Redditors having a normal one about the DPRK again

Yeah this popped up on the BBC and as usual it was just "video from years ago", "appears to show" and then some quotes from defectors saying "they shoot you if they catch you watching squid game". Just hilarious levels of make-believe.

Which is hilarious because Squid Game is implicitly pro-DPRK
- I never watched Squid Game (because I am a little contrarian) but is the show really pro-DPRK or just anti occupied Korea?
Yo what if fucking Squid Games is like fucking NORTH KOREA and how evil Kim Jong UN is?
- Holy shit man. Mind == blown
- Bro Squid Game is obviously pro capitalist, they pay you money if you win
  And winning is good and money is good, so obviously capitalism is good

It's a shame they weren't able to smuggle the sound out of the country as well. Especially with how widely spread this video was.

the footage is rare but the audio is legendary foil
Can you blame them? They only have Nokia brick phones in North Korea, and 95% of them are used for remote nuclear missile detonation because they can’t afford to build an on-impact warhead.

No sound, no original subtitles, no one talking, shown by the BBC.

Source: My balls

pirated K-dramas are ubiquitous in the DPRK and no one gives a shit
To the potential lurking liberals, that's what a resonable claim about North Korea looks like, unlike your idea that they execute ayone caught watching drama because they're so evil which is peak liberal idealist nonsense.
Why is the content ubiquitously pirated if it's legal and totally acceptable in NK?
I could imagine someone unfamiliar with America saying "weed is ubiquitous and nobody gives a shit", but that'd be a massive oversimplification given we have a metric fuckton of people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.
Could it not be the case that in NK that pirating and watching foreign media is both extremely common and against the law/lands people in prison?
And if that is the case, then even if this one case happens to be fabricated, there's likely a ton of cases where people are actually imprisoned for breaking the law, since that's usually how breaking laws goes. I don't think it should be against the law to watch foreign media.
- Why is the content ubiquitously pirated if it's legal and totally acceptable in NK?
  This is speculation, but I'm gonna take a wild guess and say South Korea refuses to license media to the DPRK so they literally have no other choice but to pirate it. Like if you tried to obtain a PS1 game in the West right now, Sony isn't selling the vast majority of them any longer so your best bet is to download it from a ROM site.
- Why is the content ubiquitously pirated if it's legal and totally acceptable in NK?
  Do you pay for content??
  Could it not be the case
  there's likely a ton of cases
  I don't think it should be
  Thank you for your feels based analysis

I read an account by a DPRK defector once. He had been given fingernail clippers that were made in the USA. They were so well made, and cut such neat clean lines that they made him despondent, because he knew the DPRK could never make anything that well.

Wtf they're nail clippers. If you can manufacture AKs you can manufacture nail clippers. Literally 3 bent and cut bits of polished spring steel, a rivet, and a retaining pin
- Keyser Soze style
- Nope, in North Korea entire towns share the communal nail clipper or if they dont have that they get the guy with the most teeth to bite them off for them
Are there still nailcliplers made in America? I don't believe I ever bought one not Chinese.
Funny, I just experienced the inverse of this. Saw a tweet from a Russian about how due to remnant industry from the USSR they can get some specialized machinery for $10 there and it costs $1000 in the US.
Who would win in a fight, a country building atom bombs or a pair of snippy bois?
They will beleve the most ridiculous nonsense as long as it's compatible with their unshakable assumptions that [country liberals don't like] is literally 1984.
This almost feels real. Like maybe a small oversight on production lines due to sanctions and the like.
But now Real Korea has their own "Legos", so who the fuck cares, really.
are they fucking serious
no communist can withstand contact to the perfected craft of tweezerman cosmetic tools.
That DPRK defector's name was Mai-Ass

Gotta scroll down ten comment threads to get to the first one that's critical of the narrative being presented.

You can just overlay any text over a video and people believe it.

Fucking TRUE

Yeah my coworker tried showing me this. There's no audio and nothing to indicate what's actually going on. I don't know what trials in the DPRK like, but do they really look like this? The audience looked like they were in a stadium or auditorium or something. For all I know this could be a theater and everyone on that stage is an actor.

I don't even think watching dramas are illegal in the DPRK lmao. I'm pretty sure nearly everyone in the DPRK watches pirated media they buy on USB drives and no one cares.

