North Korean News Is Funny

Mobile soft drink stalls

Somebody? — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:24:35 +0000

You can now buy drinks on the street in Pyongyang it seems. As is usually the case with KCNA’s “slice of life” stories, they report on some completely mundane thing presumably as evidence that things are going well in the country.

Except this looks suspiciously like private enterprise, which in the DPRK is not mundane at all. The story does not say that this is capitalism, but to me it’s odd that there is no clear implication of the Dear Leader, in all his largesse, having provided these supplies for the good of the people. Instead drinks and “Eskimo Pies” (they even appropriated and capitalized a Nestlé brand) are sold. Whether this really is some sort of market economy or not, the fact that the language of the story is not steeped in Communist rhetoric is interesting. Maybe they are learning how to write propaganda slightly less ineffectively?

On the other hand, this is Pyongyang, which means it’s only the country’s elite enjoying such luxuries in any event. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear the rural areas are still in miserable shape.

The North Korean angling contest

Somebody? — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:12:53 +0000

The DPRK goverment would like to give the impression that people fish for fun in North Korea, and that the environment is clean enough to allow for fishing, even in the city. Hence, the report on the yearly angling contest held in Pyongyang. So there you have it: North Koreans have leisure activities.

Kim Jong Il advises a chicken farm

Somebody? — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:04:18 +0000

If you ask for the DPRK’s official party line on Kim Jong Il, it is that he knows pretty much everything about everything. It should come as no surprise that he provided advice to a chicken farm about how to produce more. I think we need to get Obama to help the United States’ chicken industry in the same way.

Pyongyang still has a grocery store

Somebody? — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:56:36 +0000

Pyongyang has a ritzy grocery store that has been mentioned before here. KCNA seems to enjoy advertising it with odd and mundane details: apparently you can buy quail meat in packages of 1-3 kilograms. I believe this is the same grocery store that has an elevator that KCNA saw fit to report on.

A picture with Kim Il Sun (sic)

Somebody? — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:18:52 +0000

Here’s another heartwarming story about Kim Il Sung. This one details how some commoners had their picture taken with him. That’s it. As of this writing, they even misspelled Kim Il Sung’s name in the headline, leaving off the last G. I presume someone is going to be in serious trouble for that.

Public Pool Priorities in Pyongyang

Somebody? — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:16:09 +0000

On the same day that KCNA reported that the public Panwoldo public pools, for use of the citizens of Pyongyang, are overcrowded, they reported that a luxurious-sounding swimming pool complex has been built for foreign diplomats and their families. Seems like rather than building that, the cash-strapped country could have done well to build more pools for its own people — or, even better, to feed them!

Dictatorial rule in South Korea

Somebody? — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:19:17 +0000

It is a common theme for KCNA to call attention to the purported dictatorial rule in South Korea. Certainly some people are unhappy but elections in the South are reasonably legitimate. There isn’t actually a dictatorship there. So why does the North persist in publishing this easily refutable nonsense when people can just go to Seoul and check for themselves? My guess is that it’s a combination of the writers actually believing what they write (after all, they probably haven’t actually seen the South) and nobody being allowed to admit in any way that things are far better south of the 38th parallel.

The legendary song “Patriotic Song”

Somebody? — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:05:57 +0000

Kim Il Sung wrote (for a presumably very loose definition of “wrote”) a song about Korea entitled “Patriotic Song”. This is now being featured on commemorative postage stamps in the DPRK. Well, I guess the name of the song is, if nothing else, simple and to the point.

Maniacs’ Disgusting Sophism Snubbed

Somebody? — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:01:13 +0000

What with the recent US/ROK wargames and the slightly less recent sinking of the Cheonan, KCNA propagandists have put their thesaurus into overdrive. Presumably whoever is now responsible for English there has had far heavier exposure to the English writings of other communist regimes than he or she has had to the English writings of current native English speakers, but the desire is there to make the text sound a bit more interesting. So this patchwork of odd word choices results.

Korean-style machine tooling

Somebody? — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:10:26 +0000

On their website, KCNA often publicizes editorials which appear in Rodong Sinmun, a prominent state-controlled newspaper in the DPRK. In general those editorials are the usual blather about how great the North is because the Dear Leader is great, and how things are only going to get better from here, and how the US imperialist aggressors hate Korea and just want to control it, and so on. There is also often mention of a “great leap forward”, which is the DPRK term for forcing everyone to work even harder for a period of time to meet the latest harebrained production quotas.

This one, however, adds a bit at the end randomly mentioning the production of iron, fiber, fertilizer, and what I assume to be CNC machine-tool technology. An odd mix — perhaps these are what they are focusing on during the current great leap forward?