
What’s North Korea like? - wintercoat
https://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts/north-korea-101
======
Stratoscope
I had a vivid taste of North Korea by radio about 20 years ago. I was driving
to work and had a shortwave receiver in my car, and happened to tune in the
English language broadcast from North Korea. The news announcer said:

 _Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim Jong-il, because
the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of mental power beyond the ability
of ordinary human beings._

Those were the exact words. It was one of those things that sticks in your
brain and I remember it to this day.

------
Cyberdog
I've read Nothing to Envy, which is mentioned a couple of times in this
interview, and it gave me literal nightmares. Actual, literal nightmares.

Now I want to read this Dear Reader book as well, but I don't know if I can
mentally handle it at this stage in my life.

God help the people of the DPRK.

~~~
gooseus
This National Geographic documentary from 2006 had me sobbing like nothing I'd
ever seen before, and I'm actually getting upset right now recalling it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8)

Lisa Ling went undercover with an eye surgeon from Nepal on a mission to do
1000 cataract surgeries in 10 days. Cataract surgery in any modern country is
an outpatient procedure, but in NK you are doomed to be blind forever.

This man, Dr. Sanduk Ruit[0], had to persuade the NK government to come to the
country to do the surgeries and after he restored the sight of each of the
thousands, who had been effectively blinded for years by their backwards
government, they walked right past him and fell to their knees in tears of
adulation to a picture of their Dear Leader. I've never felt a hatred as
strong as I did then for Kim Jong Il.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduk_Ruit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduk_Ruit)

~~~
bambax
> _This National Geographic documentary..._

"This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in
your country on copyright grounds."

Ah, liberty!

~~~
Red_Tarsius
Try this link:
[https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8](https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8)

------
DoubleCribble
Let's ask the recently escaped DPRK soldier what it's like. In addition to
recovering from 5 gunshot wounds acquired during the sprint across the border
he has: \- PTSD \- TB \- Hep B and (had) \- intestinal worms! [0]

[0][https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/health/north-korea-
defector-d...](https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/health/north-korea-defector-
doctor-intl/index.html)

------
civilian
Michael Malice is great. He had an interview that also covered North Korea on
the Rubin Report:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDmaPdyqGUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDmaPdyqGUU)

------
gkya
Vice has a three-part 1-hour-total documentary on North Korea with footage
from the country. Part one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4)

~~~
dominotw
This is not documentary on North Korea. Its a documentary on ' the north korea
show', there isn't even a glimpse of 'real' real korea in those documentaries.
Youtube is filled with these tourist documentaries, everyone from bbc to your
next door tourist neighbor seems to have one about it. Almost all of them with
identical content. All of them present NK in a very sterotypical way,
brainwashed population, cult of kims, hatred for america, starving children,
deserted roads, total govt grip on people ect ect.

I recommend the watching the follwing media instead

1\. Children of the Secret State
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csI1EoMOXXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csI1EoMOXXk)

2\. Loves and the Despot

3\. Under the Sun

~~~
gkya
I have to disagree, it seems to me that what it shows is something very real
about NK: the way the NK wants to portray herself, the illusion that they want
to create. It's not like say pictures of Istanbul with century-old men, veiled
women in rundown rotting quarters which many tourists and photographers like
to shoot and many believe represent the general reality of the city while we
the citizens cringe to death. The "show" here is put on by NK herself and the
documentary is interesting because its documenting that. It's NK that pushes
those stereotypes.

------
dqv
For anyone who wants to know another answer to the question in the title,
there is a youtube channel [1] of someone videoing their experiences in North
Korea.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzvCf_q10UZkUJE0lOav0ag](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzvCf_q10UZkUJE0lOav0ag)

~~~
markplindsay
Just because it isn’t kitschy and filled with over-the-top praise of the Dear
Leader doesn’t mean it isn’t orchestrated. I think it is a mistake to believe
the DPRK isn’t capable of producing sophisticated social media like this.

~~~
dqv
The way DPRK is described... It's really hard to humanize the people that live
there. The videos were the first glimpse I've had of what North Korea looks
like without a gray lens filter. Sure, it's manufactured, but that's why I
said it's a /different/ answer to the question.

------
singularity2001
Please God or someone show me how to help CLOSE the CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

------
vfulco
You mean unicorn-land? Yea welcome to fantasy peninsula

------
dpwm
For those who might not have twigged from the domain, this is published by the
Cato Institute, a think-tank has a clearly stated agenda to promote
libertarianism.

Whatever your stance on libertarianism in general, it's not hard to imagine
that a communist state is a libertarian's worst nightmare from an ideological
perspective and that we should probably view this with the same scepticism we
might from an article put out by a hypothetical pro-DPRK think-tank.

~~~
tannhauser23
Yeah, and Amnesty International is a group with a "clearly stated agenda" to
promote human rights. We still tend to trust their reports.

