Secret State of North Korea [video]

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365155890/

by bane • 13 years ago

151 83 13 years ago

video.pbs.org

tptacek5• 13 years ago

There's some amazing footage in this; at one point, someone with a hidden camera visits a Potemkin department store in Pyongyang and tries to buy a dress, and then some beer, only to be told that all the merchandise on display is for display only.

bane3• 13 years ago

I noticed also that almost everything they showed was non-perishable goods.

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

cclogg• 13 years ago

Darn, now I really want to watch it lol! However, it's blocked in Canada :(

It's kind of silly considering we actually contribute to PBS (according to PBS Seattle, we make up a 3rd of their contributions).

jlgaddis5• 13 years ago

I won't be able to watch this until the weekend but I'm curious why

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

Mikeb85• 13 years ago

The products on the shelves can't be bought, they're literally just there for show, as opposed to a normal store where you buy things...

qohen• 13 years ago

In 1989 Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, went to one of these department stores and describes how even the shoppers in the store were fake -- here's an excerpt (more at the link [1]):

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-...

dzink2• 13 years ago

We had those in Bulgaria for a number of years before the fall of communism. They were restricted to use only by foreigners buying with foreign currency and locals could only gawk, but never buy. As a child I remember seeing Kinder Surprise eggs and Ritter Sport chocolates, and watching ads for Hot Wheels toys and paint-by number sets I could never play with. It scars you for life.

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.

herdrick2• 13 years ago

Actually, this is something else. Those foreigner-only, hard-currency-only ones are sad enough, but this is much worse. There is no store. It's just playacting.

elipsey2• 13 years ago

This documentary is really good. It's impossible not to gawk like a tourist at the pathological outcomes of the command econconmy, the wretched poverty, and the Orwellian anti U.S. propaganda, for example posters depicting U.S. soldiers pulling out the teeth of children with pliers, and executing Korean civilians. The film is composed largely of real footage produced by dissenters. No matter how cynical you might be of the demonization of "rouge states" by U.S. media, I promise that you will moved by this very convincing film.

I think Frontline is one of the last investigative journalism shows with real integrity that is left; did you see that embarrassing puff piece a few weeks ago where 60 Minutes licked the NSA's asshole for an hour?

The big footage of the Korean landscape is stunningly beautiful, and reminds me of Vladivastock. Must watch.

Also, if you want to learn more about North Korea (at least from a quasi-American perspective), please go watch "Crossing the Line" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Line_%282006_film%...) a film about a U.S. Army soldier who defected to N. Korea, which was still on Netfilx last time I checked. It will enlighten you, and also weird up your day :)

mrcsparker• 13 years ago

Watching 'Crossing the Line' right now. James Joseph Dresnok creeps me out. You are right about it weirding up my day. Christian Slater narrating feels surreal. It almost feels like a parody.

Worth watching. I have never seen anything like it.

belorn4• 13 years ago

Calling the posters propaganda would be true before 2001, but today I would not call it that. They simply represent a simplification of how an NK conflict with the U.S. army would look like.

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.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Interesting. What other North Korean state messages do you believe to be, at root, basically true and honest?

elipsey2• 13 years ago

These are good points. I suppose I was referring to the style and motivation of the material rather than it's factual content.

Must propaganda be factually false or grossly misleading? I don't know...

coupdejarnac• 13 years ago

There was a live chat today with the former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, and she said the average height of a North Korean soldier is 4'9". Not too imposing. They do not have adequate resources to feed their people, let alone to project power.

Loughla2• 13 years ago

But they have one metric shit-ton of soldiers.

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

spydum• 13 years ago

So far the most interesting point they have made is that these guys are smuggling in foreign media/tv and people are consuming it. The pitch is that the latest box office hits (sky fall 007 was mentioned) are the best way to influence N Korean culture. I guess I was surprised by this, but it does make more sense than trying to give them hard truth, which they would more likely reject due to their own cognitive dissonance.

This makes me wonder how our own media is manipulated to influence political movements?

bane3• 13 years ago

This makes me wonder how our own media is manipulated to influence political movements?

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...

po• 13 years ago

I'm also reminded of this Slate article where they reported on the US as if they were reporting on a foreign country as an exercise in language:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/09/30/potential_g...

nitrogen• 13 years ago

It's very rare that a political issue will stay front and center over an inconsequential starlet's sex video.

This sort of thing happened recently in the US with CNN placing Miley Cyrus over news from Syria, Egypt, the Snowden leaks, and probably something else even more important that I'm forgetting.

