What’s North Korea like? | Hacker News Reader

What’s North Korea like?

libertarianism.org

91 pointswintercoat64 comments

I had a vivid taste of North Korea by radio about 20 years ago. I was driving to work and had a shortwave receiver in my car, and happened to tune in the English language broadcast from North Korea. The news announcer said:

Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim Jong-il, because the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of mental power beyond the ability of ordinary human beings.

Those were the exact words. It was one of those things that sticks in your brain and I remember it to this day.

I've read Nothing to Envy, which is mentioned a couple of times in this interview, and it gave me literal nightmares. Actual, literal nightmares.

Now I want to read this Dear Reader book as well, but I don't know if I can mentally handle it at this stage in my life.

God help the people of the DPRK.

There's a big issue with those sources, however. North Korean defectors are paid essentially on how horrific their stories are, so there's a real incentive to make things up.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/world/asia/prominent-nort...

People always say things like this about despotic regimes while they're in power. Yet, every time they fall, we almost invariably learn that things were actually much worse.

Examples other than the Nazis?

Like, I remember in the original gulf war, we were told that soldiers were taking infants out of incubators at leaving them on the floor. An Iraqi refugee testified before congress that this was happening. Turned out to be total bullshit.

I would say the USSR, but thanks to people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we already knew how bad it was.

I mean...

> In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''

> Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskay...

That book was quite literally written by the KGB [0], and his (ex-)wife had KGB ties [1].

From [1]:

>In 1974, shortly before The Gulag Archipelago was due to appear, Natalya Reshetovskaya was recruited by the KGB to try and persuade Solzhenitsyn not to publish.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn#KGB_ope...

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1431878/Natalya-R...

That's all according to a defector (which brings us back to the original conversation) and a member of MI5. The notes that form the basis of those claims are still classified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Andrew_(historian)

I was born in USSR, and lived in it enough to be able to reassure you it was not possible to publish a book there in 1974 just because you decided it for yourself. Even authors of fairytales were forced to make ideological "corrections", not to mention anything even distantly political.

Solzhenitsyn's typist hanged herself after she was compelled to give up one of three extant drafts of the book to the KGB. Who would do that over a collection of "camp folklore"?

Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, not to mention the Soviets. And that's just the beginning.

We're not a very humane species.

Both sides are full of examples, the same thing happened before both Iraq wars but at the same time there were vocal doubters of the early information about the Rwandan genocide and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.

We can never be certain how bad things are, but we do know how bad countries look after US intervention.

Read some of Anne Applebaum's stuff:

https://www.anneapplebaum.com/

In particular Red Famine:

https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on...

Also read Mao's Great famine:

https://www.amazon.com/Maos-Great-Famine-Devastating-Catastr...

"Everytime" as the OP says is too strong. But we have often learned that things were bad beyond belief, as in the Holodomor and The Great Chinese Famine.

Also with Iraq there were incredible actions carried out against the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds and also chemical weapons were used by Saddam Hussein. The thing was a lot, perhaps the worst, were carried out when Hussein was an ally of the West against Iran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein...

This National Geographic documentary from 2006 had me sobbing like nothing I'd ever seen before, and I'm actually getting upset right now recalling it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8

Lisa Ling went undercover with an eye surgeon from Nepal on a mission to do 1000 cataract surgeries in 10 days. Cataract surgery in any modern country is an outpatient procedure, but in NK you are doomed to be blind forever.

This man, Dr. Sanduk Ruit[0], had to persuade the NK government to come to the country to do the surgeries and after he restored the sight of each of the thousands, who had been effectively blinded for years by their backwards government, they walked right past him and fell to their knees in tears of adulation to a picture of their Dear Leader. I've never felt a hatred as strong as I did then for Kim Jong Il.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduk_Ruit

I couldn't handle that section either. Those people have been mentally raped.

EDIT: Also the old (old!) man who, yelling, pledged to use his newfound eyesight to kill the American imperialists.

> This National Geographic documentary...

"This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

Ah, liberty!

Try this link: https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8

'Dear Reader' is supposed to be funny (in a dark way, but none the less funny).

Two others to read are ‘The Cleanest Race’ and ‘Eyes of The Tailless Animals’ if you’re interested in the subject. 38North.org is also a fantastic resource.

Let's ask the recently escaped DPRK soldier what it's like. In addition to recovering from 5 gunshot wounds acquired during the sprint across the border he has: - PTSD - TB - Hep B and (had) - intestinal worms! [0]

[0]https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/health/north-korea-defector-d...

