for an hour.
rqtwteye 3y ago
Think about life under Stalin or even worse, the Khmer Rouge. People will always find a way to justify even the worst cruelties.
bitwize 3y ago
> This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around? Totalitarianism kind of tends to take the same shape no matter the initial ideology. It's kind of like how crabs keep spontaneously re-evolving across genera. To me it sounded like the "struggle sessions" of communist China, or "sec checks" in Scientology. St. Augustine showed us that it's much easier to keep control of a population if you can infuse them with guilt and get them to police themselves (and each other). Other cults and states just applied that principle in different ways. > I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead? For the Workers' Party of Korea, if the country gets run into the ground doing the right thing that beats a thriving country living outside the rules of Juche.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

North Korea runs contrary to my intuition about dictators. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of regicide, but most dictatorships, even among the most horrific, represent some sort of misguided attempt at benevolance. Killing dissidents? Sure, they're getting in the way of your utopian plan. Failed economic plans that lead to famine? Well, the idea had some justification, better pivot to avoid further harm. Hell, even overtly fascist ideologies have some subset of the "common folk" that they attempt to promote. North Korea's leadership doesn't seem to have any interest at all in the wellbeing of the populace. I'd expect radical, top down changes to be common place until they found some solution that didn't have almost half of the country malnourished. Yet they just seem to double down, consistently.

awiejrliawjer 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jhbadger 3y ago
In Kim Il-Sung's (the first of the Kims) time there was some sort of attempt at improving the lines of the North Koreans (as ineffectual as it was), but certainly in the reigns of his son Kim Jong-Il and his grandson Kim Jong-Un, it does look like power for the sake of power. I suspect at this point there is a fear (not just from Kim Jong-Un but also the higher ranks of the military and administration) that any sort of reform will lead to them not only losing power but also their lives.
lordfrito 3y ago
> represent some sort of misguided attempt at benevolence This is the image dictatorships sell to their poor, uneducated, and ill-informed public. The reality is much worse. Rulers tend to make decisions that benefit those who they share power with (no man rules alone). Dictatorships thrive where there are abundant natural resources combined with an uneducated public. Democracies tend to thrive where a country's main resource is it's people. North Korea has neither. But those in power wish to remain so, and the cult of personality around "the ruler" and his benevolence helps maintain some form of control over those that are starving. Well that and a lot of guns. North Korea has a well deserved reputation for brutality and suffering. Checkout the video series Rules for Rulers. It's pretty eye opening, and helped me change the way I look at countries and geopolitics. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

jemmyw 3y ago

I remember years ago reading about someone from the north who had defected to South Korea after they were shown an episode of a SK TV show about two women fighting over a car parking space. Seeing a normal person in the country next door being able to argue over something so inconsequential because they already had every basic need met cut through. I'm sure SK tries to send propaganda information to the north. Maybe they should saturate them with bullshit first world problem complaints instead.

CrackerNews 3y ago
The harsh reality is that NK defectors could end up being second class citizens in the South or wish to return back [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/forever-strangers-the-north-korean-defectors-who-want-to-go-back https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/forever-strang...
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Perhaps more harsh is that the entire population of NK cannot just defect south. A few people have managed. The only path would be an uprising and that will only work if it includes the military personnel and security apparatus. I never understand why those folks are ok doing what they do and being the tools of dictators against even their own family. But time and again we're shown people will do their job to the bitter end.
Beached 3y ago
they do, there are organized groups who send media across in many forms. black market South Korean dramas are fairly common

jraph 3y ago

I just can't understand what motivates so much violence towards a whole population. This is a mystery to me. Even if it's greed or something, how are you happy with yourself and sleep well when you are causing so much harm? I usually try hard to understand fellow human beings but I'm badly failing here.

