(Part 2) Top products from r/northkorea

I think the first point to consider is that The Orphan Master's Son should be read as a domestic drama, more along the lines of Nothing to Envy than any of the foreign-policy focused news and zomg-weird-pop-performance-footage that dominates this subreddit and /r/northkoreanews.

In that light, the Orphan Master's Son is a lovely, well-told story, and it was well-researched, but it's still clearly a second-hand impression of the country. It doesn't add to the outside world's stock of DPRK information; it just retells the tragedies already told by Shin Dong-hyuk and Kenji Fujimoto in a literary style.

Then too, there are places where the needs of the story subsume the reality on the ground. For example, the book entertains the notion that the state would promote just individual one actress its paragon of female virtue and one individual soldier as the paragon of male virtue. This is important to author's point about public and private identity and whether love also needs truth, but it's wholly out of step with the Kim regime's way of doing business. Kim Il Sung is the one god in North Korea, and the only permissible icons are his successors, and to a lesser extent, senior party politicians. Pop figures are disposable.

But The Orphan Master's Son is a good read. It would go high on my list of recommendations for someone who wants a starting point on the country but is scared of footnotes and foreign names. But if your DPRK obsession hinges more on predicting the fate of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, it won't give you much.

They had to praise him when the bandages came off or they'd be thrown out of their housing or sent to a work camp. Also, those people were handpicked by the government for their loyalty and training in ideology. They knew it was being filmed. It was a free propaganda stunt for NK.

It's impossible to know how brainwashed the country is. The documents and testimonials that came out of the USSR after the fall attest to this. Many of them simply went along with the party line to survive, while others consciously (or sub consciously) produced a mixture of Soviet and civilian (for lack of a better term) culture that served to both keep the regime satisfied and fulfill their own societal and cultural needs. This could very well be happening in NK. We have no idea, but recent videos that have been smuggled out show unrest in the provinces. People are talking back to police, and there was the incident with the grafitti last month. Modified radios are also more widespread than once though, so outside news is getting in moreso than it was in the last few decades.

RansomIblis is right, the army is starving. They had been the most taken care of segment of the population until very recently. If they starve, everything falls apart. They will not shoot civilians if they see that they are no longer any better than the average citizen.

I'm glad that you're interested in the NK situation, but please do some more research beyond youtubes and online vids. Check out this book for a great education on the subject. It's big, but highly readable and enjoyable.

Eyes of the Tailless Animals Eyes of the Tailless Animals - A book about a woman that lived a fairly comfortable life, but was forced into prison camps after she refused to take part in official corruption. It's a very personal memoir, but I found it to be a good read.

Somewhere Inside By Lisa and Laura Ling. I read this before I read "The World is Bigger Now," and they're two very different books. Laura was a tool for the North Koreans during their captivity because of the connections she had. Her boss, Al Gore, was able to involve the State Department and ultimately led to Clinton's rescue of them. This is more political and less emotional when compared to Euna Lee's book. I found it quite informative.

I recommend The Impossible State. I am about halfway through it and here is what I have gotten so far.

N. Korea is in a very weak position if actual war broke out. The major reason that the U.S. and S. Korea won't attack and want to avoid an all out conflict is not because they would lose, but because thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of soldiers and civilians would die before the end.

N. Korea still has to project the image that it can inflict massive amounts of casualties in order to maintain peace. If it became obvious that N. Korea could not inflict heavy losses on the South, then neither the South nor the U.S. would listen to any of its demands.

Its far more complex than that, which is why I recommend the book.