8 ms·

Six Days in North Korea

54 points by tswartz 11y ago

atemerev 11y ago
You do realize that everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully pre-selected and even engineered for display purposes, right? (I was born in the Soviet Union. It is mostly unknown for Western people how much propaganda matters in totalitarian countries, and how little it has to do with reality).
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Slide 2 - FOR THE FEW FOREIGN JOURNALISTS WHO HAVE HAD REPEATED ACCESS TO THE NORTH, THE VIEWS FROM THE WINDOW BECOME VITAL, OFFERING COUNTERPOINTS TO THE CASCADE OF OFFICIALLY ARRANGED SCENES. Sorry for caps, but that seems to be the entire point of this story, it looks at the photos of silly things, like just 5 swimsuits on a rack of clothes in a 'shop'.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  Having been there on holiday myself, the only way to ensure that everything is pre-selected and engineered would be to effectively shut down the entire city (indeed, every city and town I went to), and create a kind of bubble around each of our buses (and, when we switched to foot, around each pocket of walking tourists); fake cities filled with actors, all standing and doing nothing until someone shouts "The bus is almost visible" at which point they break into action like a pack of extras on a Hollywood set, pretending to be walking somewhere as the bus passes, only to stop as soon as it's out of sight. Everyone's life on permanent hold, just waiting to show the tourists what it looks like when people walk on the pavement. What glory for the Fatherland that is! To say that "everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully pre-selected and even engineered" is simply not true.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    >effectively shut down the entire city So.. you guys were carefully corralled in the city? N Korea is mostly rural, with most of its population barely able to get enough calories to eat. Pyongyang is a propagandist show-room and is full of connected party types. Your average N Korean doesn't live that lifestyle. This is all fairly well documented by various sources, mostly via the oral histories of defectors: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912 http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0... http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0143122916 http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0... If you care to discredit these works, I will argue with you on a point to point basis. I have read both and other sources that describe the regime and everyday life in North Korea. Perhaps we can also get Dennis Rodman in here too but clearly you both are on the same page. Sadly, I find North Korea cheerleading often to be a biased political position tied to the usual pro-China HN crowd that finds fault with everything the US/EU do, thus anything the US/EU are critical of, must be good and any criticism of these regimes must be "western propaganda."
    - EliRivers 11y ago
      So.. you guys were carefully corralled in the city? No. We travelled through rural regions as well; small towns and so forth. I saw (but did not go into) numerous very small villages. Those were not much more than a collection of buildings, generally with a dirt track leading to it from the road we were on. In the city, whilst walking with our two guides, the distance between the front walker and the rear walker was on the order of a hundred metres at times. When I went there, it was a significant national holiday. Some of the exhibition centres we went to had literally thousands of people flowing through them while we were there. We were in the crowds, mixing in with the people attending. Huge flows of people. At a military parade, we stepped off the bus and stood with the crowd to watch. On the underground, we stepped onto the carriages with the locals who were waiting for the train. A funfair in Pyongyang; huge, huge queues outside and inside. Enormous numbers of people milling about and again, our group wandered through them. I saw numerous signs of deprivation and malnutrition. I saw extensive evidence of a massive solid fuel shortage in recent years. I saw a lot of things that made it clear that the nation is, in many many ways, truly grotesque. I also saw an upright