Michael Malice is great. He had an interview that also covered North Korea on the Rubin Report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDmaPdyqGUU

Vice has a three-part 1-hour-total documentary on North Korea with footage from the country. Part one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24R8JObNNQ4

This is not documentary on North Korea. Its a documentary on ' the north korea show', there isn't even a glimpse of 'real' real korea in those documentaries. Youtube is filled with these tourist documentaries, everyone from bbc to your next door tourist neighbor seems to have one about it. Almost all of them with identical content. All of them present NK in a very sterotypical way, brainwashed population, cult of kims, hatred for america, starving children, deserted roads, total govt grip on people ect ect.

I recommend the watching the follwing media instead

1. Children of the Secret State https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csI1EoMOXXk

2. Loves and the Despot

3. Under the Sun

I have to disagree, it seems to me that what it shows is something very real about NK: the way the NK wants to portray herself, the illusion that they want to create. It's not like say pictures of Istanbul with century-old men, veiled women in rundown rotting quarters which many tourists and photographers like to shoot and many believe represent the general reality of the city while we the citizens cringe to death. The "show" here is put on by NK herself and the documentary is interesting because its documenting that. It's NK that pushes those stereotypes.

In general you shouldn't trust Vice. They've had too many scandals and they've played up too much while pretending to be unbiased. There is a journalist named Daniel Voshart that's been covering their lies and distortions for years.

For anyone who wants to know another answer to the question in the title, there is a youtube channel [1] of someone videoing their experiences in North Korea.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzvCf_q10UZkUJE0lOav0ag

Just because it isn’t kitschy and filled with over-the-top praise of the Dear Leader doesn’t mean it isn’t orchestrated. I think it is a mistake to believe the DPRK isn’t capable of producing sophisticated social media like this.

The way DPRK is described... It's really hard to humanize the people that live there. The videos were the first glimpse I've had of what North Korea looks like without a gray lens filter. Sure, it's manufactured, but that's why I said it's a /different/ answer to the question.

Please God or someone show me how to help CLOSE the CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

You mean unicorn-land? Yea welcome to fantasy peninsula

For those who might not have twigged from the domain, this is published by the Cato Institute, a think-tank has a clearly stated agenda to promote libertarianism.

Whatever your stance on libertarianism in general, it's not hard to imagine that a communist state is a libertarian's worst nightmare from an ideological perspective and that we should probably view this with the same scepticism we might from an article put out by a hypothetical pro-DPRK think-tank.

Yes and no. Yes, these people may come from a biased starting point. But North Korea is objectively horrible, no matter what your ideological starting point. When you start from a biased starting point and it's bad enough to shock you, even though you were biased in the beginning, then it's really bad.

That's not how cognitive dissonance vis a vis confirmation bias works.

I think the podcast was designed to shock you. The person interviewed in the podcast has a name, which you can google. He seems to have made a career out of shocking audiences of news sources at how bad the DPRK is. It appears that most is sourced from the accounts of defectors. There are some truly horrible accounts, I think we can agree on that. However, we must accept that we do not know the motives of the defectors. If they are paid for defecting with a story, then it is in the defector's interest to produce a story.

Most residents of the DPRK do not defect. Defectors are not necessarily a representative sample of the DPRK. We cannot know from defectors alone if that is because they desire to and cannot, or do not desire to.

Incidentally, we were both led to that podcast by an account that is 48 days old, has at the time of writing contributed not one comment in this community and is one of many accounts that only posts links to only this domain.

Before you dismiss this as ad-hominem, the point I am making is that this is part of an agenda. The agenda is ostensibly not about making money, but promoting an ideology. This is quite overt, yet it seems that source evaluation is not entering into critical thinking any more.

> He seems to have made a career out of shocking audiences of news sources at how bad the DPRK is. It appears that most is sourced from the accounts of defectors.

OK, but this podcast was primarily based on a personal visit to NK, plus a bunch of the NK's own propaganda. (Yes, they did discuss at least one NK defector, but that wasn't the primary topic of discussion.)

Okay, to you and others questioning the motives of defectors on fiduciary grounds, remember that defecting is a high crime in North Korea, and a difficult task. Most defectors don't attempt to simply rush the North-South border, because it is highly patrolled and likely to get you shot at by the North side. Instead they take an arduous trip through China, avoiding Chinese authorities who will deport them back to North Korea if caught. The families of defectors become social pariahs back home, if not worse. Defection is literally a life-risking act, and not only for the defectors. So defectors have to be extremely motivated to take the risks they do, and such people tend to have a story, yes; perhaps they make parts of them up, but I don't think most of them would really need to.

At any rate, avoiding the country becoming like North Korea, or avoiding normalized relations or acceptance of the Nork regime, isn't really a goal of most libertarians, in the sense that such things are already far from happening in the first place.

