Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro
earthnutshell.com
earthnutshell.com
Its frightening to think how easy it is to suppress a whole population for years and decades on end. The romantic image of courage, revolution and human freedom comes to naught here. Status quo, acceptance and survival seems to be the more natural human state.
There is the natural reluctance to put one's head above. And for good reason, anyone foolish or brave enough to put their head above in this all knowing state will be put down swiftly, and perhaps brutally to be made an example of. How does change happen here?
Organizing anything in this state of pervasive surveillance is nearly impossible and should be a wake up call for those sleepwalking into one.
The only way we know from history is implosion of the prevailing power center or outside support motivated more by massive self interests than human freedom or kindness, compromising the road ahead.
Surveillance, secret courts and dubious processes are meekly accepted but change can become very difficult once these infrastructures are put in place, operational and at the complete discretion of whoever happens to be in power. A warning for all of us.
> There is a palpable sense of fear and unease on people's faces, not a smile to be seen.
I'm not sure that if you took a picture on the London Tube or the NY Metro you'd see any smiles either.
It could just be our or my own prejudice and perspective knowing what we know about North Korea and reading more into these rather unique and powerful set of images, you just want people to be free and happy if possible.
I don't know, bribe China, bribe North Korea, surely there must be a way to get those holding the strings to let go and to do it not because of nuclear weapons, strategic interests or business but to set the people free. What a moment it will be. Humanity would have truly prevailed.
I think all that iconic imagery is probably biasing you.
I'm not saying that DPRK is a wonderland, but I'd wager that if you took photos of the Pyongang, Moscow Metro, London, Tokyo and New York subways and randomly swapped the various backgrounds, a casual viewer would view the Soviet-influenced Moscow- and Pyongyang-background passengers as gloomy, and the New York- and London-background ones as having "practiced indifference".
(You'd probably have to be clever with the composition, though - seeing obviously-British people or people of African descent with Mao or Lenin behind them would be a little jarring, and a bit out of place.)
I kind of want to do this now, but don't think I have the time today.
This, I can't help but think he'd have a different opinion if some of these pictures were shown out of context without any indication that it's NK.
The desire for change must come out of North Korea inhabitants, then other states can help. Otherwise what you're suggesting would be externally orchestrated regime change, a thing that usually ends up badly for the people living there.
> Organizing anything in this state of pervasive surveillance is nearly impossible and should be a wake up call for those sleepwalking into one.
I saw this sentiment expressed by another poster yesterday and almost responded, but this seems like a much better context.
I, personally, agree that pervasive surveillance is a bad thing and that the power of government should be carefully restricted. That said, what is the path from "pervasive surveillance" to "be[ing] put down swiftly, and perhaps brutally to be made an example of"? North Korea's state has the willingness and power to chop down those who stand up; how would one of the nations "sleepwalking into [a state of pervasive surveillance]" get away with it?
I can certainly see, and articulate, dangers involving minority targeting. Similarly, I can articulate the dangers of isolated cases of abuse of power. I cannot, however, articulate a path for a liberal Western nation to become North Korea (or even China) without delving into tinfoil hat territory.
You won't even know were it not for Snowden at great cost to himself, not an easy decision when the first impulse is to put your head down. And 'allegations' would be met with 'tinfoil hat' you just used.
How will you then detect and stop it tomorrow? Wait for another Snowden? Another sacrifice? Is there some defined point at which the population just stands up and says no. Or is it just faith?
Our democratic systems allow us to say yes, but not no. There are huge flaws with accountability, choice and capture by vested interests that remain unsolved. And now we have creeping surveillance, self serving justifications and arbitrary governance processes to deal with. Few of us have the privilege to stand up and say no, too engrossed in day to day life.
There is no clear mechanism to say no beyond protest and we can see how repressively liberal western democracies are dealing with dissent and protest today, infiltrating and tracking activists, protests and general harassment, something unthinkable at the height of liberal posturing during the bulk of the cold war. Isn't it way beyond the point of faith.
