"What life looks like inside North Korea"

[marybourg]

These are fascinating pictures and reveal a capitol city much more modern, developed and affluent than I expected.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/what-life-looks-like-inside-north-korea/2016/09/07/03967fa6-750b-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_gallery.html?utm_term=.e3f9f19ab0cf

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Try reading "Nothing to Envy"

which is about life outside the capitol city. A totally different picture.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

13. Great book.

Pretty harrowing.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. Pyongyang is like a giant phony stage set, carefully presented to outsiders to hide the misery of

most North Koreans.

North Korea is a totalitarian shithole, absolutely the worst of the worst in terms of human rights.

[marybourg]

19. Yes, a "Potemkin Village" or in this case,

a "Potemkin City", but still it IS there, and very unexpected to me, at least, and worth examining.

[JI7]

21. it's all for show . people are not actually living like that everyday

not even the privileged ones .

[KittyWampus]

37. Only the Songbun live in the capitol. In fact, they just moved 600,000 people out of the capitol

to make room for more of the Songbun.

[Kablooie]

3. Notice how empty the city is...

While audiences, public performances and military displays have millions.
Why isn't the city bustling with crowds?
Where are all the people?
Because the people you see are essentially performers set up for publicity photo ops.
very few live and work in the city.
These amenities are primarily for show.
They don't allow visits or photography outside of the showpiece areas.

[DetlefK]

4. Pyongyang itself may be nice and dandy. But the rest of the country is Third World:

[SwissTony]

11. That picture is worth 103 words

Last edited Thu Apr 13, 2017, 10:11 AM - Edit history (1)

Even Pyongyang can't seem to produce enough light to register on the photo.

Edit: the title should be "10^3" not "103".

[marybourg]

18. That's exactly the photo I was thinking about

when I saw the WaPo images. Hard to correlate the two, except to assume that they don't light the Potemkin City at night.

[JI7]

22. really ? that's your conclusion ? how about the fact as others have said that it's all fake

[Hortensis]

5. Supposedly NK's fortunate and "elites" get to live in Pyongyang.

Lucky them. Even so, reportedly power outages are very frequent in the city, the building interiors behind the well maintained exteriors are typically in bad shape, and only the elites are allowed to shop in the few well stocked supermarkets. But the abject poverty and malnutrition that are everywhere once the city is left behind are not allowed to be seen in their showcase city.


'Although cars are becoming widespread in Pyongyang, peasants aren't used to seeing them. Kids play in the middle of the road just like when they didn't exist'


'Bizarre: When visiting the dolphinarium in Pyongyang, you are allowed to photograph the animals, but not the soldiers who make up 99 per cent of the crowd!'


'Pyongyang is the showcase of North Korea, so building exteriors are carefully maintained. When you look inside, the truth becomes apparent'

This photographer has since been permanently banned from NK.

The WaPo pix are of real scenes, of course, but strictly the officially approved type, which makes me wonder if they were posted to try to butter up the NK regime to protect or gain access.

[EL34x4]

39. There's Pyongyang and then there's the rest of North Korea.

Pyongyang is NK's showcase to the world. It is the only city that foreigners are allowed to visit. North Koreans who do not live in Pyongyang are not allowed to travel there.

It is like Panem's "Capitol" in the Hunger Games series.

[BostonianMagi]

6. Wow...really?

Using a bunch of 'state approved' pictures of a flimsy façade to gloss over crushing poverty and a brutal regime??? How nice. Oh, excuse me; I meant how disgusting.

[JI7]

7. those are all for show , that is NOT an affluent modern developed city

[VOX]

8. It's all a goddamn movie set populated by cult members...

There is appalling poverty in NK, they just hide it, and don't film it. It's one big death-cult.

[narnian60]

9. So creepy.

[a kennedy]

10. and EVERYONE looks so happy.......NOT, it's sad really, they all look so sad. eom

[EX500rider]

46. hahahaha...who was it that said that for real a while back on DU?

Hannah Bell i think...

