Offtopic, but every time I watch a documentary on North Korea I am happy to see that so much of the old Berlin subway rolling stock seems to lead a nice retirement live there - according to Wikipedia, they use 220 Class D cars from the 50ies and 60ies (132 in active service) in the Pyongyang Metro, and another 120 Class G cars from the 70ies were converted into trains for the Korean State Railway. [0]
> every time I watch a documentary on North Korea I am happy
There is something deeply wrong with that. It's kind of like saying that every time you watch a documentary on the Holocaust you are happy the fate of the rolling stock that took people to Auschwitz. It is almost literally the same thing.
When I see pictures, I'm always surprised by how relatively normal it looks from a distance. I guess I pictured it more 1984 style, with grey cubed buildings and zero trees, decoration, or anything else pleasant.
From a distance, it seems remarkably normal to me. I have no desire to visit and certainly wouldn't want to live there, but it looks not all that bad.
Simon has unprecedented access to NK. More than any other Westerner, I think. He's been doing this for so long, without reprisal, that I think he must know where the line is on what he can publicly document.
If you meet him, ask him about the other stuff he can't document... :)
There's some kind of cartoonist supervillian picture of North Korea. It's quite surprising when you learn that it's a country filled with ordinary people, doing ordinary things like us.
Yes it's incredibly paranoid and authoritarian, but when you learn the history it makes sense why it is like that.
This is a country that was utterly destroyed by a superpower, who crowed about it, and which still threatens it.
> Having visited the hermit state around 200 times through working as a tour guide
He's a regime supporter who brings in desperately needed foreign currency to help pay for the nuke & missile program and elite luxuries. Hence, given that he has talked about and posted this, he is almost certainly correct when he says
> Some media has portrayed the idea that North Koreans are embarrassed by the empty hotel or the length of time it took to finish, Cockerell said, "but I never found that to be true"..."That's ludicrous, and never been true. Absolute nonsense. It used to appear on the front of books and magazines, even when it was an incomplete concrete shell with a crane up top. So that's complete rubbish. It was not a cause for embarrassment." Cockerell said the Kim family simply put the blame on America, falsely explaining to the North Korean people that the delays were "the fault of jealous conspiracies" from outside Western powers...Cockerell has also observed how Pyongyang locals interact with the structure. "It's not like people sit on their balconies, watching the slogans go by. It's just part of the nightlife. It's a futuristic building to North Koreans, very modern, unlike anything else."
That is, this post is sort of a quasi 'submarine' for North Korean tourism. 'Come see our unique pyramid, which we think is cool rather than a symptom of totalitarian dictatorship (and pay us a lot of renminbi/dollars/yen)!'
> No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
This is in fact doubly painful, since the whole reason they built the Ryugyong is (apparently) that a South Korean company built what was then the world's tallest hotel in Singapore.
> Due to the huge cost of importing steel, the towers were constructed on a cheaper radical design of super high-strength reinforced concrete. High-strength concrete is a material familiar to Asian contractors and twice as effective as steel in sway reduction; however, it makes the building twice as heavy on its foundation as a comparable steel building. Supported by 23-by-23 metre concrete cores and an outer ring of widely spaced super columns, the towers use a sophisticated structural system that accommodates its slender profile and provides 560,000 square metres of column-free office space. [0]
Looking in Wikipedia, they still have a section that diminishes with the height and they are made of some special "super high-strength reinforced concrete".
Even by using this special reinforced concrete, the towers are twice heavier than if they had used a steel structure.
> Cockerell began running tours to North Korea with the company Koryo Tours in 2002 ...
> Ten years later, Cockerell met a North Korean who was working in China, and that man had the contacts necessary to arrange a visit.
Though the article has some later information:
> No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
It is a term journalists like to use to convey that they're doing important work or that you're reading something valuable. I see them use this kind of language for many things, hoping that readers fall for it.
This should be your reminder that economic sanctions really does nothing but starve ordinary people to death while doing nothing to the ruling regime and, in many cases, strengthens support for it as those enacting the sanctions are (with merit) seen as the enemy.
Back in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later Secretry of State was asked about the 500,000 Iraqi children who died due to economic sanctions and she replied "we think the price was worth it" [1].
The next century for the Korean peninsula is going to be interesting. Looming large is the collapse of South Korea. The current fertility rate is the lowest in the world at ~0.71 children per woman. What that means is if you take 50 men and 50 women in 3 generations you have 8 people. We haven't seen anything like this before.
I, too, find NOrth Korea fascinating but what I find more fascinating is how and what we talk about with North Korea and how it's never about the starvation and death we directly cause.
