Reply #243: As someone who has been there (Pyongyang), I have a very hard time believing your story....

[SadPanda]

It took the members of the crew I was with about a year to obtain the necessary documents for entrance into NK and even then we had to go to China and bribe some NK officials into letting us in. We spent four full days in Pyongyang and I often heard a line you used in your post.

The second thing you must know is that the society you see today was built from the ground up by the regime of Kim Il-sung after a US Air Force bombing campaign that leveled everything and killed untold numbers.

The Great Leader. Kim Il-sung. Supposed savior of the Korean culture. Defender.

Lets call a spade a spade. How about half a century of slavery?

As for the bombing by the US during the Korean war why don't you try to present the bigger picture... particularly the subdivision of the country following world war II and the fact that it was North Korea that actually invaded the south with financial support from both the Soviet Union and China.

Kim Il'sung didn't rebuild shit. The Chinese did. If you can even call it rebuilding.

The truth is that North Korea is nothing more than a tragedy of the Cold War. The Soviets and Chinese did create their buffer zone against the spread of Capitalism. Sadly, that buffer zone is nothing more than a relic of that time. Anyone who has seen both Koreas knows that South Korea is the true judgement of having lived north of the 38th Parallel.