Anytime I see a picture of North Korea I think
1) is the person now banned? 2) did insiders get punished?
For this one, I worry for those insiders. They made their choice but I can’t imagine Kim is happy this got out.
1) is the person now banned? 2) did insiders get punished?
For this one, I worry for those insiders. They made their choice but I can’t imagine Kim is happy this got out.
From a distance, it seems remarkably normal to me. I have no desire to visit and certainly wouldn't want to live there, but it looks not all that bad.
He's a regime supporter who brings in desperately needed foreign currency to help pay for the nuke & missile program and elite luxuries. Hence, given that he has talked about and posted this, he is almost certainly correct when he says
> Some media has portrayed the idea that North Koreans are embarrassed by the empty hotel or the length of time it took to finish, Cockerell said, "but I never found that to be true"..."That's ludicrous, and never been true. Absolute nonsense. It used to appear on the front of books and magazines, even when it was an incomplete concrete shell with a crane up top. So that's complete rubbish. It was not a cause for embarrassment." Cockerell said the Kim family simply put the blame on America, falsely explaining to the North Korean people that the delays were "the fault of jealous conspiracies" from outside Western powers...Cockerell has also observed how Pyongyang locals interact with the structure. "It's not like people sit on their balconies, watching the slogans go by. It's just part of the nightlife. It's a futuristic building to North Koreans, very modern, unlike anything else."
That is, this post is sort of a quasi 'submarine' for North Korean tourism. 'Come see our unique pyramid, which we think is cool rather than a symptom of totalitarian dictatorship (and pay us a lot of renminbi/dollars/yen)!'
If you meet him, ask him about the other stuff he can't document... :)
I caught up and was like "wtf can we do this? they dont mind?"
He told me yea, no problem go wherever you like in the parade just dont do anything stupid. So we did.
He was very clear about when we needed to hold back, but also knew exactly which boundaries could be pushed.
Yes it's incredibly paranoid and authoritarian, but when you learn the history it makes sense why it is like that.
This is a country that was utterly destroyed by a superpower, who crowed about it, and which still threatens it.