This makes me wonder what the reasoning is, or even if they officially do, for preventing North Korean citizens from migrating south? If it's all united as one country then why would someone be prevented from moving there?
They are cognizant that there is a DMZ , and that theere exists a polity on the south that keeps sending usb filled baloons , propaganda loudspeakes blaring on the Border. So mostly a poltical position being staked out , which is also why the maps only have Palestine and Western Sahara.Not because they are unaware of the situation insitu but geopilitically they are staking their claims.
I really wish I had spent time with it. If nothing else it would have given me some questions to ask my history teachers.
I remember once wandering around my college library and finding the book “The Soviet Economy Through the Year 2000.” This occurred during the current millennium.
Seeing through the lens of railroads is probably an artifact of both ideology and the economic reality in North Korea. And maybe also the implicitly military purpose of these maps.
I don't know whether they're decades out of date or just plain wrong - the West Coast Main Line was "opened between 1837 and 1881" according to Wikipedia.
I guess the maps are old, because they show the Newfoundland Railway, which was removed in the 80s.
But strange, then, that the north/south line (Kansas City Southern / Canadian Pacific) is not there.
I just assumed the red lines were "major routes" of some sort, maybe rail, maybe roads.
Under closer scrutiny, all of the lines were railroads, and not highways. In fact, (I don't think) there were no highways at all. And it was all railroads, not just ATSF. I don't recall the date on the map.
Just a fascinating "other view" of the world to look at the US through that lens.
Well - it depends on how one wants to call the result of the war.
I think there was not necessarily a winner; there was a stalemate/truce, with China guaranteeing North Korea to not lose, but not necessarily win either. That does not mean North Korea won, but I don't think one can necessarily say that they lost the war either.
I am fully aware of how the propaganda in North Korea works, but some articles are also heavily biased. The biggest danger to North Korea actually comes from the success model in South Korea, as well as the internet. The internet kind of nerfed Scientology (see what Ron Miscavige said and described how Scientology changed over the years, so if one of the big guys can quit, the whole business model they established decades ago, is dead and decaying). Sooner or later Kim Jong Fat will also lose out to the internet. You can not permanently cut off million of people, with the assumption they won't be able to understand how strategic lies work. It also does not work in Russia either, though Russia is of course nowhere near as isolated as North Korea right now.
North Koreans do not have any Internet, save for through computers at a few government-controlled and strictly monitored libraries, as well as through illegal imported Chinese smartphones if they live near the border.
And North Korea could see greater internet uptake but still remain a stable dictatorship, precisely on the model of Russia where, even if the population “sees through the lies”, that doesn’t challenge the regime itself; people who dislike the regime largely simply accept it as a fact of life, and might even disapprove of those people who make the effort to challenge it.
According to the North Korean govt, the Korean war was started by the South who wanted to invade North (it was not, based on extensive studies). Therefore in their view (or at least from their propaganda), the communists "won" by successfully defending their part of the peninsula.
> According to the prevailing narrative in North Korea, the war was won by the communists and since then, the entire Korean peninsula has remained united under the rule of the Korean Workers’ Party.
This is either not true at all or the writer phrased strangely — both of the governments (South & North) recognize that the war is still on-going and they have an enemy that is controlling the other half of the peninsula that they do not control. However, both of the governments also argue that they are the only legal government that is ought to control the whole peninsula and does not recognize each other's legitimacy. For example, ROK(Republic of Korea, the government that controls the southern part of the peninsula)'s constitution writes that it's government governs the whole peninsula and it's islands. It's like how both PRC(People's Republic of China, i.e. China) and ROC(Republic of China, i.e. Taiwan) both argue that they are the only legal government over all of China (i.e. Mainland China and Taiwan combined).
> Therefore, when looking at the maps in this atlas, it should come as no surprise that Korea is always shown as one country, with no reference to the other country that exists at the southern tip of the peninsula.
It is universally agreed between the two governments (and their citizens) that a unification should happen at some point, so it is obvious that we should be using a map that covers the whole peninsula. We (as South Koreans) also learn 'our country' as the whole peninsula.
> This North Korean world map is centred on the Pacific Ocean, which gives Korea a privileged position on the global stage.
