Welcome to a land whose leader's birth was supposedly greeted by a double rainbow along with birds that sang in human voices.
A land where the people all wear boiler suits.
A land where the "Great Leader" correctly managed to guess the number of fruit on the Great Leader's Pomegranate Tree.
This isn't a land in a Terry Pratchett novel. This is real....and it's North Korea.
In 2003, a BBC reporter managed to get a look at life inside the world's last truly Stalinist state...
Welcome to North Korea - a backward and brainwashed nation
By Ben Anderson, BBC reporter who filmed undercover inside the Dear Leader's North Korea
28/05/2009
The Daily Mirror
North Korea is one of the world's most secretive societies.
It is one of the few countries still operating under harsh communist rule. I spent three weeks inside it, secretly filming for the BBC.
I was shocked at the truly secretive nature of a nation whose people are brainwashed by their leaders.
On arrival in the capital, Pyongyang, I was assigned two government minders. They couldn't have been nicer. "Welcome to North Korea," they beamed as I walked out of the airport and into the world's last truly Stalinist dictatorship.
Travelling on a tourist visa, I had to give assurances I wasn't a journalist to become one of just 150 westerners that entered North Korea that year.
Before long I realised the people here were truly blind to the rest of the world.
Everyone I met was anxious to tell me they didn't deserve to be on President Bush's "Axis of Evil" list, which he famously drew up in 2002.
They also wanted me to know that, in almost everything, North Korea was superior to the rest of the world. In most dictatorships you soon find the truth among disgruntled masses but in North Korea this just isn't the case.
People look at you with a straight face and explain that a double rainbow greeted Kim Jong Il's birth, along with birds that sang in human voices.
They will tell you that electric fences on the beaches are "to keep the American scuba spies out" and that the US started the Korean War.
It's a personality cult forced on an entire population and I didn't find a single sign of dissent. Kim Jong Il is called the Dear Leader. His father, who despite being dead is still the President, is called the Great Leader.
There are three newspapers in North Korea, plus one radio and one TV station - all publishing the same kind of propaganda all day long.
A typical front-page story I remember had a picture of Kim Jong Il at a goat farm, which he proclaimed great because protein is important.
A smaller story said that the "US Imperialist Aggressors" (they are not called Americans here) had massacred 17 civilians in Iraq.
I asked a minder if she was curious to visit anywhere in America. "No," she said, surprised at my stupid question.
"My teacher told me if you go out at night, gangsters will shoot you." I asked why children ran away from me. "Because you look American," said my other minder, "and in our movies all bad guys are American."
Everywhere you go, there is a Great or Dear Leader story, and usually a shining monument to it.
These monuments, along with the military, are the only things the government seems to spend money on.
One day during my 2003 visit we were driven along empty roads for hours. There are few cars, with most agricultural workers taken to and from work in army trucks. We were to see the perfect co-operative farm, where the story revolved around the "Great Leader's Pomegranate tree".
Apparently he had visited and asked how many fruits were in the tree. One farmer said 300, another 500.
The Great Leader thought it was more like 800 and, when he left, the farmers picked every fruit... and there were 798 pomegranates. All this - along with Kim Jong Il's zany haircut, his boiler suits and high heels - has comedy value but hides a dark truth.
For while the dictator plays with rockets, his film studio, imports his own pizza chefs and lorry loads of Hennessy's most expensive Cognac, his people are starving.
When the country suffered a famine in the 90s, somewhere between 200,000 and three million died. Every face you see is gaunt, and their stateissued boiler suits hang off bony bodies.
We were taken to a VIP restaurant one night towards the end of our tour and were given a fried egg on our burger for first course, and a few plates of gristle and fat for the main course.
I couldn't imagine what ordinary people ate, under obligatory portraits of the Great and Dear leaders.
Many have fled across the border to China, but those caught are sent to brutal labour camps to serve long sentences, often with their families thrown in with them.