I can't believe you're equivocating the Cato Institute with a pro-DPRK think
tank. It's not possible to defend the North Korean state honestly - by
contrast, an organization dedicated to libertarianism has the motive to expose
North Korea's unbelievable human rights abuses. They're not even the same
ballpark.

~~~
dpwm
> Yeah, and Amnesty International is a group with a "clearly stated agenda" to
> promote human rights. We still tend to trust their reports.

Amnesty International's reports are about human rights abuses. If this was an
Amnesty International report about human rights abuses in the DPRK, I would
not suspect them of having an agenda. For what it's worth, they have a page on
this that I broadly agree with [0].

> I can't believe you're equivocating the Cato Institute with a pro-DPRK think
> tank.

I'm not. I'm saying it's expected to be ideologically opposed. I've tried to
search the Cato institute for their criticisms of Saudi Arabia, and I broadly
agree with them. But they're not as concerned about the human rights abuses in
Saudi Arabia as in the DPRK. I should point out that all of the articles I
read were articles, not podcasts, and were well-written.

> It's not possible to defend the North Korean state honestly

It's not possible to claim that defectors, paid for their stories, represent
an unbiased sample of the population honestly. From a historical perspective,
it's a poor source. It is now and it will be in 100 years. Unfortunately due
to the secrecy in the DPRK we don't really have a way to objectively know how
it is now short of living there.

[0] [https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/north-
korea](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/north-korea)

~~~
woodandsteel
>It's not possible to claim that defectors, paid for their stories, represent
an unbiased sample of the population honestly. From a historical perspective,
it's a poor source. It is now and it will be in 100 years. Unfortunately due
to the secrecy in the DPRK we don't really have a way to objectively know how
it is now short of living there.

So you have determined that every single defector who is interviewed by a
journalist, historian, or human rights activist was paid for his story?

You know, the broader question is the relationship between a countries form of
government and how good life is for its citizens. You seem to believe that it
is possible for an authoritarian government like that of North Korea to be
good. And as a consequence there is no reason to chose liberal democracy over
totalitarianism. Have I got you right?

~~~
dpwm
I want as much as anybody to believe that the DPRK and its people deserve what
is being considered for it, because it will ease my conscience a little bit
that I tolerated the people who seem to want to help agentically propagate the
same old half-baked self-inconsistent nation-caricatures that carry with them
the implicit justifications for yet another war with a country from the
warmonger's wishlist to be inflicted by a state that has the world's largest
prison population (the second largest per capita), a criminal justice system
where your income determines your survival and a truly appalling human rights
record.

I will restate my points and elaborate upon them for clarity, because they
seem to have been missed.

1\. Most DPR Koreans have not defected (I count ~4 the past year)

2\. Defectors are self-selected.

3\. It is likely that the vast majority of attempted defections fail,
resulting in repercussions from the state. Even if this were the case, we have
an upper bound of 200,000. Approaching this upper bound assumes nobody is
imprisoned for anything other than defection, which would be absurd.

4\. It is highly unlikely that the successful defectors are representative of
the general population of that country.

Many of the comments on this article seem to accept the people are
brainwashed, indoctrinated, completely controlled by propaganda. It seems
unlikely that the same people are also consumed by a desire to be free and to
defect and living in misery as a result.

So my point is this: even if we could extract the memories and experiences
directly from these defectors heads and watch them on a projector, they are
likely to be so unrepresentative of the experience that _you_ would have
living there, having been brought up with the norms and customs of that
country, as to be worthless.

The fact that many have been paid for their testimonies, and those testimonies
have failed to be consistent with other testimonies is really a tool to help
those who still see merit in statistically meaningless testimonies to
recognise that they are also likely to be influenced by the monetary offers
for a satisfactory testimony.

I'm not saying that atrocities are not happening. I suspect they are, as they
are in many countries. But I also know that some of the more ridiculous
stories that have been pumped out by propagandists are being regurgitated by
reputable news sources. We've seen this before. The truth doesn't come out, it
gets buried in the chaos.

~~~
woodandsteel
So I was right, you do believe that a secretive totalitarian government like
North Korea can produce a good life for its citizens.

~~~
cribbles
The author of the post you are responding to questioned the approach of
relying upon paid testimony from self-selected defectors as an objective
account of the DPRK as a whole. This is not irreconcilable with a critical
view of the DPRK, and only indirectly addresses the point you are making here.

It is facile to observe that any form of society can 'produce a good life' for
some subset of its citizens. You have not persuasively argued that conceding
this point means agreeing to the bizarre equivocal statement that 'there is no
reason to chose liberal democracy over totalitarianism.'

~~~
woodandsteel
There are lots of other ways to determine what things are like in North Korea
besides paid testimony from defectors. In fact, the interview in question
mentioned at least one, namely books published by the government.

The post author avoided mentioning any other means, and has not explicitly
stated a belief that an authoritarian country can't be just as good as a
liberal democracy. I am going to assume that is what he believes until he
states otherwise.

Oh, and as long as we are at it, what is your belief on this matter?

------
snarf21
I asked my old college friend "What's it _really_ like living in North Korea?"
She said, "Can't complain."

~~~
fapjacks
Zing!

~~~
knicholes
I wouldn't have gotten the joke about not actually being able to complain had
you not added this comment. I would have interpreted the response as, "Meh,
it's not too bad."