The Onion wrote a parody justification of the placement (NSFW language): http://www.theonion.com/articles/let-me-explain-why-miley-cy...

rossjudson• 13 years ago

Remarkable. The international version of Time is something I'm actually interested in reading, now. The US version? Not so much.

bitops• 13 years ago

Here's a simple example that most of us can probably relate to. I often read the Danish news outlets for coverage on "big" international stories. I read them a lot during the last Iraq war.

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.]

a-nikolaev• 13 years ago

People in North Korea are probably well aware about the hard truth. And also, in my opinion, it's very difficunt to create a good foreign made documentary/educational movie, which is not a propaganda itself, and is not insulting or misinformative in some way (even unintentionally).

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.

Nanzikambe2• 13 years ago

pbs.org videos are US only. Any links for the rest of the world?

ghuntley• 13 years ago

    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

Nanzikambe2• 13 years ago

You sir, are a gentleman & a scholar.

mostlyalive• 13 years ago

In case you can't watch it, here's a mirror:

    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

mwilcox• 13 years ago

Thanks!

jbverschoor• 13 years ago

Thanks! yay censorship

broolstoryco2• 13 years ago

Thanks for this, was having trouble finding it on tpb

cabinguy2• 13 years ago

I watched this last night and thought it was really good - but the entire time I couldn't help but think about this propaganda video put out by North Korea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJoQOQHQ8oA

tptacek5• 13 years ago

That's a hoax. You didn't start wondering when they said "there are no birds except these ones, which will be eaten on Tuesday; they are yummy"?

cabinguy2• 13 years ago

Yes, the interpreter says that and I found it strange. I don't speak Korean so I don't know if that's what the narrator said or meant (you can hear her in the background). How do you know this is a hoax and not real propaganda out of North Korea?

Edit: You're correct. It was a hoax.

austinl• 13 years ago

I would also recommend watching the (somewhat less official) footage from Vice's trip to North Korea - they film what is shown to average tourists that are allowed to visit, and it's easy to tell how much of it is staged.

http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-n...

tomca322• 13 years ago

While the footage is great, I hoped the documentary would be a bit deeper. It's still the same thing: "Look at poor North Koreans".

The most informative video I've ever seen about NK is this lecture: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/292562-1

It's really worth watching it if you're interested in why and how NK came to be the way it is.

Loughla2• 13 years ago

Read "The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future" for a better run-down of how NK came to be.

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.

tomca322• 13 years ago

That sounds great and exactly what I'm interested in. Thanks for the recommendation.

notdonspaulding• 13 years ago

Towards the end of the film, they come to the conclusion that even though the collective mindset of NK citizens is changing, it won't necessarily result in a cultural revolution. It seems the primary thing keeping real change from happening is that North Koreans can't trust their family friends to not turn them in, and if they do somehow know who to trust, they can't gather in groups to talk or organize any activities.

This seems like a technical problem, no?

What would a "social network" (for lack of a better term) look like that enabled citizens to feel each other out and establish a network of trusted individuals? Could it be made resilient to breaches? That is, if one person were to divulge their communications with the state, how could the damage be limited?

It wouldn't even have to enable communication outside the border. It would be a boon if all it did was to let insiders organize over the country's cell network.

jlgaddis5• 13 years ago

At some point, in order for change to actually occur, things would have to move "off-line" and people would be forced to meet in public, wouldn't they?

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

lhl3• 13 years ago

I think that in the NK scenario, meeting offline would be one of the last things that would happen. Just being able to anonymously communicate with each other would be pretty revolutionary, as so much of the way the society functions is based on lies that unravel once people can access/share/discuss outside information.

It seems like once there's enough popular support, it'd be a lot easier - there are a lot more of the populace than the ruling class?

Cory Doctorow actually writes the most plausible scenario (and pitfalls) of bootstrapped online/offline coordination that I've read in Little Brother... based on how NK works, infiltration of any group, infiltration is probably a given. The real question would be whether the gov't could respond if the majority of the population were all conspiring in groups. Are there enough secret police to execute/arrest everyone all at once?

dominotw• 13 years ago

No. Because any action you take would endanger your whole family. This I think is the fundamental difference between North korean police state and other Stalinist regimes that crashed and burned in the 90's.

dailyrorschach• 13 years ago

Not just your current family, but your children and their offspring with the three generations punishment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaechon_internment_camp#Human_r...