stuffed alligator on wheels holding a drinks tray that David Koresh of Waco fame had sent as a gift. I would hazard (but of course do not know) that I know more about the subject than you do (both before and after travelling there I read an enormous amount of the available literature and various collections of conference proceedings), and I have the additional evidence of my own eyes. The western media LOVES to spin stories about the DPRK, and the western public LOVES to read them. There is a lot - a LOT - wrong with the DPRK, but the media seem to be able to write pretty much anything they like and people want to believe it. You know what, go there and see it for yourself. Run in the Pyongyang marathon. Do a cycling tour.
      - abandonliberty 11y ago
        I'm curious about your perspective on this article, "North Korea: A nation of racist dwarfs" [0]http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor... I've nearly given up on understanding the reality of the situation. Are you Dennis Rodman? ;)
      - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  - billyhoffman 11y ago
    North Korea has a history of doing crazy things to make things seem normal or better than they are. For example they built and have maintained an fake and empty village next to the DMZ for the last 50 years to try and entice the South Koreans to come north. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong North Korea is not a rational place.
    - crdoconnor 11y ago
      It was built in the 1950s when South Korea was still very, very poor. The idea of encouraging defections back then wasn't quite so crazy. I'm pretty sure that the village is actually inhabited now and has been for many years. Probably as soon as they realized that its propaganda value was limited. There's plenty of shit made up and printed in 'prestigious' media outlets about North Korea. If a story seems too crazy to be true, then there's a good chance that it actually isn't. Like yours, for instance.
      - billyhoffman 11y ago
        As of 2014, North Korea insists it a real village. The lights still come on at night. But anyone with binoculars can see the streets are empty. http://boingboing.net/2014/07/08/north-koreas-creepy-fake-civ.html http://boingboing.net/2014/07/08/north-koreas-creepy-fake-ci... It's not my "story" or "made up". It's 2 cited 3rd party articles. No reason to be a jerk to people contributing to the conversation.
  - abandonliberty 11y ago
    And I thought the opening of the Beijing games was some impressive organization! I suspect that a sizable proportion of the population believes the situation you describe to be true; that is our propaganda.
  - yequalsx 11y ago
    I have a hard time understanding why someone with a conscience would spend money in a brutal, repressive regime. Do you have any compunction about giving money that supports such a regime? Is there a level of brutality and oppression that would make you not want to directly support that brutality and oppression? EDIT: I seem to have hit a nerve. Is it always OK to vacation in a brutal regime? If so why? I'd love hear why directly giving money to the North Korean regime is an acceptable thing to do.
    - im3w1l 11y ago
      You know how touristy places look more like each other than the genuine thing? Souvenir trash shops, tastes you are used to. People doing traditional stuff, except it's only a show and their souls are not in it. A sell out. I think that would be a good development.
Zirro 11y ago
For those who would like to follow North Korea on a more than casual basis, these sites are likely to be of interest: * NK News (http://nknews.org http://nknews.org) * DailyNK (https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php) And perhaps especially since this is HN: * North Korea Tech (https://www.northkoreatech.org https://www.northkoreatech.org)
- dominotw 11y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/dprk360 https://www.facebook.com/dprk360
  - yakshemash 11y ago
    http://38north.org/ http://38north.org/
colinbartlett 11y ago
NY Times team did a great job of making this responsive. It works really well on mobile. That said, this is best viewed on desktop on a huge monitor. It looks gorgeous. Really, beautiful job to their front end team, consistently delivering this kind of experience.
