North Korea - a Deceptive State (complete)
"What is Real?"
"What is Real?" Never has the quote from The Matrix been more appropriate. I have just returned back to Beijing after a long week in North Korea. And the question many of us were asking ourselves and each other was, "What is real?".
It's a horrendous thought and a terrible thing to write, but we have strong reasons to believe that much of what we saw while in the country was staged. It was a puppet show. It was an act. With hundreds and hundreds of people - innocent people - involved. Where reality meets stage show we can only begin to phanthom,
But, a scary fact that struck home when I retured to China and reread parts of Jasper Becker’s book, “Rouge Regime – Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea” (2005), much of what de saw in 1986 and 1989 remains the same. He writes: From the outside a grocery store looks normal.…Yet there is nobody there. No one is shopping, and no one ever will. Nothing is actually for sale because when you look closely the vegetables are all made of plastic (pg. 115). He goes on to say: “…The rooms, full of new, modern medical equipment, are for show too. Not even the plastic wrapping on the electrical plug for the Siemen’s heart monitor has been removed” (pg.115).
This is very close to what we experienced this week. Becker decribes most of Pyongyang as a stage, where puppets can be moved around according to what the leadership wants to show. Think about it for a second. I genuinly believe that the leadership show us want they want us to see. Yet, through the cracks, the filthy buswindows, in the countryside and in the horizon we can only glimse the Real North Korea. We’ve had numerous incidents that I fully believe that what you, as a foreigner, see in North Korea is often a staged show.
Where, excactly, the truth lies nobody knows. I believe, much like in China’s history, we’ll only get a full picture years, maybe decades after the present leadership falls. It is not a comforting thought.
Let one thing be clear. North Korea is a state of terror. It reigns by fear. It is labelled as a communist state. It is not. Rather it is a curious mix of totalitarian police state, Dictatorship and Personality Cult. As a visitor it is curious, a relic. Once you get a glimpse of the everyday life of the populance it is frightening.
I’m writing these pages in order to shine a little light on the issue, and share my experience from both reading and visting this state of terror.
On my Flickr site
www.flickr.com/photos/26370166@N06/sets/ I'll be uploading more pictures, text and videos over the coming weeks. I would very much appreciate your comments and feedback.
Thank you,
Chris
www.flickr.com/photos/26370166@N06/sets/
Location: North Korea (2008)