Preventing the north korean regime from having the funds to grow its military presence seems like a fair use of economic sanctions to me - sadly, even if there is an economic cost to its people.
I really doubt that worked, given that North Korea does most of its trade with China and Russia, who don't participate in the sanctions. Besides, they already have nukes and the ability to launch them over the ocean. The military presence has grown as much as the regime needs it to with the sanctions, so there's no point to keeping them anymore.
I thought the context of the previous response was that sanctions do nothing to the regime i.e. in terms of strengthening, weakening, or getting rid of. The North korean dictatorship remains in place so that is agreeable. However, North korean military presence (seen as distinct from the regime presence) has seemingly faltered dramatically.
That chart does not at all show that it follows South Korea! It is massively behind and has suffered a debilitating famine in the 90s. That on top of the spurious data collecting in North Korea that probably skews those numbers.
The people against sanctions want countries around the world to be forced to trade with North Korea. We don't have to be forced to trade with anyone. Free trade is earned, not a right for all the dictators of the world.
The way US sanctions against countries work is when we sanction a country, we also sanction any other country or entity or person who passes money or goods in return for money or goods from the targeted country.
It's not simply "We've decided to not buy and sell goods from a certain country."
What really happens with US sanctions is the guys we sanction all decide to band together with each other and to oppose and hate America, and eventually withdraw from using the US Dollar, reducing the US's influence. That may be good or it may be bad but its definitely not what the US has in mind when it sanctions a country.
By "a period in the nineties", you mean "since the nineties", right? So basically for the past 35 years North Korea has been heavily lagging in life expectancy.
Another way to put that is it's been 75 years since Korea split, and half that time North Korea has been much worse than south Korea.
Let's not even get into what that chart would look like if humanitarian aid wasn't shipped during those famines.
Life expectancy in the northern portion of Korea was higher than in the southern portion up until the point the US bombed 2/3 of all buildings in the northern portion.
In that chart I see one clearly identifiable famine, after which the life expectancy started rising again. Can you perhaps take a copy and mark out the other famines?
North Korea infamously refuses foreign aid, do you have a source that describes more in detail the aid you're referring to?
North Korea has roughly the equal third largest standing army in the world. North Korea has nuclear weapons. What exactly have we prevented?
My point is that economic sanctions never work against enemies. They only work against allies. Apartheid South Africa is the example that springs to mind.
Take the economic sanctions against Russia after it's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. What have they done exactly? Russia is now basically a war economy. It still has energy exports because there's always a market for that.
I don’t get why you’re trying to characterize NKs military as strong when it is objectively not so. The goal for stability in the region is for SK to have a stronger military. If we want to look at whether sancions have progressed that goal, then we would need to evaluate the relative strength of the two since the time sanctions went into place. How large of a standing army they have is not your kpi
TBH NK special case in that they make sanctions bite extra hard out of (Juche) policy. They're in prime geography to evade/smuggle all they want. IMO pretty good illustration on the maximum limits of US sanctions - i.e. countries with enough industrial base with max sanctions and tying their own hands can still concentrate enough resources to nuclearize and build icbms. Reality is NK nuclearization threatens US regional security architecture and likely reached stretch goal of penetrating CONUS GMD, i.e. NK basically the only shit tier country that can on paper nuke US.
Conventionally, now that we're in era of cheap drone warfare, harder to extrapolate NK/SK force disparity anymore. Risks no longer limited to artillery a few dozen km south of DMZ. NK building loitering munitions that can cover entirity of SK - SK has no longer have even modest strategic depth to hide high end hardware unlike few years ago. Ditto with Iran being able to credibly hit Israel. But that's more factor of tech proliferation.
I'm not sure how to feel about sanctions in general, but when it comes to North Korea, I think the blame firmly lies on its government.
Since the days of president Kim Daejung (1998-2003) every liberal South Korean regime tried to build trust with North Korea, including the controversial Kaesong industrial complex (housing factories owned by South Korean companies inside NK, with NK workers), which North Korea unilaterally shut down in 2013. Railway connections: severed by North Korea. Group tour of mount Kumkang: stopped after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean tourist who walked into a restricted area.
Basically, every time South Korea tries to give North Korea money in exchange of better relation, North Korea pisses it off, to such a degree that these policies (and their perceived failure) are now regular talking points by conservative South Korean pundits.
At this stage, there's not a lot of things we can try, unless we want to just give NK money and say "Oh please develop more nuclear weapons with this money, we don't care what you do."
