Thursday, August 12, 2010

North Korea on Youtube

The Korea Herald had a blurb on its front page that North Korea had opened a Youtube channel.  Now, this is very, very interesting news to me, because a North Korean propaganda channel on Youtube is/could be...

1. unintentionally hilarious
2. unintentionally frightening
3. a fascinating convergence of backward-looking thought with new media
4. in danger of being blocked by the Korean government
5. loaded with hilariously bad English

-here we expat bloggers have been moaning that South Korean promotions people have been failing to reach their audience because they've been publishing/producing stuff THEY like instead of stuff that'll actually reach their audience... how much do you want to bet a North Korean Youtube channel will raise that hilari-out-of-touchness to a degree we may never have seen before.

If the intended audience of the Youtube channel is the international world, and not just South Korean sympathizers/potential sympathizers, that is.

Here's North Korea's Youtube Channel: take it with a grain of salt, and keep an eye on it: who knows when the hilarity will begin.  I'm praying for subtitles and English language narrators to keep me joy-ing.

Also interesting are the comment threads on most Youtube channels related to North Korea: even my own video about North Korea gets a random "Hail the great North Korea" comment posted on it about every third month or so.

For more North Korea on Youtube:
JucheKorea
rodrigorojo1 (Hat-tip to Reasonable Man)
the famous north/south b-boy showdown video that went around Youtube.

The video you SHOULD watch is this one, by LINK (Liberty In North Korea) - this was a video sponsored by Google to spread word about the situation in North Korea.  This video features a talk by a North Korean defector who grew up in a North Korean concentration camp.  Did you know there are still concentration camps operating in the world?  Why isn't every person in the world outraged about this?

public executions, mass starvation, concentration camps; the list goes on.

The tragedy: this video only has 100 000 or so views as of today.

story on google news
I'd link the Korea Herald article, but I've been getting "this site will harm your computer warnings" lately.

Vice Guide to North Korea: a tour of North Korea from the view of a western TV Crew who pretended to be tourists, and took hidden camera footage.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That Vice Guide stuff is awesome, a friend sent that to me a while back. I think they have several different clips available on their website.

Unknown said...

Well you'll find plenty of North Korean footage if you search hard enough, as well as testimonials by defectors from those concentration camps.

The author of the Aquariums of Pyongyang even met Bush a few years back for his work.

The problem is that because NK is such a closed state, there isn't a lot of stuff coming out.

Once the Northern regime falls, I cannot imagine the moral panic that it will bring once those concentration camps are found and reported on. A state run concentration camp that is being operated for nearly twice as long as Stalinist ones, and more horrifying by a few orders in magnitude? It will be unbearable to most..