So you’re entire current family is sent, and then the next two generations will be born and live and know only the internment camp as the world.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

If you are interested in North Korea, read The Orphan Master's Son. Fiction, but based on true stories. Won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (I've heard the audiobook is excellent, but the book is quite graphic, so the audio could be a little "intense." I didn't risk it.)

msane3• 13 years ago

All they need are data-phones and sims. Soon they will have the ability to communicate with less risk and in "town square" web venues like twitter and forums. I think it's a hard counter to the situation there. Collapse in under 5 years.

lhl3• 13 years ago

One of the things that occurred to me was that flooding the market with cheap Android tablets/smartphones would be pretty interesting.

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...

msane3• 13 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking, in terms of population size, price-point per data-device, at least in that I see it as inevitable that they will saturate a critical amount of the population soon, if just through luxury smuggling. It's only a matter of time as the devices are getting cheaper and they are already entering at an exponential rate. Cellular service is extremely powerful on its own, data service is... "liberating".

I think it needs little prompting at this point it is bound to happen organically.

broolstoryco2• 13 years ago

i think you underestimate the degree of control the state has (data-phones? what data? what network?), as well as the extent of brainwashing of the population

lhl3• 13 years ago

According to this report, NK's 3G network is about to hit 2M subscribers (almost 10% of the population): http://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/04/26/koryolink-nears-2-m...

It mentions offering (NK-only) web browsing and most people have dumbphones, but there is a network there. I think it'd be pretty suicidal to conspire using that though as I'm sure it's monitored.

I think there's probably a lot more dissent than you're assuming, but agin, it'd be suicidal to express it if one of your neighbors would just rat you out.

Apparently, smuggling in Chinese and increasingly South Korean smart phones is already quite common: http://newfocusintl.com/chinese-mobile-phone-dominates-north... http://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/smartphones-1114201318...

I posted earlier about this, but it seems that these phones would be pretty valuable as media playing devices - preload kiwix w/ KR wikipedia etc - it'd allow you to much more easily/discretely distribute/exchange microSD cards.

Some sort of mesh protocol could be incredibly effective in allow communication while maintaining anonymity. But any sort of message passing/communication would have to be designed under the assumption that it's being monitored.

msane3• 13 years ago

I don't underestimate it at all. The state does not have control of the airwaves, with SK and CN and the rest of Asia right there.

What's being discussed is cellular/wireless data networks from outside NK penetrating in. It is currently happening. Linking up to smuggled data devices which have prices on a race to 0.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

Having used the internet for the last maybe 16 years, I've seen a lot of disturbing shit but I could not finish watching this.

simias2• 13 years ago

Blocked outside of the USA it seems. For a video about smuggled footage out of North Korea I find it a bit ironic.

Quite frankly I find those regional restrictions as big a threat to the internet as all the net neutrality issues discussed lately.

The internet shouldn't have borders.

reuven2• 13 years ago

You can use Unlocator (http://unlocator.com/) to get around it. I've been using this for a number of months, and highly recommend it. (And for now, at least, it's free!)

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

xelfer• 13 years ago

If you use Chrome, Hola is pretty good and doesn't require a signup: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hola-better-intern...

bvi• 13 years ago

If you're on Firefox, just download Media Hint (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-hint/)

reuven2• 13 years ago

If you're interested in North Korea (and I find myself increasingly fascinated by it, perhaps because it's so different from anything I've ever experienced), you should read Nothing to Envy (http://nothingtoenvy.com/), which describes life in North Korea and the ways in which people manage to escape.

This was one of those books that had me saying, out loud, "Wow, I can't believe it!" on nearly every page. It gave me a lot of insight into how they live, and how hard it'll be for the regime there to change. It also made me feel quite sorry for the people who are forced to live in North Korea, who suffer starvation and abuse (physical and psychological) for the sake of the regime.

dmorre• 13 years ago

some might take this

"wget ga.video.cdn.pbs.org/cove2.0/frontline/773e4c49-c6a6-47a0-b075-7f298847a106/2014-01-14-201639/hd-mezzanine-16x9/00003206-16x9-hls-400k-00001.ts"

and iterate to *00323.ts

alvesjnr• 13 years ago

tks

eevilspock• 13 years ago

I'm not claiming that the United States or other capitalist countries are as bad off as North Korea. I'd no doubt put North Korea in my top 10 places not to live. But I'd like to point out that many of the scenes of poverty and a privileged elite could also be filmed in the United States. For example, see the five part Desani series on a homeless child in New York: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chap...

Secret State of North Korea [video]

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