I just watched a fascinating documentary on North Korea that you can see here. Probably some of the weirdest shit you’ll ever see in your life. There’s a whole group of people who’s sole purpose in NK is to handle tourists (and the country probably only get’s a handful each year), and they run the crew through various propaganda exhibits, show them a couple of “touristy” type things and try to convince the tourists that NK’s the greatest country in the world, but you can’t help but notice things like there’s no cars on the roads, no electricity, and the buildings are crumbling.
One of the things folks are shown is a performance of thousands of gymnasts reenacting the history of NK. As the narrator of the documentary says, it’s like Andrew Lloyd Webber on acid, and weird. Surreal doesn’t even begin to describe what it’s like. About the only thing that it didn’t have was 200 dancing Elvis impersonators.
It’s worth watching just to see the narrator find a Sex Pistols song on the karaoke machine (which was built in South Korea) start singing it and have his hosts just not know how to handle it. Apparently, they had no idea that the song was on the machine, and even though they spoke English, they couldn’t quite grasp the concept behind the song.
When that country does finally open up, it is going to explode. You just cannot withhold that much from a place, make it so completely malnourished in all respects and expect to keep it in that position despite all the progress in the rest of the world. When Change comes, and change is inevitable, the People In Charge are going to pay a very high price for their crimes.
The longer it goes on, the greater the difference, the higher the pressure and the greater the inevitable reaction at the end of all things.
Can’t see that happening. NK is a sort of uncooperative proxy of China, in that without Chinese support and defense, they’d have long since passed into history. I’m sure that China would like to see them open up and modernize, but one of the things that China is fearful of is having a united Korea with a US military presence on it’s borders. I know that China has pressured them to reform their practices and thus, release a little bit of the pressure, but unfortunately, the entire thing is a time bomb of unresolved pressures and unless it is done slowly and carefully over a longer period of time (as the Chinese have and are doing), the whole thing will end very messily, which has negative consequences for the Chinese as well.
On the NK side, the PTB have no desire to lose their control and their advantages, and know that they’ll be the first ones up against the wall in a revolution. Reading between the lines of scant news articles, one can see rare signs of internal struggles between families and factions, but it’s very much like medieval nobles playing political games while the people starve around them. The peasants mean nothing to them, it’s all about their own power and games.
I am absolutely certain that, when the revolution comes, there will be a constant parade of former bosses and leaders claiming that they honestly had no idea that the situation was so desperate among the common people. And/or claiming that they were as much victims as everyone else and were powerless to do anything.
They’re really just segments of a larger work, and watching them out of sequence will make it hard to get the whole weirdness of the place. Generally, each segment includes a clip of a NK propaganda film (subtitled and dubbed into English) which deal with what kind of things they’re going to see on that’s days outing.
Well, the stuff in the column to the right of the videoplayer deals with the NK expedition. What the rest of the stuff on the site might be, I don’t know.
Why? That would pose no significant military threat to China. Ground troops on their border? BFD! The Chinese will always have more ground troops! The American threat to China (and vice-versa) is nuclear, and that has nothing to do with the status of NK.
If Kim Jong Il were smart, he would demilitarize the DMZ, open the borders to anybody who wants to visit relatives on the other side, and hope that very gradual exposure to a different way of life would gradually bleed out all those tensions, opening the way to peaceful reunification perhaps another generation down the road. There wouldn’t be any massive flood of refugees southward because the South Korean government wouldn’t want that either and would not allow it.
Simple exposure to the truth of Plenty in the Real World would quickly destroy the NK regime. Exposure to outside thinking is also dangerous at a much lower level. Can’t have anyone questioning the government, which is why they ship them off to re-education camps or kill them. So the LAST thing the NK government wants is to open their borders and let the masses see/know the truth of the outside world.
And Unification? NK doesn’t want that unless it is under their rule, which isn’t going to happen.
He’s smart, because he knows that any change means he gets the long knife.
I read a great travelogue of an American’s trip to North Korea a few years ago. It can still be found on the web here. It sounds like North Korea keeps the same tour cycle going…
For those interested, there was a really good non-fiction graphic novel (oxymoron?) that came out awhile back about a guy who went to work in NK for a few months. It’s called Pyongyang. I highly recommend it.
I agree with you. Open borders would open up communications. People from the south would bring in CDs and DVDs, players and disks, and newspapers and radios, and the Northerners would learn very quickly what a shithole they live in compared to the rest of the world.
Yes, it’s called *Pulgasari*. You can find it on DVD, and it’s not bad as far as giant rubber monster movies go. There’s a thread about here, but . . .
I find myself wondering whether the people of NK have even the vaguest idea that the rest of the world – including China, I have no doubt – regards KJI as at worst a psychopath and at best a clown.
For that matter, I wonder if KJI himself understands that.
