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Comment by mrheosuper | Hacker News Reader

The first video gives me impression that many of them are ... staged. Sorry if i am incorrect.

My impression is that the tourists are being guided along fixed routes in the limited areas of the country that are open to tourists. But there are long shots of towns and the countryside from trains and buses that can’t have been entirely staged. These are the glimpses of everyday life that I find fascinating.

Yeah, the idea that North Korea is putting on a country-sized Truman Show for the handful of tourists seems a bit bizzare to me. Of course they will keep tourists in the better, richer areas, but at the end of the day it's a real country with over 25 million people. Even if it's poor and totalitarian, like any other country that size it has big cities with an upper class of wealthy elites, it has a class of highly educated scientists who likely have a high standard of living (they produce working ICBMs and nuclear weapons after all).

I feel like due to popular portrayal, many people have an almost cartoon-like view of North Korea as "the dystopian totalitarian state" as it's portrayed in like, 1984 or something, forgetting that it's a real country with 25 million real normal people, and that there are just certain things a country has to do to keep existing.

Even with Russia, everyone understands that Putin exists in a balance with military leaders and oligarchs and has to keep them happy. But with North Korea, people are so caught-up in the one-dimensional view of Kim Jong Un as the supreme leader, that we forget a simple fact: one person cannot manage the entire military and all the industry in a medium-sized country, and inevitably there will be other high-ranking people that have a lot of power and a dictator has to keep them happy to stay in power.

It's still the world's largest prison: most North Koreans would be killed on sight or imprisoned for even attempting to leave (i.e., escape). It also has millions of slaves, in fact the highest rate of modern slavery in the world (approximately the same as the US in 1860 before the Civil War). Kim Jong Un executed his uncle in 2013. Privilege or comfort, where it exists, can be stripped by force from an entire family at once for any reason. So, yes, Kim Jong Un is not a literal god on Earth -- there are balances he must maintain within the country to keep his power. Not every North Korean is a slave. You're not wrong about those things. But I feel your description is coming dangerously close to portraying it as a relatively normal country, which it most certainly is not. It is a prison and slave state, one of the most severe in history, enforced via extreme brutality and shielded by nukes against those who would save its people.

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