[TheBlackAdder]

12. Check out these DPRK Pictorial Blog Posts from The Slightly Warped website.

.


http://slightlywarped.com/?s=north+korea


.

[Buns_of_Fire]

17. Neat site. After I saw this picture...

...I couldn't help but reread it, substituting "Trump" for "Kim". It still made sense, except for the part about retiring from golfing.

I see that ol' Kim had little short fingers, too.

[Warpy]

30. And you know the people there can recite all that crap

since one of the ways they keep order is by telling them all that the Kims have been gods.

[jmowreader]

31. The golf thing is actually pretty funny

http://www.golf.com/golf-plus/behind-kim-jong-ils-famous-round-golf

When you score a round of golf for almost anyone, you mark down the number of strokes the player takes to put the ball in the cup.

When you score one for a guy who has no compunctions about throwing people in his gulags for pissing him off, you mark his strokes as "relative to par." Hitting par gives him a zero, one-over is a 1, more than that is a 2. When they got back to the clubhouse, the NK state media "accidentally" read those five "one over par" holes as five "holes in one."

Oops.

[Ptah]

44. Hmm

[lindysalsagal]

14. Look what's not there: Nothing that doesn't fit someone's carefully worded script: no paper, no

personal posessions, few hats, no decorative clothing, distinctive hairstyles, the only toys were a few sticks with string. People only carry their briefcase and maybe a lunch bagL Nothing else, because they have nothing to carry. It looks like a badly propped set from the old 1960's films their dear leader probably envied. There are no street signs, nothing to direct people around, to entrances, to toilets, to services, because there aren't enough people around to need them. Its an empty movielot.

There is desperation and loss in their eyes in all but a couple of the children's shots. That includes the official dance and gymnastic presentations.

[JI7]

24. exactly, it's all controlled.

[snooper2]

15. LOL, I notice you haven't replied to any posts

keep trying

[marybourg]

16. LOL, like many posters here since 11/8/16

I go to DU as soon as I wake up, to make sure we're not engaged in nuclear war, but your complaint about my lack of responses reached me at 6:17 A.M. MY time . And my post was made at 10:43 P.M. last night, MY time. And I'm in the same country as you! I'm entitled to a night's sleep, no? Talk about parochial!

I found the pictures fascinating. That makes me a N.K. agent? And the Washington Post?, and the photographers? That's so silly, I can't even be angry.

[JI7]

23. but you still haven't responded to what people have said about the reality of life there. you keep

trying to insist it's actually some modern affluent place when it is not .

[Calculating]

20. Uh....No

It's literally an act. Many of the buildings are empty on the inside and have nobody living in them. Supposedly some of their stores will have fake foods on the shelves just to give the appearance of being stocked.
The vast majority of the North Korean population lives in truly deplorable poverty.

[herding cats]

25. Pyongyang is the North Korean version of OZ.

It's a 100% fake propaganda city used as the front to push that North Korea isn't a bad totalitarian establishment. It's filled with loyalist who know how to toe a line even better than American's most strident Republicans. Mostly because you can, and will, end up dead if you dare get one hair over said line.

It's a terrifying farce, and it makes my blood run cold to imagine the lives of the average people in NK.

[xor]

26. Sure beats Baltimore.

[thecrow]

27. I didn't see one naked starving person

and not one fat ass
But then it looks like they walk EVERYWHERE,
so I guess everybody's physically fit except for their leader

[Iskander]

28. A Bad Illusion

I recently read a picture heavy travel log from this website:

http://www.earthnutshell.com/category/country/north-korea/

Lots of interesting information as the writer managed to get quite a few shots behind the facade.

[Warpy]

29. The BBC posted about 2 hours of undercover footage a couple of years ago

that was one of the spookiest things I've ever seen. Pyongyang is a modern high rise city with good light rail and other mass transit jockeying with manageable car traffic. Crowds at the train station were large, very orderly, and quiet. Other places were almost like ghost towns, foreigners being sequestered away from the places ordinary people went. Stores for tourists are clean, well lit, well stocked...and deserted. It was one of the strangest films I'd ever seen.