Recent events are depressingly familiar - it almost seems as if Kim Jong Il is an attention seeker, throwing tantrums when North Korea slips back into obscurity and the world's focus is on Iran, Pakistan or Iraq.
He's done all this before. He's promised to destroy Seoul, fired missiles and authorised controlled nuclear blasts. All he really wants is to maintain power.
I suspect that, just like before, negotiations will begin and North Korea will eventually get enough food aid to prevent another famine.
And all the time the Dear Leader will be telling his people he's the one feeding them, and the missiles and explosions are glorious weapons that will halt the impending invasion by the US Imperialist Aggressors.
And they must listen and agree.
Great Britain VS North Korea
VS
Area
Great Britain: 244,820 sq km (the same size as Italy, or Oregon)
North Korea: 120,540 sq km (half the size of Britain)
Population
Great Britain: 61.6 million
North Korea: 24 million
Capital
Great Britain: London (population 14 million)
North Korea: Pyongyang (population 3 million)
Governance
Great Britain: Constitutional Monarchy/ The Monarch is Queen Elizabeth II)
North Korea: Single-party communist state /Eternal President is Kim Il-Sung
GDP
Great Britain: $2.674 trillion (5th largest in the world)
North Korea: $26 billion (85th largest in the world)
Formation
Great Britain: Act of Union 1707 (England/Wales unify with Scotland to form GB). Act of Union 1800 (GB unifies with Ireland to form UK). Anglo-Irish Treaty 1922 (Southern Ireland breaks away from UK to form a separate nation, leaving Northern Ireland as part of UK. Southern Ireland becomes republic in 1948 )
North Korea: Korea divided along the 38th parallell after WWII. The Soviets administered the North, and the Americans administered the South. The North eventually became North Korea.
Military
Great Britain: The Royal Navy is the world's second most powerful navy. Britain has nuclear weapons.
North Korea: The North Korean Army is the fourth largest in the world, with around 1.2 million troops. North Korea has the highest percentage of military personnel per capita of any nation in the world, with approximately 1 enlisted soldier for every 25 citizens. North Korea has said it is conducting nuclear tests.
mirror.co.uk
A land where the people all wear boiler suits.
A land where the "Great Leader" correctly managed to guess the number of fruit on the Great Leader's Pomegranate Tree.
This isn't a land in a Terry Pratchett novel. This is real....and it's North Korea.
In 2003, a BBC reporter managed to get a look at life inside the world's last truly Stalinist state...
Welcome to North Korea - a backward and brainwashed nation
By Ben Anderson, BBC reporter who filmed undercover inside the Dear Leader's North Korea
28/05/2009
The Daily Mirror
North Korea is one of the world's most secretive societies.
It is one of the few countries still operating under harsh communist rule. I spent three weeks inside it, secretly filming for the BBC.
I was shocked at the truly secretive nature of a nation whose people are brainwashed by their leaders.
On arrival in the capital, Pyongyang, I was assigned two government minders. They couldn't have been nicer. "Welcome to North Korea," they beamed as I walked out of the airport and into the world's last truly Stalinist dictatorship.
Travelling on a tourist visa, I had to give assurances I wasn't a journalist to become one of just 150 westerners that entered North Korea that year.
Before long I realised the people here were truly blind to the rest of the world.
Everyone I met was anxious to tell me they didn't deserve to be on President Bush's "Axis of Evil" list, which he famously drew up in 2002.
They also wanted me to know that, in almost everything, North Korea was superior to the rest of the world. In most dictatorships you soon find the truth among disgruntled masses but in North Korea this just isn't the case.
People look at you with a straight face and explain that a double rainbow greeted Kim Jong Il's birth, along with birds that sang in human voices.
They will tell you that electric fences on the beaches are "to keep the American scuba spies out" and that the US started the Korean War.
It's a personality cult forced on an entire population and I didn't find a single sign of dissent. Kim Jong Il is called the Dear Leader. His father, who despite being dead is still the President, is called the Great Leader.
There are three newspapers in North Korea, plus one radio and one TV station - all publishing the same kind of propaganda all day long.
