Wrong turn grants glimpse behind NKorean curtain

[homasse]

Wrong turn grants glimpse behind NKorean curtain

The press bus took a wrong turn Thursday. And suddenly, everything changed in the official showcase of North Korean achievement.

A cloud of brown dust swirled down deeply potholed streets, past concrete apartment buildings crumbling at the edges. Old people trudged along the sidewalk, some with

Comments

[bnmc2005]

Is it wrong that I immediately thought of images from America that are quite similar?

[destructo_ray]

Same here. Washington, DC, for sure comes to mind.

[mingemonster]

Yes.

[13chapters]

Doesn't look like any place I've ever been in the US, but it also doesn't look particularly terrible for a developing nation. I've definitely seen worse.

I'm sure it was nonetheless interesting for the reporters to see some real slice of life stuff.

[entropius]

Yup. Another poster made a comparison to Washington. While the area across the Anacostia River is definitely poor and crime-ridden, the people there are not dying in famines and they have electricity and clean water. The value of the assistance that they can get from the government (via various social-welfare programs) is quite a bit greater than the entire GDP per capita of a North Korean ($1800, per the World Bank). That bears repeating: our government will simply give a poor person from DC Ward 8 more wealth than a North Korean can earn in a year's labor. While our safety net isn't perfect, saying that the holes in it are comparable to the misery that North Koreans have no way of escaping is a little naive

[bnmc2005]

Point duly taken. Thank you.