Korea spent thirty-five years occupied by imperial Japan, a regime never much noted for the softness of its grip, and after the war, was partitioned and the northern part given directly into the hands of the Soviet Union as a proto-Cold War quid pro quo. That's not so much what you could call a "slippery slope", as it is torture and brainwashing on a societal, rather than an individual, scale.
Is North Korea even in a state of pervasive surveillance by modern standards? Their technology is not all too advanced. It's the thought of being listened to that keeps people in line, more than the technical implementation. And that overwhelming condition is really the result of propaganda - communication fanout rather than fanin.
As opposed to 8:30am on the NYC Metro or the London underground that's positively a sea of smiles?
(A great book: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, about life in North Korea and what it's like to escape to the West.)
It's amazing to see what North Korea will do to keep its own citizens in the dark, and to try to make things look amazing to foreigners -- only to fail spectacularly.
The attempts to erase traces of the metro cars' German origins reminds me of the department stores I've read about in Pyongyang, in which people enter and exit without buying anything, only to return minutes later, in order to give foreigners the illusion of a great commercial success.
All countries engage in propaganda and patriotism to some degree, but North Korea really takes the cake here. I hope that its citizens will one day be able to gain more freedom and financial security, but that somehow seems unlikely in the near future.
I don't get it. Foreigners see success in people who don't buy anything?
This Western visitor noticed that after people exited the store, they immediately entered again, to give an illusion of a busy store -- when in fact, nothing was actually being purchased.
(I can't remember if the shoppers were using money or taking things out of the store, but I have to assume that they were. I wish that I could find this story, which was quite fascinating.)
My point is that the North Korean government was so inept at propaganda that their attempts to demonstrate economic stability and power were laughably transparent.
http://www.skepticaldoctor.com/2010/01/15/classic-dalrymple-...
This is too much: "North Korea doesn’t use the traditional Gregorian calendar, they use the ‘Juche’ calendar, beginning on the date of Kim Il-Sung’s birth, Juche 1. "
At some point people realized they got the year wrong for Jesus's supposed birth. But the reaction was, "eh, fuck it", so our calendar isn't really based even on that anymore.
FWIW Japan uses, in parallel, the Western system, but also a system where the years are counted from the beginning of the reign of the current emperor.
BC/AD is deprecated for non-religious uses.
The international standard is CE/BCE for common era/before common era.
Absolutely nothing. You need to have a starting point, and for historical reasons we ended up with that one. It isn't a meaningful date for anybody, but it turns out having a common reference point is more important than having a significant reference point, so nobody cares.
It's actually a very meaningful date to a lot of people on this planet, although I'm not one of them.
We used to refer to years past that date using a short phrase in a dead language. However, this short phrase in a dead language referred to a religious figure, which is Not OK. So we decided we'd rename it "Common Era" but keep the numbers the same because that would be a big hassle. As a result, our calendar still counts how many years have passed since the alleged birth of Christ, but because people might be offended by the words "Anno Domini" we've called it something different.
If I were in the position to pick a new calendar start date, I'd probably just go with the Unix Epoch... AE, Anno Epocha? We'd now be in the year 46AE :)
Anyway, this assumes historicity of the accounts saying he was born during the reign of Herod but that's kind of complicated by the Moses imagery; this isn't exactly neutral and unimportant. But I guess that is as good a basis as any to try and determine the real date.
While the modern estimate certainly has uncertainty too (how could we ever _know_ such a thing with complete certainty?), there's no way it's _less_ accurate than the original estimate made by some random monk in the middle ages, working with much less data. It does not make sense to privilege that random monk's guesses over today's guesses.
