North Korean Labor Camps in Siberia

Uploaded by journeymanpictures on Jan 9, 2012  

North Korean villages in the Siberian wilderness?

We take a madcap look at one of the weirdest experiments of globalisation: North Korea's deceased leader Kim Jong-Il exporting his people and propaganda machine to Russia in a bid for cold, hard cash. 

"You should see their way of living. They live in smelly barns in multiples of ten," a Russian police chief tells us as he drives towards the Korean village. Speaking to the Korean loggers as they take a cigarette break the picture is painted in even starker terms: "What he's saying here is that the majority of workers have a ten-year plus labour commitment to live and work in the middle of nowhere for almost no pay." So why do they do it? As ever the North Korea propoganda machine is present to remind the workers of the 'home land' and the wise teachings of Kim Jong-Il and his father Kim Il Sung. A sign at the town reads: "Kim Il Sung lives with us forever." Yet travelling into one of the strangest of North Korea's frontiers, it is clear that the hermit kingdom's isolationist tactics are not paying off in these camps. Will new leader Kim Jong-un continue the bizarre experiment?
January 2012

Glad to see this all in one piece on YT as it makes it easy to show it to you... but... this is a Vice production with nothing to do with these Journeyman Pictures people, so they have left a distaste in my mouth for trying to take credit for Vice's rather brave work. If I find it direct from Vice I'll put that here instead.

Note for yourself though that Russia is not alone in this type of scenario.

Peace.

North Korea: Maximum Isolation, Maximum Surreality

North Korea has been rattling my head lately, for a reason that has yet to be pinned down. Perhaps it’s because I have only just been made aware of exactly how creepy the place really is. To get more insight into this weirdness, please after watching this vid do click on over and see my post on this place of horror over at What’s All This, Then? There’s an important video there as well and a link to an amazing photo gallery. I found this particular video at a nice blog called 13 Minutes After Midnight. There aren’t too many documentaries on NK, simply because it is the most isolated, paranoid and secretive country on the planet.

Perhaps it is due to the fact that I have not seen a place as surreal as North Korea, where they think such incomprehensible thoughts, do such incomprehensible things, all without realizing that what they do is so... weirdly wrong. Perhaps it is all the vast infrastructure... all of it empty. Perhaps it is the fact that major cities have no electricity. Perhaps it is the fact that just out of sight are millions of people starving so badly that they will turn to cannibalism. The place just creeps me out!