7 ms·

Don't forget that it's all fake. I'm not sure the author understands how carefully planned her trip was. What she shows is not North Korea. What she shows is

Don't forget that it's all fake. I'm not sure the author understands how carefully planned her trip was. What she shows is not North Korea. What she shows is what the propaganda from the communist party leaders wants foreigners to see. The truth is way less rosy (which, yes, makes it really very scary). The hotel is fake. The trafic is fake. The shops are fake. She did realize that they do create products that don't have a market but it's worse than that: they create fake malls (well, actually one fake mall, which every single visitor shall see if he wants to see a mall) just to make believe visitors that they have malls. The entire trip is under supervision and every "delegation" that goes there get to see the exact same things, give or take one or two things. For example the tramway picture: it's in basically every single movie show from foreign "journalist" who got to get there. I say "journalist" because they're not allowed to do anything on their own: they're constantly accompanied by members from the party. Poverty is hidden in basically every street where, of course, you're not allowed to go. I speak several languages so I can watch TV from different countries: it's always the same. At one point me and my girlfriend considered going, so we started watching as much movies as we could about North Korea and we started to realize that all the (totally non-connected) delegations were always doing the exact same visits. After three of them we knew what we were going to see in the fourth one. What about the truth? Well independent reporters have reported famine and people eating roots during cold winters. It's really frightening to realize what communism does to people from both a liberty point of view and a poverty point of view. I'm honestly not sure the author understood what happened to her.