A typical front-page story I remember had a picture of Kim Jong Il at a goat farm, which he proclaimed great because protein is important.
A smaller story said that the "US Imperialist Aggressors" (they are not called Americans here) had massacred 17 civilians in Iraq.
I asked a minder if she was curious to visit anywhere in America. "No," she said, surprised at my stupid question.
"My teacher told me if you go out at night, gangsters will shoot you." I asked why children ran away from me. "Because you look American," said my other minder, "and in our movies all bad guys are American."
Everywhere you go, there is a Great or Dear Leader story, and usually a shining monument to it.
These monuments, along with the military, are the only things the government seems to spend money on.
One day during my 2003 visit we were driven along empty roads for hours. There are few cars, with most agricultural workers taken to and from work in army trucks. We were to see the perfect co-operative farm, where the story revolved around the "Great Leader's Pomegranate tree".
Apparently he had visited and asked how many fruits were in the tree. One farmer said 300, another 500.
The Great Leader thought it was more like 800 and, when he left, the farmers picked every fruit... and there were 798 pomegranates. All this - along with Kim Jong Il's zany haircut, his boiler suits and high heels - has comedy value but hides a dark truth.
For while the dictator plays with rockets, his film studio, imports his own pizza chefs and lorry loads of Hennessy's most expensive Cognac, his people are starving.
When the country suffered a famine in the 90s, somewhere between 200,000 and three million died. Every face you see is gaunt, and their stateissued boiler suits hang off bony bodies.
We were taken to a VIP restaurant one night towards the end of our tour and were given a fried egg on our burger for first course, and a few plates of gristle and fat for the main course.
I couldn't imagine what ordinary people ate, under obligatory portraits of the Great and Dear leaders.
Many have fled across the border to China, but those caught are sent to brutal labour camps to serve long sentences, often with their families thrown in with them.
Recent events are depressingly familiar - it almost seems as if Kim Jong Il is an attention seeker, throwing tantrums when North Korea slips back into obscurity and the world's focus is on Iran, Pakistan or Iraq.
He's done all this before. He's promised to destroy Seoul, fired missiles and authorised controlled nuclear blasts. All he really wants is to maintain power.
I suspect that, just like before, negotiations will begin and North Korea will eventually get enough food aid to prevent another famine.
And all the time the Dear Leader will be telling his people he's the one feeding them, and the missiles and explosions are glorious weapons that will halt the impending invasion by the US Imperialist Aggressors.
And they must listen and agree.
Great Britain VS North Korea
Area
Great Britain: 244,820 sq km (the same size as Italy, or Oregon)
North Korea: 120,540 sq km (half the size of Britain)
Population
Great Britain: 61.6 million
North Korea: 24 million
Capital
Great Britain: London (population 14 million)
North Korea: Pyongyang (population 3 million)
Governance
Great Britain: Constitutional Monarchy/ The Monarch is Queen Elizabeth II)
North Korea: Single-party communist state /Eternal President is Kim Il-Sung
GDP
Great Britain: $2.674 trillion (5th largest in the world)
North Korea: $26 billion (85th largest in the world)
Formation
Great Britain: Act of Union 1707 (England/Wales unify with Scotland to form GB). Act of Union 1800 (GB unifies with Ireland to form UK). Anglo-Irish Treaty 1922 (Southern Ireland breaks away from UK to form a separate nation, leaving Northern Ireland as part of UK. Southern Ireland becomes republic in 1948 )
North Korea: Korea divided along the 38th parallell after WWII. The Soviets administered the North, and the Americans administered the South. The North eventually became North Korea.
Military
Great Britain: The Royal Navy is the world's second most powerful navy. Britain has nuclear weapons.
North Korea: The North Korean Army is the fourth largest in the world, with around 1.2 million troops. North Korea has the highest percentage of military personnel per capita of any nation in the world, with approximately 1 enlisted soldier for every 25 citizens. North Korea has said it is conducting nuclear tests.
mirror.co.uk
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