Yeah they sell them on the street, government owned vendors do it. Jaka Parker filmed it

what in the everloving fuck is the SAND Institute? they make it sound like a legitimate organization, but literally the only mentions I can find of it anywhere are either quoting the BBC article or the article itself

these fuckers can just outright make shit up and there's going to be some rube who'll buy it, zero questions asked

It's just rare footage bro you wouldnt have seen it. She goes to a different school
- she used to at least, before she was caught watching K-dramas and shot with an AA turret by Dear Leader
https://sand.or.kr/kr/
Unfortunately without the ability to understand Korean I can't Google any info on funding, but if I had to guess I would say NED or US state department.
- lmao, I'm checking out the website with google translate and it's absolutely breaking my CIA meter, this shit looks like one of these fake websites the CIA used as fronts for spies in Iraq
  look at their history section, lol
  also, in the SAND activities page, there's a tab that goes into their vast social contribution:
  I know that google translate does not give perfect results, but this is hilarious to me lol a completely empty shell of an organization that just sprang up out of seemingly nowhere and somehow has enough credibility to be taken seriously by the BBC, the supposed bastions of quality journalism... get the fuck outta here
Apparently it's the "South and North Development Institution" but I can't find anything on it either
Libertarian think tank nº 1692356874
It's like the sand piled between the ears of liberals

BBC: They are being sentenced to a life of hard labor for watching tv

Reality: Me and the boys interrupting the adults to ask if we can buy a Fortnite skin

god I hope I wasn't ever this fucking stupid in the past

I always think this one is a good jumping off point
- Looking at the make-up of the two governments was big for me too; one led by freedom fighters and the other by Japanese collaborators. Guess which was which?
Absolutely true, it’s astonishing to me but also not how few people know the US conducted a full scale genocide in the country, and set up a military dictatorship in the south that directly took over the implements of the Imperial Japanese occupation. At the very least people tend to shut up when I ask what they have to say about 2 million Koreans being killed and 80%+ of infrastructure being leveled in one sided bombing.
When I was in high school just over a decade ago they were still peddling the Korean War in canada at least as a “just war” that we should be proud of like WW1/2. Absolutely zero mention of the whole genocide thing, really disgusting stuff in hindsight. I knew I was morally in the right to skip Remembrance Day nonsense to drink and play Minecraft
- Yep my Canadian history classes in the late 90s also conveniently excluded the Korean War genocide, said it was a just war and that almost none of the good guys died so such a success for Canada's military prowess.
I wonder if that's why the DPRK, out of all AES nations, gets so much outrageous propaganda pushed about them? Even China doesn't get the same extreme levels of fantastical claims. The goal is to stop people ever even taking that first step towards thinking about it as a real country, it needs to be a fictional villain that is cartoonishly evil in order for the western viewpoint of the country to even exist.
- I think the DPRK gets it because it's an entire business in South Korea to sell salacious rumors to newspapers. South Korea has entire media empires built specifically on selling shocking stories from defectors or spies or whatever. Since the UN doesn't allow North Koreans to travel freely, it's easy to make up whatever you want and get no backlash.
- People probably think The Interview was a documentary
- The DPRK is a lot more culturally, economically and politically isolated than other AES states. It's easy to counter propaganda about, say, Cuba, because despite the USs best efforts Cuba does have some stronger geopolitical allies who are willing and able to counter the more egregious disinfo about them. The DPRKs allies are all states the West hates and doesn't take seriously.
Where can I read some info about the DPRK, that isnt trying to blame them for everything wrong in the world at every sentence? I just read the wikipedia page and its full of blaming the north while forgetting the south puppet dictatorship
- Possibly something by Stephen Gowans?
  Or start here: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2063780
  Or here: https://dprkorea.carrd.co/
- Gowan's Patriots, Traitors, and Empires
  Blowback Season 3

Baking the blurriest jpegs harder than Q.

I thought it was an artist's rendition for a second.
- north korea really does look like a PS2 cutscene
- I definitely thought this was a shot from a bootleg anime at first glance.

This looks like a school auditorium, 90% chance it's some sort of explanation of the judicial process

Would people really do that, just use ambiguous footage of something and make up a whole lie about north korea to tell on the internet?
I was thinking a play, but that makes more sense.

Yo, any folks on here got info about this SAND institute that sourced this video.

Trying to look them up only gives me the BBC article about this video which has this to say about them "This video was provided to the BBC by the South and North Development (Sand), a research institute that works with defectors from the North."

Something deeply sus about this, if you don't mind me donning the tinfoil hat a sec.