> Most residents of the DPRK do not defect [...] We cannot know from defectors alone if that is because they desire to and cannot, or do not desire to.

Not sure you're seriously proposing that there is some sort of epistemic uncertainty about the quality of life in the DPRK; so let's just be clear: there isn't.

Yes, the Cato institute is part of the Koch-funded right wing propaganda machine, and yes, they have an agenda. Still, there's no doubt that the DPRK is a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship with an atrocious human rights record.

I've read the whole transcript - the word "communism" appears exactly once in a whole discussion. Overall the amount of ideology in the article is minimal and they focus on describing the situation of North Koreans.

Additionally, most of the talking is done by Michael Malice, who is an author of the book in question (Dear Reader); is he, too, affiliated with that think-tank (honest question)? I don't know him, but from what I read just now he doesn't seem like a rabid ideologue.

> I've read the whole transcript - the word "communism" appears exactly once in a whole discussion.

> Overall the amount of ideology in the article is minimal

That is an incredibly poor limtus test for determining ideological bias in a publication.

Ok, I'm willing to learn. Could you cite the paragraphs from the talk which reveal the ideological bias in this publication?

I was criticising the test, not the publication.

There's a few things about bias. It is incredibly difficult to detect it when it is biased towards your political/philosophical/etc views. It can happen through comission (Outright lies about verifiable facts), implication (Weasel wording, leading questions), or omission (Lack of context, mentioning but down-playing inconvenient facts).

Simply scanning a piece for trigger words isn't an indicator for, or against bias.

I personally think that TFA is pretty reasonable. There's a few important pieces of context that a few of their points are missing, but it's not supposed to be a seven thousand page treatise, nor is it supposed to reflect on our society. I just take issue with the test.

The interviewee quotes Ayn Rand with no warning or precaution, which is kind of surprising.

To be fair, she was a Soviet defector, so she's relevant (Beyond her awful, awful, toxic ideologies, which - being irrelevant - were not mentioned.)

Yeah, and Amnesty International is a group with a "clearly stated agenda" to promote human rights. We still tend to trust their reports.

I can't believe you're equivocating the Cato Institute with a pro-DPRK think tank. It's not possible to defend the North Korean state honestly - by contrast, an organization dedicated to libertarianism has the motive to expose North Korea's unbelievable human rights abuses. They're not even the same ballpark.

Yeah I have many problems with libertarianism, but the Cato Institute is biased but accurate source of information. Taking certain positions, like being pro-DPRK, literally require sacrificing objective truth. There is no comparison.

Since when was the Cato institute an accurate source of information?

Since its beginning? It doesn’t fabricate information; it just has a quirky interpretation of said information.

If it's neither pushing an agenda nor trying to manipulate nor influence, why is it that submissions to libertarianism.org are being made mostly from two accounts that do not seem to otherwise engage in this community?

No comments, no other posts, just posts to libertarianism.org.

Whilst there's nothing specifically in the guidelines against the practice of accounts that just post to one website, the articles do tend to be inherently political and are at least pushing the guidelines in that respect. Even if we assume the accuracy of the information is unquestionable, a very high bar that even the most respected of sources do not meet, the behaviour seems shady and makes me deeply suspicious that they will be pulling at least some of the other tactics that can be employed to mislead.

Does it not occur as strange to you that the majority of content on that site that gets posted here as stories is being posted by people who have no engagement with this community other than to post links to that website?

We were talking about the Cato Institute? Not HN posters?

Also it is quite possible to have an agenda and a bias while still presenting accurate information, which is what you were sarcastically denigrating.

> Amnesty International is a group with a "clearly stated agenda" to promote human rights. We still tend to trust their reports

This is an inconsistent comparison: A.I. "agenda" is to promote human rights, not a political worldview.

> I can't believe you're equivocating the Cato Institute with a pro-DPRK think tank. It's not possible to defend the North Korean state [...]

Questioning the accuracy of the report is in not automatically pro-DPRK. You are creating a false dichotomy.

> Yeah, and Amnesty International is a group with a "clearly stated agenda" to promote human rights. We still tend to trust their reports.

Amnesty International's reports are about human rights abuses. If this was an Amnesty International report about human rights abuses in the DPRK, I would not suspect them of having an agenda. For what it's worth, they have a page on this that I broadly agree with [0].

> I can't believe you're equivocating the Cato Institute with a pro-DPRK think tank.

I'm not. I'm saying it's expected to be ideologically opposed. I've tried to search the Cato institute for their criticisms of Saudi Arabia, and I broadly agree with them. But they're not as concerned about the human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia as in the DPRK. I should point out that all of the articles I read were articles, not podcasts, and were well-written.