Some of the footage is in this video from the BBC:

Government functionaries who have lost Kim's favor and managed to escape say the country will eventually collapse suddenly with no warning, but no one can give a time table. I think they are absolutely right, there's only so much people will take from a right wing police state if they get hungry enough, and it appears many of the population are very hungry and have been for a long time. Since Little Kim is such a young man, I think it will likely happen during his regime as people realize he will not do anything better than his father or grandfather and in fact, is considerably worse.

People there are constantly told that the US will attack them any day. Asshole is playing right into this fear and keeping Kim safe.

[jmowreader]

32. I agree KJU is done for but not who will do it.

(KJU = Kim Jong-Un, the dictator of North Korea.)

A people's revolution will only work if the ruling faction agrees to let it work. Consider East Germany and Poland, where negotiations between the party and the people led to the downfall of the party. North Korea is different. The closest real-world analog to the DPRK is Romania under Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu, but that's not really accurate because Ceaucescu was nowhere near as bad as KJU.

The most comparable environment to North Korea under KJU is The Hunger Games' Panem under President Snow. I look at all the mass executions he has held in his reign and think the man is both capable of and evil enough to herd his foes into a sports stadium, block all the exits so no one gets out, and demolish the stadium with aerial bombardment or artillery fire.

Like Romania, the only way to topple KJU is to turn the army against him. This is very possible - KJU has whacked several generals, so the army is not on his side.

[Warpy]

33. No, the military or another family member will get rid of him

and the spectacle of seeing their god is vulnerable will embolden people who have been crushed for decades. The whole country will be in an uproar as there's not only a political power vacuum but a religious one.

They've been sold the bill of goods that "godhood" was transferred from father to son at death. It looks beyond stupid to us, but they believe it because if they don't, they and their families will be slaughtered.

I can't look down at them for this sort of thing. It worked remarkably well for the Romans and for the European Divine Right kings.

[marybourg]

34. Thanx, Warpy,

that was very interesting. Doomsday cult is a very good characterization. Other than of the D.M.Z., I don't recall seeing any images of N.K since the Korean War newsreels, when Pyongyang was a cluster of mud-brick huts.

The images from the Washington Post that I linked to are so rare and, at least to me, fascinating. Although, apparently, others are moved to hostility by them.

[Warpy]

42. Can you imagine the boom there if li'l Kim sort of faded away

and was quietly replaced by somebody sane who prized diplomacy?

All those big, beautiful, empty buildings would be stuffed by reps from foreign corporations ready to move in, building the country up and taking advantage of a large and extremely docile work force.

It's not going to happen, alas. Even if he evaporated tomorrow, I think he's got a son being groomed to follow him, a bit young but boy god-kings have always had regents who wanted to keep the scam going.

[JI7]

45. because as people have said, it's all fake . what you assume to be life is north korean propaganda

[KittyWampus]

35. Step outside the capitol city and there is no electricity. Go a little further and it's 19th century

My father was in China in the mid and late 80's doing birdwatching counts for research out in the Chinese countryside.

The photos showed pictures that could actually have been even more primitive than the 19th century. People used oxen. No cars, no gas stations.

One of the women in the group ended up freaking out in culture shock.

Edit- that was China. North Korea is apparently infinitely worse not having progressed at all in the 20th century.

[marybourg]

36. Yes. That doesn't make the images

of one slice of life in N.K. any less interesting. Blindness will not benefit us in any upcoming interaction. Or we will be no wiser than the brain-washed N.Kers.

[RedWedge]

38. Blindness to what?

[marybourg]

40. To anything we can see or deduce which

could give us insight into the minds of people.

[RedWedge]

41. Are you saying people are deducing incorrectly about these photos of NK?

[Johnny2X2X]

43. Worst place to live

ISIS ruled territories might be the only place worse.

People are starving. Slave labor camps house millions. Canabalism is the last resort of starving North Koreans. It's pure evil what is going on there.

The world needs to do something, but this isn't the way. Trump is about to start a war he has no idea how to fight.