- adolfojp 11y ago
  And yet the video was awful in every way. It cut too fast, not allowing us to fully appreciate what was going on, and it had no playback controls so if you missed anything you have to wait for the entire thing to loop back up. Did you see the blue box that trapped the foot? I don't know what that was.
  - ubersync 11y ago
    It covers your shoe with a polythene shoe cover. Mostly used in hospitals.
  - tswartz 11y ago
    Yeah the video started to load for me then froze and I couldn't get it started again without reloading the entire page and scrolling back down.
- milkworsethan 11y ago
  What's your rate for shilling?
coldcode 11y ago
The empty freeway from the window was the killer shot for me. Imagine if you showed the average citizen there a picture of LA or even Beijing during rush hour.
- tswartz 11y ago
  Yes, its so interesting to see those types of pictures. I'd be fascinated to hear what North Koreans think of the freeway system in their country since few people use it.
gambiting 11y ago
I was always fascinated by cars in North Korea - what brands do they use? How do they get there? What do you have to do to drive one? Exactly how uncommon are they? Who fixes them, and how do they know how? If the supreme leader is driven in a Mercedes, how do they get the parts for it? I come from Poland where during communist times cars were really hard to come by, you had to wait 10 years on an official list to be allowed to buy one, but people always managed to get by somehow. Most models were of course of Soviet production, but an odd western car would sometimes appear, imported through friends of friends of someone in the party. Obviously NK is completely different, but I still find it very interesting, and it's hard to find any information about this anywhere.
- rwmj 11y ago
  The UN has a report on NK: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Reportoft... It's a 372 page Word document(!) Anyway, buried deep inside you'll see the regime imported a dozen Mercedes-Benz for the elites. Importing these luxuries is against sanctions, so that must have been quite a feat in itself. How they keep them running is another issue.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  An article from 2014 suggests the government use at least one Mercedes, and probably bought it via Russia or China. I'd guess they just drive it over the border... Maybe parts don't count as "luxury vehicles", in which case they can buy them from Europe. Alternatively, China/Russia. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11013338/Mercedes-limousines-spotted-in-North-Korea-could-breach-UN-sanctions.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11...
  - ams6110 11y ago
    China produces compatible parts for almost every car, including Mercedes.
- smcl 11y ago
  I read this recently, it seems there's a bunch of 1970s Volvos floating around which are not paid for http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-volvos-it-bough-1629521713 http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-v...
mrcactu5 11y ago
I am impressed that Pyongyang appears in Google maps https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongyang/@39.0338528,125.6923056,13z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x357e1d28b1b75405:0x283ff682d04744d6 https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongya... I was looking for the giant Ryuyong Hotel in the center of town.
- yitchelle 11y ago
  Clicking on some of the landmarks around the hotel, they have some Google reviews. The reviews for the Pyongyang Arena makes interesting reading. https://www.google.com.pr/search?q=Pyongyang+Arena,+Pyongyang,+Corea+del+Norte&ludocid=9068691185340548019#lrd=0x357e1d31fa7eca45:0x7dda7695c7f083b3,1 https://www.google.com.pr/search?q=Pyongyang+Arena,+Pyongyan...
jeffzilla 11y ago
Hey, I've been there! I ran my fastest marathon ever while being tailed by the paddy wagon, suited up and bowed down before the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, locked and loaded to shoot at chickens, and tripped out in psychedelic halls of mirrors in the DPRK - North Korea. Here's how it all went down... http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-korea-and-running-the-pyongyang-marathon/ http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-kor...

