Saturday, July 10, 2010

More Art From The DPRK




Apparently, more like it is available at the Shinchon-Ri Museum in Pyongyang.

6 comments:

FGFM said...

Rape rooms!

Suhayl Saadi said...

Hieronymus Bosch. Obviously, this is the usual unsubtle visual propaganda concocted by totalitarian states. However, two points:

1)Remember the fake story about 'Iraqi soldiers and baby incubators' in Kuwait? That story, reported widely in the Western media, was untrue and was essentially an updated version of WWI's 'Hun soldiers eat infants' tale.

2) In view of the atrocities revealed through Wikileaks in relation to Afghanistan, plus those already known in the context of Iraq, in essence, is the idea of US soldiers committing such atrocities so very far from the truth?

angrysoba said...
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angrysoba said...

Hi Suhayl,

Yes, I agree on your points and I imagine that FGFM was also making that point too. As it happens, I don't remember the stories of the Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of the incubators in the first Gulf War but I have read about the story since then, first in a book called War Reporting for Cowards who takes a not exactly humourous but wry look at the so-called "War on Terror". The one that I remember from the build-up to the Iraq War was the story about the human paper shredder. As for the rape rooms in prisons, that was often denounced as propaganda and apparently detailed in Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear. But other reporters such as Robert Fisk have said they really did exist.

This post is actually meant as a supporting post for a review I haven't yet written of a book about DPRK propaganda. The author points out that the DPRK almost always chooses to show these types of war crimes of a highly dubious provenance instead of the far more obvious war crimes of saturation bombing of the whole country and use of massive amounts of napalm. In fact, while there was a massacre at a place called Shinchon, which these pictures supposedly depict, the massacre was carried out by Korean rightists, which were obviously allies of the US-led United Nations mission. The US most certainly did carry out war crimes in this curiously ill-remembered war but many of those are never talked about because, according to the author, the bombings are hard to reconcile with the idea that Kim Il-sung was a protective parent of the Korean teacher. It does sound like a bit of a stretch but I have found that the North Koreans really do play down those very real atrocities.

angrysoba said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Suhayl Sadai said...

Interesting, thanks for that very relevant information; yes, it figures that North Korean ruling cadres, with their almost psychotic view of reality (which in that psychotic respect reminds one oddly of Franco, who equated the mystical body of Spain with his pointy-hatted idea of the Catholic Church, though at least Franco did industrialise the country). Good luck with the book!