How to Leave North Korea, and How Not To
* There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything. See also related posts at DPRK Studies.
* As much as I’d like to see this Yonhap story as evidence of more cultural infiltration of North Korea by the South, it seems more like an example of the opposite. In what must have been a very carefully guided and choreographed tour of a P’yang department store, a clerk is wearing earphones, is predictably asked why, and responds that he’s listening to mp3’s he downloaded off the internet. Excuse me if I suspect that this whole episode was predictably staged and gullibly reported. On the contrary, by all defectors’ accounts, only a tiny selection of North Koreans are permitted access to the internet, and only for the government’s own purposes.
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I’m skeptical, too, especially when it was a department store clerk wearing an earphone to listen to music while working. I agree that the whole incident looks staged and phony.
It amazes me that there isn’t the slightest hint of skepticism in the Yonhap story. Looks like South Korean journalists have become victims of their own Sunshine Policy driven pro-North brainwashing of the masses.
Considering that many take what they read on the news as an absolute fact (e.g., fan death is true b/c I saw it on the news all these years) the implications are unsettling.
i would have love to follow up the question with…..’from which website did you download the music?’