54 points by tswartz 11y ago

You do realize that everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully pre-selected and even engineered for display purposes, right? (I was born in the Soviet Union. It is mostly unknown for Western people how much propaganda matters in totalitarian countries, and how little it has to do with reality).

mattmanser 11y ago
Slide 2 - FOR THE FEW FOREIGN JOURNALISTS WHO HAVE HAD REPEATED ACCESS TO THE NORTH, THE VIEWS FROM THE WINDOW BECOME VITAL, OFFERING COUNTERPOINTS TO THE CASCADE OF OFFICIALLY ARRANGED SCENES. Sorry for caps, but that seems to be the entire point of this story, it looks at the photos of silly things, like just 5 swimsuits on a rack of clothes in a 'shop'.
EliRivers 11y ago
Having been there on holiday myself, the only way to ensure that everything is pre-selected and engineered would be to effectively shut down the entire city (indeed, every city and town I went to), and create a kind of bubble around each of our buses (and, when we switched to foot, around each pocket of walking tourists); fake cities filled with actors, all standing and doing nothing until someone shouts "The bus is almost visible" at which point they break into action like a pack of extras on a Hollywood set, pretending to be walking somewhere as the bus passes, only to stop as soon as it's out of sight. Everyone's life on permanent hold, just waiting to show the tourists what it looks like when people walk on the pavement. What glory for the Fatherland that is! To say that "everything in these pictures is thoroughly and carefully pre-selected and even engineered" is simply not true.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >effectively shut down the entire city So.. you guys were carefully corralled in the city? N Korea is mostly rural, with most of its population barely able to get enough calories to eat. Pyongyang is a propagandist show-room and is full of connected party types. Your average N Korean doesn't live that lifestyle. This is all fairly well documented by various sources, mostly via the oral histories of defectors: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912 http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0... http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0143122916 http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0... If you care to discredit these works, I will argue with you on a point to point basis. I have read both and other sources that describe the regime and everyday life in North Korea. Perhaps we can also get Dennis Rodman in here too but clearly you both are on the same page. Sadly, I find North Korea cheerleading often to be a biased political position tied to the usual pro-China HN crowd that finds fault with everything the US/EU do, thus anything the US/EU are critical of, must be good and any criticism of these regimes must be "western propaganda."
  - EliRivers 11y ago
    So.. you guys were carefully corralled in the city? No. We travelled through rural regions as well; small towns and so forth. I saw (but did not go into) numerous very small villages. Those were not much more than a collection of buildings, generally with a dirt track leading to it from the road we were on. In the city, whilst walking with our two guides, the distance between the front walker and the rear walker was on the order of a hundred metres at times. When I went there, it was a significant national holiday. Some of the exhibition centres we went to had literally thousands of people flowing through them while we were there. We were in the crowds, mixing in with the people attending. Huge flows of people. At a military parade, we stepped off the bus and stood with the crowd to watch. On the underground, we stepped onto the carriages with the locals who were waiting for the train. A funfair in Pyongyang; huge, huge queues outside and inside. Enormous numbers of people milling about and again, our group wandered through them. I saw numerous signs of deprivation and malnutrition. I saw extensive evidence of a massive solid fuel shortage in recent years. I saw a lot of things that made it clear that the nation is, in many many ways, truly grotesque. I also saw an upright stuffed alligator on wheels holding a drinks tray that David Koresh of Waco fame had sent as a gift. I would hazard (but of course do not know) that I know more about the subject than you do (both before and after travelling there I read an enormous amount of the available literature and various collections of conference proceedings), and I have the additional evidence of my own eyes. The western media LOVES to spin stories about the DPRK, and the western public LOVES to read them. There is a lot - a LOT - wrong with the DPRK, but the media seem to be able to write pretty much anything they like and people want to believe it. You know what, go there and see it for yourself. Run in the Pyongyang marathon. Do a cycling tour.
    - abandonliberty 11y ago
      I'm curious about your perspective on this article, "North Korea: A nation of racist dwarfs" [0]http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor... I've nearly given up on understanding the reality of the situation. Are you Dennis Rodman? ;)
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
- billyhoffman 11y ago
  North Korea has a history of doing crazy things to make things seem normal or better than they are. For example they built and have maintained an fake and empty village next to the DMZ for the last 50 years to try and entice the South Koreans to come north. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong North Korea is not a rational place.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    It was built in the 1950s when South Korea was still very, very poor. The idea of encouraging defections back then wasn't quite so crazy. I'm pretty sure that the village is actually inhabited now and has been for many years. Probably as soon as they realized that its propaganda value was limited. There's plenty of shit made up and printed in 'prestigious' media outlets about North Korea. If a story seems too crazy to be true, then there's a good chance that it actually isn't. Like yours, for instance.
    - billyhoffman 11y ago
      As of 2014, North Korea insists it a real village. The lights still come on at night. But anyone with binoculars can see the streets are empty. http://boingboing.net/2014/07/08/north-koreas-creepy-fake-civ.html http://boingboing.net/2014/07/08/north-koreas-creepy-fake-ci... It's not my "story" or "made up". It's 2 cited 3rd party articles. No reason to be a jerk to people contributing to the conversation.
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  And I thought the opening of the Beijing games was some impressive organization! I suspect that a sizable proportion of the population believes the situation you describe to be true; that is our propaganda.
- yequalsx 11y ago
  I have a hard time understanding why someone with a conscience would spend money in a brutal, repressive regime. Do you have any compunction about giving money that supports such a regime? Is there a level of brutality and oppression that would make you not want to directly support that brutality and oppression? EDIT: I seem to have hit a nerve. Is it always OK to vacation in a brutal regime? If so why? I'd love hear why directly giving money to the North Korean regime is an acceptable thing to do.
  - im3w1l 11y ago
    You know how touristy places look more like each other than the genuine thing? Souvenir trash shops, tastes you are used to. People doing traditional stuff, except it's only a show and their souls are not in it. A sell out. I think that would be a good development.

