Another tourist made a trip and posted some stuff about his experience. Apparently, they had another Mass Games a few days ago, one of the only times foreigners are allowed in the country for any tourism.
I’m impressed they let him see the bodies of the two dead former leaders.
I’ve linked to it before here on the Dope, but if you haven’t seen it, Vice TV went to North Korea a few years ago and made an awesome documentary about their trip. It’s in 3 parts of about 20 minutes each.
For even more fun, check out their trip to Liberia! :eek:
ETA: The article is very similar to the experiences of the Vice crew; not surprising that nothing has really changed.
If you want more N. Korea fun from Vice, watch Russian Labor Camps, which use N. Koreans for labor.
Yes, he tried to reach the N. Koreans in Russia to talk them.
It’s fun.
Have any of you ever dealt with people who have some weird idolization over NK?
I have a very liberal, hippy friend from my college days who literally loves North Korea and thinks it would be a great country to live in.
I think he’s insane, but he really truly believes it. He hates the united states and considers himself a libertarian.
North Korea fascinates me because if the truly Orwellian dystopia that it is.
It really does make you wonder how much propaganda and media control and shape our lives in the west. Obviously we have free and open press, but still, North Korea it’s like a macro sociological experiment. Fascinating.
Too bad for him that NK is a dictatorship, not a libertarian paradise.
And the award for dumbest comment on the article goes to . . .
I seem to have missed the big giant picture of George Bush required in my house and the millions of starving Americans hiding in prison camps somewhere . . .
You mean Great Leader Ronald Reagan and Dear Leader George Bush.
The first thought I had about those comments is “I wonder if the North Koreans try to spam any articles about their country”. Does this sound plausable to anyone?
Not personally, but such people are out there. A documentary about such a group is Friends of Kim, where a group of pro-North Korea westerners visits North Korea. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the members of the group grow more and more disappointed in NK as their visit progresses.
There are a bunch of comments like that on the Facebook page that the article links to, including one person pulling the ol’ “Well, how do we know that the Americans didn’t invade North Korea and start the Korean War, huh? NSA lemmings!!!1!!!” trick.
Has he ever tried to move there? Seriously, I would think they’d love to have him, if only for propaganda purposes. Unless, of course, they suspected he was just an American plant and denied him entry, which they quite likely would.
Has he tried Cuba? It’s much closer, and I suspect Spanish is easier for an English-speaker to learn than Korean.
I knew a girl in college who was convinced that the only reason for the Berlin Wall was to keep all of the starving, suffering West Germans from storming into the paradise that was East Berlin and ruining it for everyone by demanding food, health care, education…you know, all the things they didn’t have in West Berlin. :rolleyes:
Sadly, I didn’t have her phone number or address when the Wall fell.
I am the very last person to defend the DPRK, so please don’t take this wrongly. But it’s important to note that there are similar propaganda films shown in the DPRK, with quite real filming of homeless folks in downtown Detroit - although the bit about all the birds having been eaten is a little far-fetched. - YouTube Still, I can totally see how some of those comments might come from a person who’d grown up in poverty here in the USA.
There is probably no modern country without neighborhoods where one could go and film horrific squalor and poverty. It’s an indictment of all of us. But the human rights abuses in the DPRK are completely beyond the pale, and the comparison of their labor camps with the Nazi concentration camps is fully justified.
:dubious:
Neighbourhoods with horrific squalor and poverty? I don’t believe you’ll find much of that in Canada. The more socialist countries of Scandinavia probably don’t even know the meaning.
Hmmm. Perhaps not among citizens, I haven’t been there so I don’t know. But I’ve read some horrible things about the living conditions of immigrant workers in Sweden and Holland. Then there are the girls who are tricked into moving to Amsterdam only to find out that “Dance career” wasn’t exactly what they were promised. . .
And I’ve driven through some scary parts of Toronto and Windsor Ontario.
I have been to the DPRK and it is on a fairly short list of countries I would not like to live in.
Your friend must’ve bought all the NK big show propaganda.
NK already has their token caucasion westerner immigrant. A us soldier defector. They don’t want any more cause it would be too much of a security risk. Not to mention their whole worldview is based on hating America, cant risk people running into too many likeable westerners, and they’re just a tad bit monoethnic.