> It's not possible to defend the North Korean state honestly

It's not possible to claim that defectors, paid for their stories, represent an unbiased sample of the population honestly. From a historical perspective, it's a poor source. It is now and it will be in 100 years. Unfortunately due to the secrecy in the DPRK we don't really have a way to objectively know how it is now short of living there.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/north-korea

>It's not possible to claim that defectors, paid for their stories, represent an unbiased sample of the population honestly. From a historical perspective, it's a poor source. It is now and it will be in 100 years. Unfortunately due to the secrecy in the DPRK we don't really have a way to objectively know how it is now short of living there.

So you have determined that every single defector who is interviewed by a journalist, historian, or human rights activist was paid for his story?

You know, the broader question is the relationship between a countries form of government and how good life is for its citizens. You seem to believe that it is possible for an authoritarian government like that of North Korea to be good. And as a consequence there is no reason to chose liberal democracy over totalitarianism. Have I got you right?

I want as much as anybody to believe that the DPRK and its people deserve what is being considered for it, because it will ease my conscience a little bit that I tolerated the people who seem to want to help agentically propagate the same old half-baked self-inconsistent nation-caricatures that carry with them the implicit justifications for yet another war with a country from the warmonger's wishlist to be inflicted by a state that has the world's largest prison population (the second largest per capita), a criminal justice system where your income determines your survival and a truly appalling human rights record.

I will restate my points and elaborate upon them for clarity, because they seem to have been missed.

1. Most DPR Koreans have not defected (I count ~4 the past year)

2. Defectors are self-selected.

3. It is likely that the vast majority of attempted defections fail, resulting in repercussions from the state. Even if this were the case, we have an upper bound of 200,000. Approaching this upper bound assumes nobody is imprisoned for anything other than defection, which would be absurd.

4. It is highly unlikely that the successful defectors are representative of the general population of that country.

Many of the comments on this article seem to accept the people are brainwashed, indoctrinated, completely controlled by propaganda. It seems unlikely that the same people are also consumed by a desire to be free and to defect and living in misery as a result.

So my point is this: even if we could extract the memories and experiences directly from these defectors heads and watch them on a projector, they are likely to be so unrepresentative of the experience that you would have living there, having been brought up with the norms and customs of that country, as to be worthless.

The fact that many have been paid for their testimonies, and those testimonies have failed to be consistent with other testimonies is really a tool to help those who still see merit in statistically meaningless testimonies to recognise that they are also likely to be influenced by the monetary offers for a satisfactory testimony.

I'm not saying that atrocities are not happening. I suspect they are, as they are in many countries. But I also know that some of the more ridiculous stories that have been pumped out by propagandists are being regurgitated by reputable news sources. We've seen this before. The truth doesn't come out, it gets buried in the chaos.

So I was right, you do believe that a secretive totalitarian government like North Korea can produce a good life for its citizens.

The author of the post you are responding to questioned the approach of relying upon paid testimony from self-selected defectors as an objective account of the DPRK as a whole. This is not irreconcilable with a critical view of the DPRK, and only indirectly addresses the point you are making here.

It is facile to observe that any form of society can 'produce a good life' for some subset of its citizens. You have not persuasively argued that conceding this point means agreeing to the bizarre equivocal statement that 'there is no reason to chose liberal democracy over totalitarianism.'

There are lots of other ways to determine what things are like in North Korea besides paid testimony from defectors. In fact, the interview in question mentioned at least one, namely books published by the government.

The post author avoided mentioning any other means, and has not explicitly stated a belief that an authoritarian country can't be just as good as a liberal democracy. I am going to assume that is what he believes until he states otherwise.

Oh, and as long as we are at it, what is your belief on this matter?

"Good life" compared to US allies Saudia Arabia, or a host of other states ignored by the Cato institute.

> it's not hard to imagine that a communist state is a libertarian's worst nightmare from an ideological perspective

No, an authoritarian communist state is the (ordinary) libertarian's worst nightmare. You can also have a libertarian communist state - it just hasn't been tried before... or maybe it did, who knows, but anyway all the revolution leaders got dependent on the power they had and decided to stick with it.

Libertarianism is fairly focused on property rights, otherwise it would just be anarchy. Hard to combine that with a communist economy.

> we should probably view this with the same scepticism we might from an article put out by a hypothetical pro-DPRK think-tank.

You're absolutely right. The report is highly biased, and North Korea is a far more just, humanitarian, and prosperous place than the article wants you to believe.

I asked my old college friend "What's it really like living in North Korea?" She said, "Can't complain."

Zing!

I wouldn't have gotten the joke about not actually being able to complain had you not added this comment. I would have interpreted the response as, "Meh, it's not too bad."

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