Well.
I read this post earlier today and just thought about it now and tried to look it up without simply referencing this post.
Let me tell you: Googling “North Korea Giant Bomb” is not a super productive use of time.
Very, very ill, moron people.
Gotta feel sorry for that poor kid. I suspect he probably did try to steal some kind of propaganda decoration to take home as a trophy; probably thought it would look good in the frat house. But nobody deserves to die for a stupid mistake like that. Seems like he was only minutes away from being out of NK when they pulled him off the plane. Talk about bad luck.
I understand the appeal to visit a dictatorship, I have the same curiosity, but is kind of a dumb move, considering is a monstruous place that devour their own civilizens.
I guest this will have a effect in this kind of turism.
There’s an argument that tourism helps develop economy and locals in authoritarian regimes, and this might be the case in somewhere like Myanmar, but in DPRK all tourists are doing are handing over dollars for the leaderships Remy Martin imports.
I am spanish, and tourism completely remade my country top-down.
There are things that are Ok to do to your own citizens when you are dictator, but that scare away the turist dollars, so you don’t do in the area/region where these turist walk around. So these areas (the areas with turist) are safer and more free than other areas. Turism have like a direct and strong effect.
I guess the NK regime is more closed than others, and favour more their closeness than turist dollars.
In the summer of 1981 (nowhere near as cool as the summer of '69), I was able, courtesy of my now long-dead grandmother, to take a trip sponsored by one of those college travel groups through Europe. It was a thirty-day, if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium sort of things, but as I had lived in Germany and traveled a bit in Europe before, I didn’t hold that against it.
Anyhow, one of the more interesting parts of the trip was going through Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Years later, when I worked in German, my job prevented me from going into Communist countries, so this was the only time I had during the Cold War to visit behind the Iron Curtain. Not quite like going to North Korea, but it sort of qualified as visiting dictatorships.
East Germany was as you would expect–drab, gray, depressing, all the bad parts of the German gestalt and none of the good vibes. Czechoslovakia was pretty cool, and Prague, despite being in commieland, had some killer beer halls and great brews; the people were pretty chill. Ditto for Hungary; Budapest was neat, and the big park even had a huge John Lennon memorial (informal) section.
Now, Yugoslavia (as Tito was still around and it hadn’t yet broken up into the goat rope it became) was a different story. The Serbian parts were, well, imagine East Germany without the efficiency or Teutonic restraint. Food was great but the authorities lived up to full jackbook expectations, beating up our Austrian tour guide and taking our bribes of chocolate and Marlboros and not giving us any of the expedited services they were supposed to procure (the bastages!). The Hotel Serbia in Belgrade may well be the only hotel I’ve ever stayed in with a prominent “what to do in case of nuclear attack” sign in the lobby–also, many cockroaches, and the only guy I met in Belgrade who admitted to speaking English gleefully told me he learned it in prison. On the plus side, they had a cool WWII museum with lots of hardware left by the Germans mostly, who I’m told spent a relaxing few years on a Balkan holiday there during the forties.
Once we got out of Serbia, the rest of the trip there was marginally nicer, but the country was rather poor and army/police were everywhere.
None of this I’m sure comes even modestly close to the experience of being in North Korea, but I have been around fundamentalist Baptists, who seem to behave pretty much the same way the Kim faithful do around their divine leader. Guess that counts.
I didn’t know you knew my family.
Ok, more serious, that’s a really cool story. I’ve got to admit to having some of the same curiosity into the reality of how these countries are. Obviously we see the portrayed perspective, but as often as not the truth is mixed with liberal doses of propaganda it seems. But North Korea seems fundamentally different, as if exaggerating the despotism is an impossibility. It’s like they looked at the propagandized portrayal of China or the USSR and swallowed that wholesale and emulated it.
So how closely did the reality mesh up with the portrayal? It sounds like in Yugoslavia it was fairly close (I actually dated someone who grew up there during the break up and civil wars, interesting stories for sure).
Well, it was a long time ago, but as I recall the reality partially corresponded to the Cold War-era depictions of Soviet-bloc authoritarianism. What was interesting was the extent to which average folks simply lived average lives. Sure, the level of material prosperity was far below that of the West, and the atmosphere was, to an outsider at least, pretty oppressive in terms of surveillance and the omnipresent security people, but hey, life went on, and people did all the tings people do. But it was very clear you weren’t in Kansas any more, as it were, and paranoia sure started to seem a lot more understandable.
I lived in Berlin twice, once around 1969-71 and again from 1988-90. There, you could see East and West side by side, and contrast was more striking. I haven’t been back since the Wall came down, so I would love to go and see what a reunified city looks like.
Quite different, I’m sure! I was there two years ago, and the city was quite nice. You could see where the divide used to be, but it was also clearly fading with time. In fact if you weren’t explicitly aware of that time, and where the divide was, it may escape your notice. At least that was my impression of the day there, we were visiting people in Magdeburg, so Berlin was a final day jaunt.
Took a very similar trip in '87 after I graduated high school. I still tell the story of going through checkpoint Charlie from time to time. Getting to see Berlin before the wall came down was something my adolescent brain couldn’t process very well at the time, but a hell of an experience. Also went to a lot of the same places you did, Budapest, Lubjana, etc.
The dreaded Lubyanka is not what I would suggest for a gap year trek.
This is the state of our country now, that I read those tweets and I think “ok that’s pretty good.” Fucking tweets from the President. At least they tried. jfc
What a loser with his ICBMs and nuclear weapons. Weak.
He should be spending his time posting GIFs to Twitter!