Zirro 11y ago

For those who would like to follow North Korea on a more than casual basis, these sites are likely to be of interest: * NK News (http://nknews.org http://nknews.org) * DailyNK (https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php) And perhaps especially since this is HN: * North Korea Tech (https://www.northkoreatech.org https://www.northkoreatech.org)

dominotw 11y ago
https://www.facebook.com/dprk360 https://www.facebook.com/dprk360
- yakshemash 11y ago
  http://38north.org/ http://38north.org/

colinbartlett 11y ago

NY Times team did a great job of making this responsive. It works really well on mobile. That said, this is best viewed on desktop on a huge monitor. It looks gorgeous. Really, beautiful job to their front end team, consistently delivering this kind of experience.

adolfojp 11y ago
And yet the video was awful in every way. It cut too fast, not allowing us to fully appreciate what was going on, and it had no playback controls so if you missed anything you have to wait for the entire thing to loop back up. Did you see the blue box that trapped the foot? I don't know what that was.
- ubersync 11y ago
  It covers your shoe with a polythene shoe cover. Mostly used in hospitals.
- tswartz 11y ago
  Yeah the video started to load for me then froze and I couldn't get it started again without reloading the entire page and scrolling back down.
milkworsethan 11y ago
What's your rate for shilling?

coldcode 11y ago

The empty freeway from the window was the killer shot for me. Imagine if you showed the average citizen there a picture of LA or even Beijing during rush hour.

tswartz 11y ago
Yes, its so interesting to see those types of pictures. I'd be fascinated to hear what North Koreans think of the freeway system in their country since few people use it.

gambiting 11y ago

I was always fascinated by cars in North Korea - what brands do they use? How do they get there? What do you have to do to drive one? Exactly how uncommon are they? Who fixes them, and how do they know how? If the supreme leader is driven in a Mercedes, how do they get the parts for it? I come from Poland where during communist times cars were really hard to come by, you had to wait 10 years on an official list to be allowed to buy one, but people always managed to get by somehow. Most models were of course of Soviet production, but an odd western car would sometimes appear, imported through friends of friends of someone in the party. Obviously NK is completely different, but I still find it very interesting, and it's hard to find any information about this anywhere.

rwmj 11y ago
The UN has a report on NK: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Reportoft... It's a 372 page Word document(!) Anyway, buried deep inside you'll see the regime imported a dozen Mercedes-Benz for the elites. Importing these luxuries is against sanctions, so that must have been quite a feat in itself. How they keep them running is another issue.
Symbiote 11y ago
An article from 2014 suggests the government use at least one Mercedes, and probably bought it via Russia or China. I'd guess they just drive it over the border... Maybe parts don't count as "luxury vehicles", in which case they can buy them from Europe. Alternatively, China/Russia. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11013338/Mercedes-limousines-spotted-in-North-Korea-could-breach-UN-sanctions.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11...
- ams6110 11y ago
  China produces compatible parts for almost every car, including Mercedes.
smcl 11y ago
I read this recently, it seems there's a bunch of 1970s Volvos floating around which are not paid for http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-volvos-it-bough-1629521713 http://jalopnik.com/north-korea-still-owes-393-000-000-for-v...

mrcactu5 11y ago

I am impressed that Pyongyang appears in Google maps https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongyang/@39.0338528,125.6923056,13z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x357e1d28b1b75405:0x283ff682d04744d6 https://www.google.com.pr/maps/place/Ryugyong+Hotel,+Pyongya... I was looking for the giant Ryuyong Hotel in the center of town.

yitchelle 11y ago
Clicking on some of the landmarks around the hotel, they have some Google reviews. The reviews for the Pyongyang Arena makes interesting reading. https://www.google.com.pr/search?q=Pyongyang+Arena,+Pyongyang,+Corea+del+Norte&ludocid=9068691185340548019#lrd=0x357e1d31fa7eca45:0x7dda7695c7f083b3,1 https://www.google.com.pr/search?q=Pyongyang+Arena,+Pyongyan...

jeffzilla 11y ago

Hey, I've been there! I ran my fastest marathon ever while being tailed by the paddy wagon, suited up and bowed down before the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, locked and loaded to shoot at chickens, and tripped out in psychedelic halls of mirrors in the DPRK - North Korea. Here's how it all went down... http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-korea-and-running-the-pyongyang-marathon/ http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2015/06/exploring-north-kor...