I'm always fascinated to read about North Korea. I feel so incredibly bad for the people who live there, who either know how bad things are (and can't do anything about it) or don't know (and thus don't care). In some ways, the latter group is probably better off.
(A great book: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, about life in North Korea and what it's like to escape to the West.)
It's amazing to see what North Korea will do to keep its own citizens in the dark, and to try to make things look amazing to foreigners -- only to fail spectacularly.
The attempts to erase traces of the metro cars' German origins reminds me of the department stores I've read about in Pyongyang, in which people enter and exit without buying anything, only to return minutes later, in order to give foreigners the illusion of a great commercial success.
All countries engage in propaganda and patriotism to some degree, but North Korea really takes the cake here. I hope that its citizens will one day be able to gain more freedom and financial security, but that somehow seems unlikely in the near future.
> in which people enter and exit without buying anything, only to return minutes later, in order to give foreigners the illusion of a great commercial success
I don't get it. Foreigners see success in people who don't buy anything?
No, the story that I read indicated that the North Koreans brought Western visitors to a department store, to demonstrate how great North Korea's economy was.
This Western visitor noticed that after people exited the store, they immediately entered again, to give an illusion of a busy store -- when in fact, nothing was actually being purchased.
(I can't remember if the shoppers were using money or taking things out of the store, but I have to assume that they were. I wish that I could find this story, which was quite fascinating.)
My point is that the North Korean government was so inept at propaganda that their attempts to demonstrate economic stability and power were laughably transparent.
I understand, that makes sense. What a clearly stupid decision on the government's part. It would have been much better if the stores were simply empty. Thanks for clarifying.
In a similar vein, there's pictures online of a "computer lab" in North Korea shown to visitors. There's people typing away at computers, which is seemingly normal, until you realize none of the computer have electricity.
I think the point is that they're attempting to make the shops look busy, but it's a ham-fisted/incompetent failure (they recirculate the same "shoppers", nobody buys anything)
What's arrogant and condescending about feeling bad for a country in which people don't have enough to eat, where every house needs to have pictures of the country's founder and his son, and in which punishments for even minor infractions involve entire families going to prison camps?
There is plenty of documentation establishing that those two things and many others are accurate. If you don't believe western media, there are Chinese sources as well.
For the malnutrition, North Koreans are smaller on average, and they even have trouble to recruit for their army, this cannot lie. The abuses and problems of North Korea are also very well documented.
(A great book: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, about life in North Korea and what it's like to escape to the West.)
It's amazing to see what North Korea will do to keep its own citizens in the dark, and to try to make things look amazing to foreigners -- only to fail spectacularly.
The attempts to erase traces of the metro cars' German origins reminds me of the department stores I've read about in Pyongyang, in which people enter and exit without buying anything, only to return minutes later, in order to give foreigners the illusion of a great commercial success.
All countries engage in propaganda and patriotism to some degree, but North Korea really takes the cake here. I hope that its citizens will one day be able to gain more freedom and financial security, but that somehow seems unlikely in the near future.