this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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98% of everything that Americans especially but the people of white countries in general have heard about North Korea is false, and the general ethos of being some kind of psychotic tin-pot dictatorship with no grip on reality is purely an American invention (with the help of the sellouts and agents in the South). There is plenty to criticize the DPRK for -- even including stereotypical lines about the less-social elements of its Confucian heritage coloring state ideology all the way back to Kim Il-Sung -- but the image that most "westerners" have in their heads is fundamentally a fabrication, despite how confident they are in it.
Could you go into detail? I'm interested in hearing your take on this and what it comes from. For reference, I have a good friend (with a stupid amount of money) who loves to travel. Having kind of exhausted all of the typical places, and wanting to do something different, he decides to go to North Korea.
His stories are that it was absolutely as bizarre as he was expecting and how he had zero freedom and everything was perfectly controlled so he could only see what they would allow him to see, including being moved around in vans that didn't have windows when they were going outside of the city where he was staying.
I completely missed this comment, sorry.
Yeah, they are definitely restrictive with tourists, but that's not the same as how citizens live. Your story sounds more extreme than others I have seen (where the general consensus is more generically that the visit was "on rails"), but I'm not about to call your buddy a liar. Citizens, it probably won't surprise you to know, are not moved around in windowless vans (beyond the case of arrest, where I imagine they might be since that would be pretty normal for most countries).
No worries.
From his description, his experience was very "on rails" too, but just including cases where the "rails" very conspicuously were making it so he couldn't see what was going on around him.
But this doesn't really answer my question. I'm not saying his experience matches that of a citizen or even that it was accurate. I have no idea I wasn't there. In fact, it was kind of the exact opposite and that it being "on rails" and only being able to see what they wanted him to see, probably is not at all what citizens live. Kind of the point that they were trying to hide how citizens live.
Which leads me back to my question again. . .you claim we have it all wrong, and my good friend's experience kind of confirms (as much as he was allowed to) how secretive and weird they are. . .so where is your claim coming from and what is it based on?
The DPRK is in an unusual and tenuous position, and there is very little that can be usefully gained from speculation that doesn't involve considering that. At the same time as trying to develop a [dictatorship of the proletariat/highly unusual set of political economic arrangements], they bear constant acts of sabotage from the South and the US that are at times extraordinarily depraved, have endured sanctions for decades, and suffered from regional poverty since long before the WPK took over, all the more so after the US bombed them back into the stone age.
Given this context, and probably also the Otto Warmbier incident, we can begin to understand why they would be vigilant -- some would say hypervigilant -- towards various security issues, and don't want some jackass tourist going rogue and causing an international incident. Since they never made a ton of money from tourism -- especially discounting Chinese tourism -- sacrificing some level of profitability to their tourism industry to keep tourists on a short leash and prevent incidents isn't so inexplicable.
Complete aside, what nationality is your tourist friend? I assume not American because -- due to US passport law -- it is very difficult for a US citizen to gain access to the DPRK since the Warmbier incident.
Of course the DPRK is strange, even its most ardent supporters would tell you so, but the fact of the matter is that what westerners think about the DPRK isn't "The DPRK is weird", it's "This is a completely backwards place with absurd laws and propaganda which considers human life worthless," right? "State propaganda says the Kims don't shit and Kim Il-Sung invented the hamburger. Kim Jong-Un had his uncle eaten alive by dogs for being rude to him. The rats eat the kids and the kids eat the rats." etc. My biggest point of emphasis is that every one of those stories, which have agglomerated together to create the hazy cultural consensus that I mentioned, is unambiguously false and you have very little left that you've ever actually seen about the DPRK if you subtract all of that.
Here are some things to look at if you like. Obviously I would not tell you to take anything uncritically and I have my own issues with things here and there. I'd be happy to discuss any of them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4Hnl7J9H4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBqeC8ihsO8
And of course, you can actually look at statements that they put out:
http://kcna.kp/en/article/q/5a9ffe6e4d6704ac1838b14785365295.kcmsf
Or the fact that the Korea-watching industry is just completely shameless about putting out the most harebrained nonsense with very little pushback (including things that don't make it to the headlines), which really does not lend credibility to the idea of serious-minded criticism of the DPRK having any strong presence in anglophone media and therefore anglophone culture. On this point, because it is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation, it's really just a question of how many examples you want.