http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums...ad.php?t=82755

It really does make me appreciate living in the US. And to think I had took some freedoms for granted.....

The beaches especially made me pause.

Yeah, I guess you don't have to worry about shark attacks in NK...Scary stuff.

Next in line: a Korea-inspired Art Lebedev keyboard!

Some of the things were nice, but overall, I'm thankful to live when and where I do.

That hotel on the second page.. WTF? Without doubt the most impressive building to never be completed. Why not it finish?

Those photos were a bit of an eye opener.

Eh... while I would not want to live under the NK regime, I feel that some of the comments were overexaggerated.

Maybe it is because they live in the USA or some other '1st-World' country, but such architecture is not uncommon in Asia.

If I were to add more vehicles to some of those pictures, it would not look too much different from what I can see in places such as Malaysia( my country of birth) or Taiwan.

To those guys I wish to say, "Dudes, it's not that strange to have old houses next to new ones; and not every country can afford to have the latest car models."

As for unfinished construction projects... haha... ask some of my more cynical fellow Malaysians what they think of unfinished construction projects that take years, if not at least a decade, to finish.

Just something I wanted to lift off my chest.

I am not a fan of NK policy, but I strongly feel that if one must criticise something, it has to be with relevant basis.

My thoughts exactly Dundee, well said. I'll add that a relevant basis almost never includes pictures - instances of one event taken out of context. One statement in its relevant context is worth a thousand pictures. Yeah, there were some miserable (and pretty nice) places there, and nobody should have to live under the rule of one person, but the goons talking about 'wow, black/white difference between communism and capitalism' are missing quite a bit of historical, political, and socioeconomic context. Things happen for a multiplicity of reasons, and NK is hosed at the crossroads of several that make none of those pics surprising.

As for the hotel, if you make it to page 9 of that thread, someone says that the unfinished hotel was built to be the tallest building ever constructed, but someone beat em to it.

That looks like a rather nice place to live. People aren't free, the government can listen to your phone calls and misinform you, but I would guess the crime rates are pretty low.

Great link [img]smile.gif[/img]

For those that are interested here is an astonishingly detailed and really really interesting account of someone elses travels through N Korea.

It's a prison state, one of the worst run communist countries in the world.

No internet? No cellphones? Different rules for foreigners and locals? More policemen and military than actual working class? What a joke.

The North is a xenophobic military dictatorship, plain and simple. Seriously. Most South Koreans want to reunify (families are split in half by the border after all, just like Germany in the Cold War), but when reunification comes, the Korean economy will be in serious trouble; the South will simply not be able to carry the weight of the woefully undeveloped North.

It's not about communism vs capitalism, it's so much more complicated than that, the history behind NK's political system goes back thousands of years. Hell, if you're really into gross generalisations and vague political comparisons then NK is more akin to the feudal kingdoms of Ancient Greece that were ruled by militaristic God-Kings than to anything Marx and Engels wrote about. As you've seen in the pictures, many places in the North operate at medieval levels of technology and organisation, but what is even worse is the cultural impact that the division of North and South has brought to Korean families (family is pretty much everything in the Korean Confucian mindset).


And have you guys heard that Pyongyang is testing out ICBM technology? It's all over the news here. Maybe it's all just rooster-crowing bluster, but it's still cause for concern. To hell with Iran, Bush needs to get his priorities straight.

[ 06-23-2006, 12:19 AM: Message edited by: Luther ]