pyre 14y ago
| It's really frightening to realize what communism Communism is such a loaded term that it's pretty meaningless at this point. China is also 'communist,' but people aren't eating roots to survive the winters. North Korea is a dictatorship under the guise of communism/socialism.
- martinced 14y ago
  I realize that communists don't like the fact that Cuba ain't exactly a place where freedom rules king, the fact that North Korea is an utter failure, the fact that the soviet did sent opponents to communism die in Siberia (when it wasn't downright murdering) and the fact that Che Guevara was an homophobic and racist schizophrenic slaughterer... Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty. And it's only since we can write that China is "communist" between quotes that they're starting to escape poverty. And people in small villages in China are still not exactly living on very high standards so...
  - chii 14y ago
    > Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty. i don't think you can blame the problems faced by those countries to communism. The idea of communism is a good one, but the execution is always poor - reason being that at some point, someone is going to be able to grab power, and the whole system filled with corruption and/or systemic mismanagement (again, due to some form of corruption). Plus, communism sounds like a better name than tyranny, and so the tyrants call themselves communists. "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal. I'd like to see if that could work.
    - davidhollander 14y ago
      > "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal. Any rational agent, whether biological or artificial, A) possesses a set of preferences, and B) seeks to maximize its preferences. If an AI obtains its set of preferences for maximization from a group of privileged programmers or creators, then a small group of humans is still in power in your scenario. If the AI is responsible for deriving its own set of random preferences, then it is effectively operating as another individual in society with no deterministic guarantees on behavior, and to grant it governing authority is equivalent to unchecked dictatorship.
      - jhuni 14y ago
        Our AI programs don't need to have their own preferences. Each rational agent can be assigned an assistant AI which will derive its preferences from the agent's already existent preferences.
        gojomo 14y ago
        It'll be like everyone has an AI genie, granting them wishes!
      - lotu 14y ago
        I believe by AI, he actually means oracle.
- frozenport 14y ago
  North Korea is not communist it is Juche. All reference to Marxism-Leninism was dropped in the revised 1998 constitution. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/10/north-korea-loses-its-communist-decor/57779/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/10/north-korea-lo...
  - miked 14y ago
    North Korea is not communist it is Juche. No, it's communist. It's just called Juche. Note that nothing about how things are actually done in NK changed when they changed their constitution. Note also that constitutions are essentially meaningless in a dictatorship, since they provide few, if any, real constraints on the dictator. Which, after all, is why we call them dictators. Looks like the fall of most of the communist states has gotten the regime a bit nervous. Can't have any of the little people thinking they might like to end their Socialist Paradise.
    - frozenport 14y ago
      If you take the reality of the situation instead of the claims of the officials, then there has never been a communist country in the world and certainly not in NK.
      - kevinpet 14y ago
        The same can be said of a free market, but that shouldn't stop us from comparing mostly free market economies with mostly communist economies.
        jhuni 14y ago
        There has never been anything close to a communist economy. Communism means there are such advanced productive forces and automation technology that there is no antithesis between mental and physical labor: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! - comrade Karl Marx
- olalonde 14y ago
  China has had a free market system since the early 80s. They still have a few state owned companies and a tighter grip on some industries but it is nothing near communism. As a matter of fact, the rate of entrepreneurship in China exceeds that of the US [0]. [0] http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100311_996919.htm http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100...
  - damian2000 14y ago
    Same goes for Vietnam, if not more so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Economy I was in HCMC/Saigon recently ... it seemed that almost everyone was working in some private business or another, often small family run businesses.
  - alid 14y ago
    Agreed - China has a Communist government, but with a mostly Capitalist economy. Deng Xiaoping's 1992 catchphrase - "To get rich is glorious" (致富光荣) - unleashed a wave of personal entrepreneurship that continues belie any socialist tendencies. That said, the state's grip on industry, and barriers to entry for business, are still high.
- adnam 14y ago
  Meanwhile in Spain -- a modern, secular, wealthy, western, capitalist country -- some people really are eating roots to survive the winter.
  - forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
    Do you live in Spain like I do? Why did you invented that lie?. We are not in a good economical situation, this means problems getting a house or good car but not being able to eat...a complete different story on one of the biggest food producers in the world. We are also not very capitalist, in fact we are socialist, more than 50% of the economy is controlled by public institutions, and the biggest source of problems. In real capitalism bad companies burn and die. Those losses had been socialized and backed by the state, witch is called statism, not capitalism.
    - adnam 14y ago
      I do indeed live in Spain. To check I wasn't lying I just looked out of my window and sure enough, there's someone rooting through the rubbish bin looking for food. For "one of the biggest food producers in the world" a lot of people sure are hungry.