Not going to lie, sometimes it feels that some of the Westerners act like that they don't even think of the remote possibility that they might not be the center of the world…?
South Korean maps do this, China maps do this, Japanese maps do this, I'm pretty sure South East Asia countries also do this, it's a normal thing to do. There's nothing special about having the Pacific Ocean centered.
My friend was on a guided tour to North Korea, and they aware of a lot of things. For example, the population of the North and the South was somehow accurately described to the tourists as 25 and 50 million, and they don't question that fact.
monooso•1h ago
(Emphasis mine)
TIL. Now I'm really curious how maintaining this fiction works (or doesn't) in practice.
hk1337•1h ago
yostrovs•1h ago
s0sa•1h ago
red-iron-pine•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral
cedilla•1h ago
In any case, North Koreans are not taught that South Korea is just like any other part of North Korea. The idea that the North Korean people and leadership are all buffoons who make the weirdest of lies possible is already Orwellian enough.
ch_123•1h ago
the_af•20m ago
They believe there's only one Korea, artificially split in two by their enemies, and that it should all be under the control of the current NK government, but they don't believe they control all of it now.
vkou•1h ago
Very easily. There's an official account, which 'everyone'[1] knows is bullshit, but if you try to assert any logical consequences of it, you will immediately out yourself as a malcontent, and will get into serious trouble. (Because despite having all sorts of constitutional protections for your rights on paper, the executive has the power in practice to do anything it wants to you at any time, with no redress. Good luck exercising articles 67 through 79 of that constitution. If you're lucky, you'll be softly told to sit down and shut up. If you're unlucky, you'll be doing a few years in a camp.)
It's the time-tested playbook that every authoritarian regime follows, and if you're interested in learning more about how it works in practice, just turn on Fox News. It's got the first half of the double-think process down, and is working hard on getting us to the second half.
There is always a thin public justification for why rights don't apply to the enemies of the state, which is enough to convince ~half the country. (Because ~half of any country will happily accept whatever atrocities its leaders do. You can observe that sort of thing on this very forum.)
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[1] Not actually everyone, some people really are that fucking stupid, but most know there's something off[2] about it.
[2] In this particular case, the official Atlas says they are one country, but the country's Constitution (updated last year on this very subject) says that the ROK is a foreign, hostile state. Anyone who can read or has eyes to see and ears to hear should easily be able to tell that the latter is the more accurate one.
red-iron-pine•1h ago
remember that 1) this forum skews to a very specific sort of person, and 2) that person notwithstanding, there is an incredible, shocking large amount of bots active here, owing to the fact that the people from 1) are also AI worshipping futurists (and/or techno-fascists)
cassepipe•29m ago
I am not a AI worshiping futurist nor a (techno-)fascist for that matter. I don't think bots are that active on such a small platform but I guess by "bots" you mean people who offer pushback on your opinions (they are a "shocking" number indeed, it seems I can hardly convince more than one person to rally my positions from time to time and I still have to pretend to be nuanced !)
I also believe that "platform is skewed against X" (generally your own opinions) are utterly useless comments. You are just pretending everyone is against you so you don't have to take criticism addressed to you seriously.
Now you can enjoy the ego boost of feeling like the virtuous online warrior against a world of techno-fascists that are ganging up on you or you can reflect and try to take into account the fact that people have different viewpoints and are mostly doing their best. I eventually chose the latter and I have to say I feel less grandiose but much better overall. Join the club, we have cookies.
ceejayoz•1h ago
The Epstein files are simultaneously a "Democrat hoax" and full of prominent Dems. The Attorney General both has them on her desk, and they don't exist.
Volundr•1h ago
Terr_•27m ago
> The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
-- The origins of Totalitarianism (1951), by Hannah Arendt
sunaookami•1h ago
>This North Korean world map is centred on the Pacific Ocean, which gives Korea a privileged position on the global stage
This is normal for asian maps, Japan does the same thing for example.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korea-repor...
recursivecaveat•1h ago
quicklime•1h ago
> This is normal for asian maps, Japan does the same thing for example.
This is common in Australia too.
bad_haircut72•17m ago
onraglanroad•12m ago
All we need is some TikTok, YouTube shorts and some gullible right wingers, and I think we've got ourselves a product!