Perhaps the opsec has been exaggerated to make the article more thrilling, or the opsec is true but it's a professional smuggling ring not involving elderly relatives.
Perhaps the opsec has been exaggerated to make the article more thrilling, or the opsec is true but it's a professional smuggling ring not involving elderly relatives.
My grandfather is in his 70s and I have heard from him about how some of his friends sneak around on their wives. These are men in their 60s and 70s who employ opsec to keep affairs concealed from their wives and the husbands of their mistresses.
Old people can be sneaky if the stakes are high enough and I guarantee that any elderly North Korean knows precisely what's at stake if they make any mistakes.
Maybe you're right, maybe there was some exaggeration for dramatic purposes but it's also plausible that the details are accurate.
There's a good case to be made for survivorship bias.
Those who are unwilling to or incapable of engaging in proper opsec don't live to be old.
Dead.
An elderly relative probably knows/knows of various people who've been caught and punished for this sort of thing. Tends to motivate people to learn. Old people aren't stupid.
As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”
-- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
If you're a good little citizen, you starve to death. If you're bad at breaking the rules, you go to the reeducation camps or to the firing squad. I'm sure that the example of former friends and family gives them ample motivation to learn good OPSEC.
The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.
There is no way sources can ever be checked, and that means anywhere from 0 to 100% of the article could be fabricated.
(edit: an analogy to better describe the dubious usefulness of the dictionary, it would be like a native Greek using a French-English dictionary to learn English)
Uh, totally wrong there. Might want to read up some more.
There are some minor spelling differences, pronunciation/accent differences. North Korean doesn't use any loan words, so there's a great deal of different terms for ice cream or radio, for example. But they're not totally different dialects. Any South Korean can understand a North Korean TV broadcast, for example.
I'm actually studying Korean right now, and one of the textbooks I'm using relies on the North Korean dialect. I can attest that the differences are minor, and are mostly limited to things comparable to 'color' in AE and 'colour' BE.
>I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.
I assume you don't speak any Korean and are talking out of your ass.
The standard Korean used in South Korea and North Korea are both based on the same dialect - Seoul dialect. There's vocabulary differences, but nothing that would prevent a (South) Korean-English dictionary from being useful to a North Korean person.