The idea that the sanctions ‘we’ (I will treat ‘we’ as the western world) place on NK directly cause NK starvation and death needs an exuberant amount of evidence.
NK literally and figuratively puts guns to the heads of their citizens and kill’s people trying to escape from the country.
NK “government” (quotes since they act like a gang) forces a cult following of Kim Jong-(Il, Un).
NK aligned with USSR and China and tried to out Communism. But like USSR and CCP, the centralization of power into a single leader squashed the good hopes of communism and turned into totalitarianism (absolutely power corrupts absolutely).
How about ‘we’ treat NK as a grown up country that has responsibility for the welfare of its people? “We” are not responsible for the starvation in NK, just like all the how all the villains in movies say “You’re forcing me to do <horrendous act>!” No, really, you’re doing it yourself because you’re insane and care about other things over the lives of people.
The failed military coup in SK changed my view on the country quite a lot. Reading up on their presidents where the legacy seem to be if they are sentenced to death after impeachement or not ...
It is like the cracyness in NK makes people assume SK is sane.
I feel you on SK and demographics, but 3 generations is still a very long time these days. We're talking close to 200 years before anything like a population collapse.
Only if you count as "people dying and then the next". After a parcel of a population reaches adulthood, another generation is already expected. See the delta between GenX, Millenials, GenZ, and so on. I'd say that scenario is closer to 40 years.
The "coming sooner" problem with such low fertility rate is the bell-curve of your population by age. It starts to center on lower-productivity ages, more medical resources are needed. The system can't sustain itself with a thinner base on age.
>This should be your reminder that economic sanctions really does nothing but starve ordinary people to death
That's not true. I mean we can look at Russia, which is currently under the maximum number of sanctions and doesn't seem to have any problems with food. It is leftist regimes, that bear responsibilities for starvation, not sanctions. Food is rather easy to grow (unless the communists forbade it, of course).
>strengthens support for it as those enacting the sanctions are (with merit) seen as the enemy.
That's also doesn't work in such way. Appearance of new enemies does not lead to the support of the more hostile and dangerous old ones.
They aren't just sanctioned by the west, there's UN sanctions on NK too. China and Russia are more inclined to abide by UN sanctions than western sanctions. (But this has now changed after the Ukraine war, and both countries do appear to have strengthened military ties with NK).
Moreover, due to the sanctions, NK can't acquire Euros or dollars essential for international trading, and only afford to pay with its own currency. This means that unless there is equal trading between NK and other countries, any trade imbalance in favour of NK would mean the other country would get stuck with a lot of NK's currency in their banks with no real idea what to do with it. That is why China and Russia actually do barter-trading with North Korea (i.e. they mostly exchange goods and services, instead of money, when they trade).
Spent 10 minutes on the Googles with a variety of search terms and couldn't find anything. There's a bunch of NK apartment collapses (but nothing specifically about concrete / balconies) and one in SK[0] which sounds plausible but obviously they weren't left in the concrete and chainsawed when dead.
Maybe if the North Korean people had the most basic of civil liberties and could communicate in any way with the outside world people would be less inclined “stereotype/orientalize”.
Pfft, amateurs. America has more "hotels of doom" than that. Almost every medium and big city has some abandoned office building with drug addicted squatters. The koreans forgot to add them.
The article could do with more mentions of "doom", "propaganda", and other synonyms for evil. Maybe even an "allegedly" quote from a non-existent source?
It was literally the tallest building in North Korea AND the tallest unoccupied building in the world for a long time(2nd only to a building in china now).
If you have hundreds of skyscrapers, an unoccupied one isn't crazy. But that's not North Korea. Trying to find equivalence here is ludicrous.
Parent comment is probably more annoyance at the propaganda Americans are exposed to without realizing it, making us all think that communism and Russia and China and North Korea are scary monsters in the closet that are going to get us. I think you’d find it difficult to find an American who both dislikes communism and can have more than a couple sentences of why they feel that way. And I think most every American is pretty oblivious to the equally and sometime more shitty things that the US does and completely fails to keep in mind that we’re literally genociding countries and have done so since forever
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Next time you read an article in the Economist about how "Xi hates this one trick", pay attention to the attribution of the sources. It's all carefully written to frame unsubstantiated statements as facts, and to be able to deny it later.
It goes both ways - my experience is that Americans who like communism are people who have never experienced it.. maybe they blindly trust in Soviet propaganda, maybe they just project some idealistic idea of communism, creating a beautiful but not very realistic picture.
Examples:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AkZ2SijQOE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo-rXlPr_94
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