Yonhap reports that North Korea’s Central TV put together a 10-minute mix-match of scenes from stories from South Korean programmers KBS, MBC (add your MBC joke HERE), SBS and YTN, edited to show just how crappy life in South Korea is.
Apparently, they took scenes from programs about unemployment, homelessness, abandoned old people, personal debt, serial killings and the like.
On a positive note, Yonhap says it’s quite unusual for North Korea to show South Korean TV programming for so long. Oh, and they missed at least one “Daehanminguk” (Republic of Korea), a taboo word north of the DMZ.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Hilarious. They could have tried to get a shot of a less 피둥피둥한 아줌마 as an example of someone wanting to leave the country…
If anything, it will make more North Koreans want to defect. Any North Korean who isn’t already brainwashed beyond hope will see this notice that even the unemployed in South Korean live more comfortably than they do.
…will see this and notice…
Reminds me a little bit of Minitrue in Oceania – War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength!
Not that different to the way MBC edits their news.
There is something rather odd about this, at least IMHO. Why after all this time would 北TV suddenly feel the need to broadcast a program showing “how desperate things are in the South”? This and Kang Chol-hwan’s story about the “150-day struggle” in the North both seem out of place. They seem like vague indications that the DPRK is having trouble(s) and is making extra efforts to keep the general public in line. Maybe they are having a bad harvest year and/or sanctions are having an effect. Or perhaps more likely, news about the South has been leaking in for years, and now they are trying to roll it back.
NK could’ve also taken some comments from the expat community on the kblogsphere “to show just how crappy life in South Korea is.”
I know that if I was starving to death, hearing some fat southerner cry about the hardships of capitalist life would seem quite silly.
A 15 minute interview with a SK teen would completely mystify a NK person. Skinship, Namjin, Malbap. They’d be forced to conclude that the Americans have colonized them.
1. Does anyone have a link to the original footage?
2. I wonder what B. R. Myers would have to say about this. He has pointed out that the official NK party line on SK has changed dramatically in the last few years. They are presenting SK as wealthy, but somehow not authentically “Korean”.
Perhaps the credit crisis has provided an opportunity for the NK leadership to claim that, although SK was temporarily rich, it has now slipped back into poverty.
Does anyone have Dr. Myers email address?
Say, what’s with the double post? I’m getting deja vu all over again.
There is poverty in South Korea, there are homeless here too. Unlike the north though nobody is starving to death, if anything people here in the south are eating too much and getting too fat.
Even the soldiers in the north are a joke, they’re all tiny. I’m no muscleman, but I could probably take on a platoon of the northern monkeys in hand to hand combat and beat their sorry little arses.
The truth is so few people even have electricity in NK that very few people probably got to watch the propaganda.
The North is a failed (rather than failing) state. What with their recent kidnapping and abduction cases they’re obviously in a terrible mess. They have the Gaesong worker, they have the two American journalists, they have the fishermen from the recently snatched boat. I wonder who is next? These are desperate measures from a screwed up failed regime.
We live in interesting times.
You must log in to post a comment.