“I and my camera crew arrived in Mexico, we’re being told the border to America is protected around the clock by armed machineguns, and trained attack dogs 24/7. They’re known to imprison journalists and torture dissenters, and I’ve signed up to live here for a week… we may not make it out alive.”
I picked a clearly anti-communist and anti-DPRK source to prove a point but there are many more from research papers to articles.
Defector testimony is not self-validating. There is serious reporting and academic work on the South Korean defector industry and the incentives surrounding it: selection bias, monetary incentives, media sensationalism, translation problems, trauma-related memory issues, political pressure, cases of embellishment and recantation, and demand for defector-activists who reproduce the narratives Western and South Korean audiences expect. For many defectors, this can also become an income stream in a society where they are otherwise economically marginalised.
Everything western citizens know about NK is US propaganda
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“I and my camera crew arrived in Mexico, we’re being told the border to America is protected around the clock by armed machineguns, and trained attack dogs 24/7. They’re known to imprison journalists and torture dissenters, and I’ve signed up to live here for a week… we may not make it out alive.”
Except, you know… independent journalists interviewing North Korean deserters.
“Independent”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart
I picked a clearly anti-communist and anti-DPRK source to prove a point but there are many more from research papers to articles.
Defector testimony is not self-validating. There is serious reporting and academic work on the South Korean defector industry and the incentives surrounding it: selection bias, monetary incentives, media sensationalism, translation problems, trauma-related memory issues, political pressure, cases of embellishment and recantation, and demand for defector-activists who reproduce the narratives Western and South Korean audiences expect. For many defectors, this can also become an income stream in a society where they are otherwise economically marginalised.
Even the satellite photos?
Someone does make a decision on which photos may be revealed to the public.
With cherrypicking, it’d not be hard to make some propaganda based on real photos that makes US look like a third world country as well.
See, they want you to think it shares a border with South Korea.