rqtwteye 3y ago
It's not any different from capitalists having terrible working conditions in their factories. Humans have an enormous capacity to ignore others' suffering as long as they have a good life themselves. And somehow they always find a way to rationalize this.
- jraph 3y ago
  > It's not any different from capitalists having terrible working conditions in their factories Is it not, really? Have we read the same article? I hate capitalism, and I hate many consequences it has including horrible working conditions for some workers, sharp inequalities, terrible incentives like preferring to produce stuff in countries with terrible laws because it's cheaper and therefore promoting horrible working conditions and terrible environmental practices, etc. I see capitalism as a worldwide oppressive system. However, as a human being, I can see how capitalism can be applied in good faith by other human beings, and the things I listed being somewhat unintended consequences (at least I can hope so - and now we know the consequences I would hope we would move away from it). But this? (this is not a communism/socialism vs capitalism debate by the way, what this article describes is not communism or socialism. It's torture)
  - CrackerNews 3y ago
    Capitalism is best described as both progressive to the past and regressive to a better future it prevents. The tension of NK running a revolutionary and ideological state and surviving in global geopolitics led them down this path. The more ideological would see this as biding their time for their enemies to collapse under the weight of their contradictions. However, the people in this article want to live a better world now. Unfortunately, the world and realpolitik is messier than fulfilling human desires.

rekabis 3y ago

Sounds like a Conservative/alt-right/Christofascist fairy tale that they look towards for inspiration. They are certainly implementing the thin edge of similar repressions in places like Florida and Texas.

contingencies 3y ago

I've been to the border and spoken with Chinese who live there, the stories of death and poverty are horrific. I find it appalling that Switzerland knowingly welcomes the leaders children to educate themselves there and live luxuriously, as they do for many other regimes.

kneebonian 3y ago

> It is not just the police she fears, it’s her neighbours. There is now almost no-one she can trust. This is interesting. Reading a book recently called Ivan's war about the Soviet Union under Stalin one of the things it emphasized was the effort by the state to ensure no one could trust each other, to make sure each person felt isolated and alone. Remember the purpose of propaganda isn't to convince you of something it is to convince you; you are alone.

whatever230610 3y ago

[flagged]

foverzar 3y ago

Flagged. Pure propaganda, just as expected from BBC. The sheer amount of emotive epithets is a dead giveaway. It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit (unless you are the US citizen and your own government forbids you to) and there are lots of North Koreans outside North Korea in other Asian countries. There were much more until 2017 UN sanctions, restricting hire of North Korean workers. To understand the real reason behind the sorrow state of modern day North Korea, one has to simply acknowledge the fact that North Korea has been pushed into isolation by much more powerful actors for more than half-a-century. It's as simple as that. "Tyrannical rule of Kim Jong Un" has no tangible effect here. The only tyrannical actor here is an entity trying to achieve its political goals by making North Korea inhospitable. Unfortunately people are naive and arrogant enough to be convinced that this is actually a good thing, that it's worth it, and that they are actually helping instead of actually being the tyrant. It really strokes their egos - who cares about collateral! And all you really need is a nice narrative, woven of cherrypicked and properly presented pieces of reality. We're undermining a tyrant here, can't you see we've been doing this to you for generations for your own good? As long as it's a glorious cause, it's clearly all worth it! At the end of the day, if North Koreans want to live decently, they simply have to collapse their country and that evil regime. And don't worry, we'll totally help you how we helped Libya wink-wink /s

Strom 3y ago
> It's not even a closed country. It's not hard to visit So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide? I would like to learn more about this opportunity.
- foverzar 3y ago
  > So you're saying I can just go into North Korea as a tourist and I won't need a North Korean tour guide? I've said specifically what I wrote and nothing different to that. Moving goalposts? You'll need a guide to enter the country with a tourist visa, but beyond that it's up to your traveler skills, whether you can ditch the guide or where would they bother to go with you. There are also other kinds of visas, that don't imply a guide. Though I imagine it could be more challenging for someone faring from a western country. Convincing them that you are not here for some scandal and could be treated with good faith would probably be an issue. Nevertheless, for most people around the globe visiting Pyongyang is relatively easier than visiting New York. I don't suppose that not being overly tourist friendly equates to being a "closed country", do you?