According to Wikipedia, there's two different methods -- written Roman records of Herod as mcphage mentions, or using written Roman records of Pilate's crucifixion and subtracting the claimed age of Jesus at that time. Both methods give years that are in the same ballpark, roughly 4 to 6 BC, which should give confidence that they are close. No method gives an answer of around 1 AD. (Actually, it's pretty impressive that some monks working hundreds of years later in the dark ages are no more than a few years off from today's best estimates)
As galdosdi surmised, it's not about whether you're not a believer, it's about that 1 AD isn't believed to be the date for Jesus's birth. At some point historians & theologians realized the calendar was incorrect, and so they had a choice: keep the reference point everyone was familiar with, even if that date is no longer significant, or switch to a better estimate for Jesus's birth, keeping the calendar significant. People decided that commonly known was more important than significant, and so we're left with a BC / AD split, where the reference point is longer meaningful.
the astronomical year numbering system actually does use year zero but they also use negative years rather than BCE notation.
I have literally never heard anyone outside of a college classroom use it in a way other than making fun of people using it.
We can say what the "standard" or "correct" is all we want, but if 99.999% of people use BC/AD, it's BC/AD.
Well, if your username is a guide, and you were born in '86, then that makes you 29 or 30, so 10 years ago would be 19 or 20, so in college. That makes sense for the first time for someone to hear about it; it takes a while for ideas to trickle down into elementary & HS textbooks.
The local system is the primary one used - it's currently year 105 here.
Before you deride it as ridiculous, remember that the metric system came about in the exact same way. The only difference is the world kept their space measure but tossed their temporal measure.
Whereas the metric system's proponents were people like Lavoisier, Laplace, or Condorcet, who tried to base the system on the principles of logic and natural phenomena. Undoubtedly a more 'global' approach.
Sadly Jefferson was not persuasive enough at the time with his similar proposal to the congress.
Not a scrap of litter, no graffiti, no sketchy people and probably doesn't even smell like piss. Floors are obviously meticulously scrubbed.
Kudos to North Korea! (OK, I know its an oppressive hellhole, but goddamn the subways are clean).
Meanwhile, in NYC, we have viral video of a rat dragging Pizza down stairs in a subway.
In large part due to massive governmental inefficiencies, massive defence spending, and because the richest individuals and corporations hardly pay any tax on their (real) earnings...
Maybe Cameron could get some ideas from good ol' Kim
Also about more cleaning: there is a proverb that sounds something like "It's clean not where a lot of cleaning has place but where people are not littering"
if someone gets a ticket for littering in NYC people on HN are all up in arms. I don't have a link for it now but take a look at the comments for the story about the policing slowdown in New York when they stopped writing tickets for parking, turnstile jumping, and other minor offenses. People were all like "yeah, we don't need parking tickets! Society works fine without them, they are just for revenue! Punishment does nothing to effect behavior!"
I mean, doesn’t kids singing the national anthem in the morning before school seem a bit weird to you, too?
But that's probably because it's a less important identity to people in the UK. It's not a country of immigrants, there is more than just national identity to hold people together.
Would a Scotsman or Northern Irishman identifies himself as such to a foreigner, rather than British ?
However saying you are Scottish when abroad as opposed to British tends to result in a much warmer reception.
(Except Shetland. I got the feeling they don't really like outsiders in Shetland.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24302914
"What emerges from the census results is that, while a majority of people in England, Scotland and Wales pick English (60%), Scottish (62%) or Welsh (58%) as their sole identity, younger and more diverse communities show higher proportions selecting a British identity."
Edit: I'm a Scot - seems natural for people to describe themselves as English, Welsh etc. and relatively few people I've known got it confused with Ireland (apart from the US VCs who invested in our UK-based startup and thought we were in Ireland and we actually worried that if we corrected them they might not invest... this was ~20 years ago).
I guess years of colonialism still makes being British slightly tarred.
For example visiting America, people are interested enough if you are from the UK but if you mention specifically Scotland they instantly start getting much more excited.
Rare to hear US sport fans come up with anything other than booing, 'D fence', 'ref you suck' or yelling a player's name
And that includes myself. I get why people want to feel proud of their country, but I don't need this. I view a state as a provider of infrastructure, social security, and societal stability. Therefore I'm not particularly attached to the concrete state I'm living in, as long as it provides these amenities to me.
