Our post a couple of days ago about the ruthless Kim Jong Il drew a visitor who left a link to a dramatic image, reproduced below:
Presumably this is a nighttime sattelite photo, showing the luminous metropolis of Seoul and the prosperous, well-lit Republic of Korea to the south, and the veiled, darkling, and preposterously named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north. The emotional power of this image is immediate, and tragic.
The picture comes from the UK paper the Daily Mail, so I assume it is genuine. The person who left it signed in only as Kim, which narrows things down in Korea about as much as if he had announced himself as “Jim” over here. The current waka waka waka WordPress settings require commenters to leave an email address, and the comment form also offers them the option to submit a link to their own websites; the email address left by Kim was from the gov.kp domain, and the website linked to was the official DPRK government website (which is well worth a look, by the way).
I rather doubt that our visitor is actually a member of the government of that enslaved nation, nor even a resident; I’d be curious to know more, Kim, if you’d care to drop me a line.
3 Comments
That “official DPRK government website” is a hoot!
Check out the stuff available in the souvenir shop: http://www.korea-dpr.com/catalog2/
I also got a kick out of the comment posted there: http://www.korea-dpr.com/catalog2/product_reviews_info.php?products_id=57&reviews_id=101&osCsid=755cbf55a17045efc82e7c1997d759a8
It’s too bad, though, that NK is so easily parodied; there is serious suffering there and one day, we’ll look back on this period and think “why didn’t we do something?”
Agreed, Son. What would you recommend?
Pump more money into NGOs — as this article shows, cash for bribes is the key: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/world/asia/19defect.html