5/3/2005: Korea at night

[Undertoad]

Always fun are the "earth at night" images but whenever I see then, I always look at North and South Korea and how vastly different they appear. This is the first such image that I've seen that isolates the entire peninsula.

I had thought the north was just poor -- and they are, eating grass if they can to avoid starving -- but it turns out that this is also the result of a personality cult demanding that all lights be off and all people in the country asleep by curfew time. Because the entire country is a slave state.

Oh. That's much better.

Christpher Hitchens puts it together in this piece on North Korea, which is where the image link came from:

One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.