What do you mean by that?
But yeah, American patriotism has too much of the more ridiculous nationalistic / jingoistic side of things. I can't think of a Western country where something as ridiculous as, say, not wearing a pin with an American flag on it, or supposedly failing to put your hand over your heart during the Presidential anthem, would become a major political attack angle.
Ironically, this belief seems to be the result of ... propaganda.
Here's the law for Florida. The morning pledge recitation is pretty clearly spelled out. It is up to the school district to implement it or not, of course. (The district I went to chose to.)
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
I'm pretty sure they still do the pledge but may have done away with the prayer.
RT might seem a bit.. over the top about certain topics (i.e. Syria and how Russia is doing), but is it really, or is it just OUR subtle propaganda that conditions me to take everything Russia says with a pinch of salt?
Which is sad. The BBC used to be better than RT.
America has pretty overt propaganda, e.g. the Pentagon paying the NFL millions to 'salute the troops'.
As a non-American, seeing young children reciting the pledge of allegiance in unison is downright creepy. I'm guessing Americans do not have alternative experiences and hence consider it to be normal. I'm guessing the same applies to Koreans growing up in Korea: it's normal. I'm not suggesting the levels of propaganda are in the same ball-park.
And it always happened in every primary school I went to.
I have a big problem with teaching it to very young kids who don't really don't have the capacity yet to really understand what it means or what they are pledging to. Most kids kinda slur their way through it because it contains vocabulary that the typical 5 year old wouldn't have. [2]
[1] "The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."
[2] I used to say "I pledge OF allegiance to the flag....under god, invisible..."
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juramento_a_la_Bandera_%28M%C3...
Hm, looking around looks like Argentina and Panama also have similar pledges:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandera_de_Panam%C3%A1#Juramen...
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandera_de_la_Argentina#Jurame...
I wonder if it's just a generalised American thing to be this defensive of our flags, perhaps as a result of some post-colonial concerns.
The practice dates from the heyday of Hitlerism, and arguably springs from much the same sort of motivation - and it's creepy enough before you read about the Bellamy salute.
This year especially, look at the fervor of support for The Party(s). It's amazing how adding a narrow choice sidesteps people's inherent distrust for being told what to do.
There are moments when it truly feels like the above statement equally applies to "us" as it does to "them".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_Metro#Rolling_stock
Which makes sense given they would both run on the same kind of track.
Google gets us closer, though despite the watermark, I'm not sure the People's Daily have a photojournalist in the US: http://images.blogchina.com/artpic_upload/n/m/g/nmghongjing/...
http://www.earthnutshell.com/out-of-bounds-in-north-korea-py...
The only semi-successful country that avoided total pain was East Germany - and it was because of the unification.
> Look at the paradise that is Iraq.
I don't think any such analogous situation exists in North Korea, it would be much more like East Germany, the economy would be horrible for decades, but I doubt it would come to perpetual civil war like Iraq.
/removes tin foil hat
NB: I'm glad it did because mine didn't get any upvotes and I was sure people here would enjoy it.
Of course, there are exceptions. Sometimes. A few.
Personality cult, definitely, although that's the part of the propaganda style.
This sounds like a horrifying way to go.
I know because I just came back from North Korea.
The western media like to portray authoritarian regimes as hell-like places where people is sad and militaries are all over, ready to shoot anybody at the minimum misstep.
In reality, within a certain frame, daily life is quite regular; everybody is busy with their own lives, not especially happy or sad. I stress "within a certain frame" - inner perception works within a frame, and of course, people needs to pay attention to the restrictive culture.
I'd rather say "tired", as most of the people are hardworking farmers, without access to any transportation mean except the bike.
China is an authoritarian state, but it really is all about degrees...its no where near DPRK levels, just like the USA is nowhere near China's level (well, the USA is authoritarian in completely different ways, so they aren't very comparable).
Where have you travelled?