      - oijaf888 14y ago
        You guys don't have food banks or homeless shelters?
        adnam 14y ago
        Yes, some.
- rmc 14y ago
  No, communism (& socialism) actually means something (planned economy, state owns everything). It's just some right wing politicians (esp. in the USA) who have overused the term to mean free health care and not being mean to the gays that have ruined the term.
justinhj 14y ago
I got the idea that the author does understand quite well. From the very first paragraphs: #1 Caveat: It's impossible to know how much we can extrapolate from what we saw in Pyongyang to what the DPRK is really like. Our trip was a mixture of highly staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments. We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders (2, so one can mind the other).
- tlear 14y ago
  Those genuine human moments were not genuine, but otherwise yeah
- notahacker 14y ago
  She also compared the experience to the Truman Show and interpreted even relatively innocuous things like a computer lab full of rather robotic "students" as an "e-Potemkin village". I'm not sure she could have sounded much more sceptical about what she was shown without punctuating every sentence with political asides, and frankly her account had more credibility because she didn't do that.
lotharbot 14y ago
> "Don't forget that it's all fake." An interesting inverse story: Years ago, just after the fall of the USSR, the Museum of Flight in Seattle acquired a MiG-21 aircraft on the cheap from the Czech Republic [0]. They had it shipped to the US in pieces, and then flew over a crew of engineers and techs to put it back together. They had a few extra days in the US at the end of the process, so the US crew and the Czech crew agreed that it'd be fun to go fishing. They stopped by a grocery store on the way out. When the Czech guys saw there weren't any lines and food was plentiful, they got upset. They thought they were being shown propaganda. The group ended up cancelling the fishing trip and spending the whole day just driving all over town and stopping at all sorts of grocery stores, big and small, to prove that they were seeing the real experience of real Americans instead of an elaborate deception. [0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/mikoyan-gurevich-mig-21-pfm-fishbed-f http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/mikoyan-gurevich-mig-... -- I worked here for several years, and heard the story from multiple sources, including the notes Jim Blue wrote about it.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Hmm, interesting. I read a nearly identical story about Viktor Belenko, a Soviet test pilot who defected to the US with a MiG 25 by way of Japan in the 70s. Basically while on some sort of mission he booked it across the Sea of Japan, landed unannounced at a Japanese airport, and jumped out of his plane asking that he in his plane be handed over to the Americans. (The Soviets were pretty pissed about this, so the plane was later returned to the Soviet Union... disassembled... in dozens of different crates). Apparently during part of the process of integrating him into American society his handlers brought him to a grocery store, and he initially became concerned that he was being lied to. IIRC he also requested that he be allowed to spend some time working at a modern American farm. The luxury of an abundance of food seems to be a common theme.
- Nitramp 14y ago
  Do you have a citation for the story, are you sure it really were Czechs? It seems a bit over the top. The Czech Republic is right next to Germany, so even before the fall of the wall, they had the ability to watch Western TV, and also generally were far from as secluded as Russia or even North Korea. And of course in the nineties, they instantly had free press and all, given the Czech Republic was always a very westward-leaning country (Prague Spring and all).
suhastech 14y ago
In the article, this line really hit me, "Are we morally required to intervene"? I'm not sure. Here's a slightly open documentary (around the 44 minute mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaqbVSEPfRc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaqbVSEPfRc Even with all the brainwashing, they somehow feel the nationalism to fight through the "bad times" and find time to feel happy with smaller things in life. I've always felt happiness is differential. To a North Korean kid, happiness from a sumptuous meal is equivalent to getting an iPad in the US? The Kims are enforcing the "Ignorance is bliss" ideology by censorship. Is that morally correct, I'm not sure but it's something we can ponder about.
obstacle1 14y ago
There is a documentary on YouTube where Shane Smith (of Vice mag) visits North Korea. He is put up in a fake hotel, given fake ceremonial dinners, fakely entertained in fake karaoke places, and so on. Seems like the same situation as the author of this article, the difference being Smith is explicitly not under any illusions of authenticity. Link to documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4
charlieok 14y ago
Well she did write, “They made sure to show us the American-style fast food restaurant, though their timing appeared to be off: the place was shuttered when we arrived. Workers scrambled to put on aprons and turn on the lights.” and “it's like The Truman Show, at country scale.” and “Inside, we were shown through study rooms like the one above, maybe 60 people diligently at desks. Were they bussed in for our benefit? Were any of them actually reading?” and “In a fantastic bit of timing, as we exited the train, the station's power cut out. The commuters around us immediately pulled out flashlights, which they presumably carry all the time.” and “The Kim Il Sung University e-Library, or as I like to call it, the e-Potemkin Village [...] No one was actually doing anything.” and “Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.” So, it seems pretty evident that she had her skeptic hat on throughout the trip.

