Is Life in North Korea....not that bad?

Is life in North Korea really not that bad?

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/commentary/north-korea-defectors-real-life

NHA TRANG, Vietnam — A peculiar strand of literature on North Korea has been published in recent years, with the authors drawing heavily on interviews with defectors. Sure, North Korea has been a horrific place with famine and prison camps, but these books reveal a single slice of North Korean society. And it's dangerous that they're taken so frequently at face value when they remain unverifiable.

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Are the refugee stories telling the whole story? Are we Westerners as inundated with propaganda against the world's most socialist state as we claim they are?

How are people affording cell phones and nice business suits in such a horribly poor, despotic regime?

Are we being told the whole truth about North Korea?

Granted, they may live under Kooky Authoritarian leaders with god complexes, but does the average person really have it that bad over there? You don't have to say you want to move there, but is it really the horrid Hell hole that it's aggressively portrayed as?

Especially compared to third world countries that have larger land and more resources? Can it be argued that they are making effective use of what little they have to work with, even with all the negatives we may associate with such oppression?

I have never heard that people try to enter North Korea because life is better there.

Compared to South Korea which is now a powerful industrial force, the North is very backward.
They had much the same resources to work with.
But they chose different political systems and partners.

I recall this very interesting article.
(Dishonest propaganda by a 19 year old gov agent?)
Eric Schmidt's daughter lifts lid on 'very strange' North Korea - Telegraph

"Our trip was a mixture of highly-staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments," she wrote. "We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders."
While much of the blog posting is taken up with the sort of observational musings common to any first-time visitor to Pyongyang, it had some interesting insights into the official side of the delegation's trip.
In particular, it fleshed out the main photo-opportunity of the entire trip when they visited an e-library at Kim Il-Sung University, and chatted with some of the 90 students working on computer consoles.
"One problem: No one was actually doing anything," Schmidt wrote.
"A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in... not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli.
"They might as well have been figurines," she added.

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One simple way to determine the truth about life in NK, let reporters in with no handlers.

One should just watch the Vice documentary about it. Quite interesting.

I've seen a few documentaries on it. I don't suppose it's gotten much better.

And to live there, well, one only has to Google image search "North Korea at night". Not to mention there isn't exactly a surplus of food...

From the many documentaries about NK i have seen over the years does not seem like a good place

Well... one does have to remember that documentaries tend to only portray a very small portion of the picture, and generally serve as introductions to a subject matter rather than being exhaustive.

I don't think we can really know what life there is truly like until they change to the point of more open borders. Hopefully the conclusion to Germany's East/West history can be repeated there.

Exactly, how do we know these documentaries are not just giving one bad slice of what is otherwise a not-bad pie? Isn't is suspicious that these few accounts are taken as gospel truth about North Korea? And of course, anything that says it's not as terrible as they make it out to be must be somehow lies and propaganda?

You can also see how horrible Qadaffi's regime supposedly was from what the Western media outlets tell you, but they rarely if ever mention all the free services and high living conditions the average person had.

Meanwhile, so-called Capitalist "Democracies" in Africa such as Nigeria don't seem to be all that fun, yet you won't see too many documentaries on how horrible life is there. Corruption and oppression can be just as bad under these regimes.

As for the heavily controlled tours, I can imagine their reasoning for doing so, even if the delivery is as clunky and robotic and unrealistic as they try to portray life as, they don't want more exploitative one-sided accounts to be made from a few observed instances of things they don't like being the only thing being told back home, and they don't want spies, though I think they'd be better off letting people see more of natural life there as I don't believe there's as much to hide as they let on.

I can imagine why not too many people would want to move there, as the propaganda against them is Thick, and they are in fact struggling to get by, and I can imagine it's not nearly as "fun" as living in the South's vibrant "night life" (aka drinking and floozies), but I'll bet you plenty of poor people in the South would consider it if if they had a more objective understanding.

But anyways, the question is: What exactly makes it so horrid? You don't have to want to move there, but is average daily life really that much worse than say, most of Africa? Is it really the worst place in the world to live as is commonly stated?

What would life be like if they weren't internationally isolated and had access to more trading options and resources?

Would the South be as rich as it was without all that Western support and trade availability? What if they weren't having billions of Military base money coming their way?

Shermana said:

Are the refugee stories telling the whole story? Are we Westerners as inundated with propaganda against the world's most socialist state as we claim they are?

How are people affording cell phones and nice business suits in such a horribly poor, despotic regime?

Are we being told the whole truth about North Korea?

Granted, they may live under Kooky Authoritarian leaders with god complexes, but does the average person really have it that bad over there? You don't have to say you want to move there, but is it really the horrid Hell hole that it's aggressively portrayed as?

Especially compared to third world countries that have larger land and more resources? Can it be argued that they are making effective use of what little they have to work with, even with all the negatives we may associate with such oppression?

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Shermana, I'd have to say you make a few good points.

North Korea, a country which has few natural resources, and which has had sanctions imposed on it for most of its independent history, nonetheless has even managed to send a rocket into space.

I wonder what the situation would be, if the geographic and situations of America and north Korea were reversed. If the Koreans were located in a huge country with natural resources, possessing a population of 300 million, and America was located in a country with only 14% arable land, and had sanctions imposed on it by external powers, thus preventing them from effectively utilizing and extracting the few natural resources it had.

Given the American work ethic, I think it would be safe to say that in such a situation, "America" would look more like Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, so-called Capitalist "Democracies" in Africa such as Nigeria don't seem to be all that fun, yet you won't see too many documentaries on how horrible life is there. Corruption and oppression can be just as bad under these regimes.

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Yes that's very true, but I would not put capitalism at fault for everything. For example, Rhodesia was once called the "breadbasket" of Africa. Under the Mugabe regime, the economy has all but collapsed.