Secret State of North Korea [video]

Worth watching. I have never seen anything like it.

For example, U.S. Soldiers don't use pliers for torture. They chain civilians to prison ceilings instead and beat them to death. Alternative they use simulated executions, rape, or sodomized civilians like in Abu Ghraib.

The posters about U.S. soldier executing Korean civilians is also a bit off. Using guns to terrorize a population is slow and ineffective, as a 24/7 aerial presence that can at any point send a explosive missile (like onto a wedding) will have better effected on the population.

Not that it takes anything away from the message the documentary gives. Seeing how bad NK has become is important, as most people seem to think that all that horribleness went away after ww2/cold world.

This is a practical workaround for what I agree is a stupid policy.

The smuggled footage in this is fantastic and remarkable. The interviews with the North Koreans in the South were also quite interesting.

> ... all the merchandise on display is for display only.

?

It didn’t take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways – yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the ‘customers’. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking.

...snip...

I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.

[1] http://www.skepticaldoctor.com/2010/01/15/classic-dalrymple-...

Years later I saw paint by number sets at a store as an adult and then bought two and spend a weekend doing just that, because I had been dreaming of doing it for years. Ritter Sport is everywhere in the US now, but when I see it, I'm just reminded of the misery of a childhood behind the iron curtain. It's gonna be a loooong transition for the victims of the Kim regime.

Something I've found very interesting is watching foreign news media and what they report on and some of the externals that surround that reporting...then reversing those observations to my own country's media. It's remarkable how taking that outsider's viewpoint and turning it towards your own native media can help you to understand where they're manipulative or not quite truthful with things.

In my case, my wife is from South Korea and I get constant exposure to the news (important and trivial) about her native country. There's lots of, to me, obvious political influence in South Korean news. It took a few years, but eventually I was able to convince my wife that this was happening. Of course she had some inkling that it was happening, but the various phenomenon I was pointing out to here had completely escaped her notice.

One of the most common in her country is to hide embarrassing political issues with wall to wall coverage of a recent scandal that was just "discovered" about some top-tier entertainer: it's usually a sex scandal, but it could be tax evasion or gambling issues. Those entertainers then "retire" or disappear for a couple years and inevitably stage a come back. The public's attention span is so short that the political issue is quickly forgotten while the poor singer or actor or whatever is drug through the press for a few weeks. It's very rare that a political issue will stay front and center over an inconsequential starlet's sex video.

Over the years I've come to appreciate the very deep relationship the government there has with the major production companies and broadcast networks. It's changing slowly, independent media is starting to spring up on cable networks and podcasts and such, but the overall homogeneity of South Korean pop culture means that most people will still just go to their favorite old media sources for most things anyways. The good news is that they aren't really spreading lies, just choosing to suddenly report at this very moment about something that doesn't matter at all when something that does matter is being ignored -- so they can still say they have a free press and all that.

Recent protests and firings at some of the major broadcasting companies have shown that this isn't nearly as true though.

Turning back on my country's media and I see similar tactics used. I think we're a bit more subtle about it, it's not quite the clockwork mechanism that I see in South Korea, but I think there's always some agenda to what gets covered and when. I think the government influence on major media producers here is just as deep, think about the flood of pure propaganda action movies that came out during Reagan. They're hopelessly obvious these days, but I don't remember them being such obvious propaganda back then.

These days, my wife and I play this game now when some outrageous, but largely inconsequential, news start getting played up endlessly in our respective countries. The game is called "what's really going on?" And we remind each other with this question that the game has started and we'll spend the next hour or so digging into the internet to try and figure out what embarrassing political situation is being glossed over so we can see an actress trip on stage for the 800th time, or some singer spectacularly flame out in public.

I can think of no better example of this in action then this

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/19insert-word-here-differ...

The example: when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and US media were saying that the "alleged photos might not be possible to obtain" I saw them a full 3 days early on Danish media before I could find them anywhere on US news.

[EDIT: My UCSC roots will really show here - check out "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky for one perspective. And yes, it's Chomsky, so YMMV.]

So, it makes sense to simply share the good things the North Koreans don't have access to. It's a small improvent to their life, but it's an improvement, and it makes them happier. One of the defectors said that she never smiled in NK. They should live better, that's the objective, I think. And the persuasive power of such seemingly meaningless things is very high, actually.

Assuming the group had been infiltrated (or monitored), it seems like that might very well be the end of the group.

It only has one chapter on the 'holy crap look how terrible it is.' The rest of the book is about the history, NK's placement in world politics, and really how the nation came to be.

Fascinating, and avoids the stereotypical conversations about North Korea.

It's like ants; size of the individual doesn't matter when there's a million of you.

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:58d690227d4c88ba52673db6c5b08201150266c2&dn=frontline-northkorea.mp4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce

Even more interesting would be if they came w/ Chinese/South Korean sim cards w/ data plans - I assume that if you're close enough to the border you'd be able to get reception and you wouldn't have to worry so much about your data being intercepted on the NK network (I doubt they'd provide a data gateway anyway).

You could preload Kakaotalk/Webo accounts and like some sort of secure chat to communicate securely w/ the defector network. You could have some sort of anonymous/pseudonymous Twitter like app as well, although the most important thing is to recognize/warn people that it'd be completely infiltrated and not to post any identifying information. A mesh 4chan-like message board might be perfect.

You'd want to provide preloaded media (and like a dump of Korean Wikipedia?) and also have USB OTG adapter for those devices as well so they could easily load new pirated media... Heck, as long as those devices had MicroSD cards that'd make all that smuggling a heckuva lot easier.

Google says North Korea's population is only 25M people. That's tiny. At say $100/pop you could produce devices for say 20% of the population for $500M. You'd have to strike a balance of trickling in devices so it doesn't get immediately cracked down vs getting to that critical mass where so many people have them that it can't be.

Anyway, that sounds like a relatively cheap way to topple a pretty terrible regime/uplift a society, to me, but well, it's never been tried before.

Maybe double that price and include smuggling in some guns and ammo w/ the devices just in case it does come to a violent revolution though...