I was curious and looked a bit more into this. So looking up public information regarding the org in Korean, there's 0 employees. The registered address is in a residential apartment building directly facing the head office of seoul metropolitan office and two blocks away from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 1
These are their web presence Youtube Webpage Twitter
It seems to be an evolution of NK defectors association. But I didn't look much into it because I got sidetracked by the South Korean Ministry of Reunification that I stumbled upon while looking into SAND. The planning regarding the forced privatization of North Korean land is wild.
- Thanks for the links comrade.
  Can't speak Korean myself so I'm having to rely on the little robot in my phone to tell me what that website says.
  Having a little read about though, and it's kinda what I expected - some of the articles on it seem to be arguing for a tighter surveillance state to root out communists and the rest are your typical unsourced defector stories.
  Edit: whole lotta reposts of BBC articles.
  Edit again: including a story eerily similar to the recent one.
  Edit once more: and in contradiction, this.
  1/5 of North Koreans have publicly stated they watch K-dramas a crime executable by death and/or hard labour.
- If I was a spy risking my life and my family’s life and my family’s subsequent 25 generations to sneak a video of evil go the heroes, I’d maybe spend an extra second to also capture sound lol
- That's a reasonable assumption, but the website Trudge linked to in this thread has a timeline of SAND's history that starts in 2017 and ends in 2019 (although the "research" section of the website has links to, like, seminars and shit they've done since and they've maintained a presence on Twitter since 2022, so it's likely they just haven't updated the timeline).

There is litteraly nothing in this clip that indicate what they are being convicted of, where the fuck are they getting that from? Also, am I the only one to think it's a little sus that this video doesn't have any audio?

Audio could be a problem, because it would mean that someone who can speak Korean could translate. We need a white guy who has never left America to be our guide to understanding the strange ways of the Oriental Despots.
It's fine that there's no audio, as Westerners believe neither their ears nor their eyes. A while back there was a top post on
about Chinese fans at an association football game. The headline did not match the content of the video at all, yet all the commenters were eating it up. I forget exactly what the claim was. Maybe about wearing masks? Lol
- I have repeatedly seen videos of Pakistani families celebrating cricket being shared as if they are celebrating 9/11, which now I am older and more jaded I realise is not nearly as bad as the kind of genocidal shit Westerners celebrate.

uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire

It has to be fake, the guy sitting with his legs spread would have been shot on the spot if this was real.

Americans try not to make up unhinged lies about the victims of their genocidal psychosis challenge: Impossible difficulty.

I wonder why the audio was cut. No way what is actually going on is different from the reporting, surely!

DPRK can't afford soundwaves

Reddit is no different than the elderly sharing Facebook memes.

Gen question, is there any policy against watching foreign media or is it an access issue because of the sanctions?

There’s restrictions on the internet like in China (more strict though), but there is access to foreign media, like with the Pyongyang Int. Film Festival (annual). The reason there are internet restrictions is risk of attack/surveillance and anti-DPRK propaganda, although there is also the angle of access given the DPRK’s development, not to put it down but some areas don’t have much technology.

Every morning, when I wake up, the first thing I do is drink a big glass of leaded gasoline because I'm an American and it's my right. The next thing I do is wonder how horrible it would be to live in a country that regularly imprisons children.

They can just make up whatever they want and everyone believes them

The DPRK is beheading babies who are caught watching k-porn!! Just trust me, that is really happening, guys!!!!

lmao these stupid fucking redditors are too lazy to even look up a source

they see some military lookin people put obviosuly prop handcuffs on a kid and they're like "OH MY GOSH!!!!!1!1!!" and don't even look up that this "SAND Institute" is barely even existent

other treasures i found when spelunking in the disgusting sewer known as """reddit""":
people saying the prop handcuffs were used because "they can't afford anything else" even thought the DPRK has fucking ballistic missiles
people saying the prop handcuffs were used because the citizens were too hungry to break them, or that the armed guards would shoot them if they tried to run, in that case, why the fuck are the handcuffs even there in the first place
people saying that pro dprk people would say kids deserved that, and then go watch a western movie (???)
- This is like collective storytelling, people trying to make up the craziest stories they have with no evidence. This is how stuff like the Gulag Archipelago got written isn't it

There’s no sound so it’s proof of nothing. Very cool.

Uncritical support to DPRK, but that's a creepy looking room.

It's like the room you would find and the end of the backrooms, and you're confronted by t h e m

Part of the “backrooms” aesthetic is the grainy quality
Considering it's outdoors, I'm not sure I'd call it a room.
- ...is it?
  It looks like a gymnasium floor with curtains hanging on the back wall

This just looks like a shitty ass drawing.

Kim Jung Un must have already executed all the talented drawers.

Ok but did it triple compared to the pre-covid numbers or is this compared to the post-covid numbers?

Serious question since DPRK lockdowns will have drastically reduced the number leaving the country. Thus any increase being framed as "tripled" may just be a return to normal levels.

literally can't find any information at all about the "South and North Development Institute," but I wouldn't know where to look on the Korean internet. Just how full of shit are they?

well someone's gotta take a stand

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It looks like the two people in the center were hand-drawn