pyre 14y ago

| It's really frightening to realize what communism Communism is such a loaded term that it's pretty meaningless at this point. China is also 'communist,' but people aren't eating roots to survive the winters. North Korea is a dictatorship under the guise of communism/socialism.

martinced 14y ago
I realize that communists don't like the fact that Cuba ain't exactly a place where freedom rules king, the fact that North Korea is an utter failure, the fact that the soviet did sent opponents to communism die in Siberia (when it wasn't downright murdering) and the fact that Che Guevara was an homophobic and racist schizophrenic slaughterer... Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty. And it's only since we can write that China is "communist" between quotes that they're starting to escape poverty. And people in small villages in China are still not exactly living on very high standards so...
- chii 14y ago
  > Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty. i don't think you can blame the problems faced by those countries to communism. The idea of communism is a good one, but the execution is always poor - reason being that at some point, someone is going to be able to grab power, and the whole system filled with corruption and/or systemic mismanagement (again, due to some form of corruption). Plus, communism sounds like a better name than tyranny, and so the tyrants call themselves communists. "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal. I'd like to see if that could work.
  - davidhollander 14y ago
    > "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal. Any rational agent, whether biological or artificial, A) possesses a set of preferences, and B) seeks to maximize its preferences. If an AI obtains its set of preferences for maximization from a group of privileged programmers or creators, then a small group of humans is still in power in your scenario. If the AI is responsible for deriving its own set of random preferences, then it is effectively operating as another individual in society with no deterministic guarantees on behavior, and to grant it governing authority is equivalent to unchecked dictatorship.
    - jhuni 14y ago
      Our AI programs don't need to have their own preferences. Each rational agent can be assigned an assistant AI which will derive its preferences from the agent's already existent preferences.
      - gojomo 14y ago
        It'll be like everyone has an AI genie, granting them wishes!
    - lotu 14y ago
      I believe by AI, he actually means oracle.
frozenport 14y ago
North Korea is not communist it is Juche. All reference to Marxism-Leninism was dropped in the revised 1998 constitution. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/10/north-korea-loses-its-communist-decor/57779/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/10/north-korea-lo...
- miked 14y ago
  North Korea is not communist it is Juche. No, it's communist. It's just called Juche. Note that nothing about how things are actually done in NK changed when they changed their constitution. Note also that constitutions are essentially meaningless in a dictatorship, since they provide few, if any, real constraints on the dictator. Which, after all, is why we call them dictators. Looks like the fall of most of the communist states has gotten the regime a bit nervous. Can't have any of the little people thinking they might like to end their Socialist Paradise.
  - frozenport 14y ago
    If you take the reality of the situation instead of the claims of the officials, then there has never been a communist country in the world and certainly not in NK.
    - kevinpet 14y ago
      The same can be said of a free market, but that shouldn't stop us from comparing mostly free market economies with mostly communist economies.
      - jhuni 14y ago
        There has never been anything close to a communist economy. Communism means there are such advanced productive forces and automation technology that there is no antithesis between mental and physical labor: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! - comrade Karl Marx
olalonde 14y ago
China has had a free market system since the early 80s. They still have a few state owned companies and a tighter grip on some industries but it is nothing near communism. As a matter of fact, the rate of entrepreneurship in China exceeds that of the US [0]. [0] http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100311_996919.htm http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100...
- damian2000 14y ago
  Same goes for Vietnam, if not more so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Economy I was in HCMC/Saigon recently ... it seemed that almost everyone was working in some private business or another, often small family run businesses.
- alid 14y ago
  Agreed - China has a Communist government, but with a mostly Capitalist economy. Deng Xiaoping's 1992 catchphrase - "To get rich is glorious" (致富光荣) - unleashed a wave of personal entrepreneurship that continues belie any socialist tendencies. That said, the state's grip on industry, and barriers to entry for business, are still high.
adnam 14y ago
Meanwhile in Spain -- a modern, secular, wealthy, western, capitalist country -- some people really are eating roots to survive the winter.
- forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
  Do you live in Spain like I do? Why did you invented that lie?. We are not in a good economical situation, this means problems getting a house or good car but not being able to eat...a complete different story on one of the biggest food producers in the world. We are also not very capitalist, in fact we are socialist, more than 50% of the economy is controlled by public institutions, and the biggest source of problems. In real capitalism bad companies burn and die. Those losses had been socialized and backed by the state, witch is called statism, not capitalism.
  - adnam 14y ago
    I do indeed live in Spain. To check I wasn't lying I just looked out of my window and sure enough, there's someone rooting through the rubbish bin looking for food. For "one of the biggest food producers in the world" a lot of people sure are hungry.
    - oijaf888 14y ago
      You guys don't have food banks or homeless shelters?
      - adnam 14y ago
        Yes, some.
rmc 14y ago
No, communism (& socialism) actually means something (planned economy, state owns everything). It's just some right wing politicians (esp. in the USA) who have overused the term to mean free health care and not being mean to the gays that have ruined the term.

justinhj 14y ago

I got the idea that the author does understand quite well. From the very first paragraphs: #1 Caveat: It's impossible to know how much we can extrapolate from what we saw in Pyongyang to what the DPRK is really like. Our trip was a mixture of highly staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments. We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders (2, so one can mind the other).

