Redditors react to a video of a bike ride around Pyongyang
Video: the most normal city ever filmed
Redditors: So spooky! Everything looks… wrong! This guy is taking his life in his hands to film this!
Also Redditors: Looks too normal, this has to be staged, they’re actors and this is a propaganda channel!
Side note: my tolerance for western bullshit on the DPRK has reached the negatives, five seconds in these comments and you can cook an egg with my blood. Salute to the small handful of brave comrades pushing back on propaganda in the replies
I was expecting the “it’s all fake” cliche but I guess they’ve been priming the people for this response for a while now. Expect to hear a lot more of this “Ok fine, they have a higher standard living than us, but they’re an EVIL AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORSHIP so they’re automatically worse.” thing for all of the west’s enemies going forward, China especially.
Pretty much the more cameras the DPRK gets and the more people who decide to upload footage to the internet the more common this take is going to get. Everyone wants to read the tea leaves of oppression in videos of people walking to and from work or the library or whatever, everyone wants to believe that the things they’ve been taught their whole lives are correct in spite of the evidence before their very eyes.
Yep. I think we may have talked about this before, how in the western worldview, these liberals who “see the truth” are brave heroes standing against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, if they admit they’ve been lied to about this country their entire lives, it would make them the bad guys according to their simplistic black and white worldview, so they have a lot of pain and suffering to go through if admit they are wrong, and get to stroke their ego if they deny reality. So almost everyone chooses the latter.
The line on China is usually that while Shanghai/Beijing/Shenzhen might be shiny, 99% of the population outside are either factory slaves or hunter-gatherers.