tlear 14y ago
Those genuine human moments were not genuine, but otherwise yeah
notahacker 14y ago
She also compared the experience to the Truman Show and interpreted even relatively innocuous things like a computer lab full of rather robotic "students" as an "e-Potemkin village". I'm not sure she could have sounded much more sceptical about what she was shown without punctuating every sentence with political asides, and frankly her account had more credibility because she didn't do that.

lotharbot 14y ago

> "Don't forget that it's all fake." An interesting inverse story: Years ago, just after the fall of the USSR, the Museum of Flight in Seattle acquired a MiG-21 aircraft on the cheap from the Czech Republic [0]. They had it shipped to the US in pieces, and then flew over a crew of engineers and techs to put it back together. They had a few extra days in the US at the end of the process, so the US crew and the Czech crew agreed that it'd be fun to go fishing. They stopped by a grocery store on the way out. When the Czech guys saw there weren't any lines and food was plentiful, they got upset. They thought they were being shown propaganda. The group ended up cancelling the fishing trip and spending the whole day just driving all over town and stopping at all sorts of grocery stores, big and small, to prove that they were seeing the real experience of real Americans instead of an elaborate deception. [0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/mikoyan-gurevich-mig-21-pfm-fishbed-f http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/mikoyan-gurevich-mig-... -- I worked here for several years, and heard the story from multiple sources, including the notes Jim Blue wrote about it.

jlgreco 14y ago
Hmm, interesting. I read a nearly identical story about Viktor Belenko, a Soviet test pilot who defected to the US with a MiG 25 by way of Japan in the 70s. Basically while on some sort of mission he booked it across the Sea of Japan, landed unannounced at a Japanese airport, and jumped out of his plane asking that he in his plane be handed over to the Americans. (The Soviets were pretty pissed about this, so the plane was later returned to the Soviet Union... disassembled... in dozens of different crates). Apparently during part of the process of integrating him into American society his handlers brought him to a grocery store, and he initially became concerned that he was being lied to. IIRC he also requested that he be allowed to spend some time working at a modern American farm. The luxury of an abundance of food seems to be a common theme.
Nitramp 14y ago
Do you have a citation for the story, are you sure it really were Czechs? It seems a bit over the top. The Czech Republic is right next to Germany, so even before the fall of the wall, they had the ability to watch Western TV, and also generally were far from as secluded as Russia or even North Korea. And of course in the nineties, they instantly had free press and all, given the Czech Republic was always a very westward-leaning country (Prague Spring and all).

suhastech 14y ago

In the article, this line really hit me, "Are we morally required to intervene"? I'm not sure. Here's a slightly open documentary (around the 44 minute mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaqbVSEPfRc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaqbVSEPfRc Even with all the brainwashing, they somehow feel the nationalism to fight through the "bad times" and find time to feel happy with smaller things in life. I've always felt happiness is differential. To a North Korean kid, happiness from a sumptuous meal is equivalent to getting an iPad in the US? The Kims are enforcing the "Ignorance is bliss" ideology by censorship. Is that morally correct, I'm not sure but it's something we can ponder about.

obstacle1 14y ago

There is a documentary on YouTube where Shane Smith (of Vice mag) visits North Korea. He is put up in a fake hotel, given fake ceremonial dinners, fakely entertained in fake karaoke places, and so on. Seems like the same situation as the author of this article, the difference being Smith is explicitly not under any illusions of authenticity. Link to documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4

charlieok 14y ago

Well she did write, “They made sure to show us the American-style fast food restaurant, though their timing appeared to be off: the place was shuttered when we arrived. Workers scrambled to put on aprons and turn on the lights.” and “it's like The Truman Show, at country scale.” and “Inside, we were shown through study rooms like the one above, maybe 60 people diligently at desks. Were they bussed in for our benefit? Were any of them actually reading?” and “In a fantastic bit of timing, as we exited the train, the station's power cut out. The commuters around us immediately pulled out flashlights, which they presumably carry all the time.” and “The Kim Il Sung University e-Library, or as I like to call it, the e-Potemkin Village [...] No one was actually doing anything.” and “Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.” So, it seems pretty evident that she had her skeptic hat on throughout the trip.