http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030214/1/37o2o.html North Korea's socialism unraveling as people and machines give up North Korea's socialist paradise is unraveling at the edges, as both people and machines increasingly refuse to work according to the plan. On the outskirts of Sariwon, 60 kilometers (37.2 miles) from Pyongyang, old women stand by the roadside, wrapped against the cold in transparent plastic sheets as silent testimonies to a collapsed transport system. "Due to fuel shortage, travel by road is not so easy," said a North Korean official. "They hope to hitch a ride on trucks that pass by." Some lorry drivers take pity on the freezing hitchhikers -- not for money, the official insists -- while others just zoom past. On the fields near the road, farmers are getting ready to plant this year's rice, piling up small hills of cow dung, mixed with human excrement. This is a vast change from just a few years back, when some reports claimed that use of chemical fertilizer in North Korea was far ahead of the South. In the distance, farmers dressed in blue and grey carry heavy loads on A-frames tied to their backs, like their ancestors have done for centuries. Large Korean characters set up above the brown rice paddies tell the peasants not to despair with the leader they have got, promising that "With General Kim Jong Il in charge, we will achieve victory". Closer to the center of Sariwon, lonely traders sit on the sidewalk, mostly women offering apples and softdrinks. One young man is squatting with a rucksack full of blue plastic tubes, apparently a commodity in scarce supply. If they are the representatives of budding private enterprise in North Korea, they fit nowhere in the grand plan for the future which the rulers have in mind. The Korean Workers' Party is steering towards a society made up of workers, farmers and intellectuals, and there is little room for private businesspeople. Pyongyang leaves the same impression -- of a place that lives up to neither the brightly colored tourist brochures nor the propaganda of a highly disciplined people toiling away for the communist utopia. At a distance, the city of 2.5 million looks a bit like how Russian architects envisaged the future in the 1960s, with rocket-shaped skyscrapers and stadiums formed like giant birthday cakes. But the facade is crumbling, with plastic sheets frequently spread across empty window panes in the apartment buildings to keep out the February chill. As in many other socialist societies, the city's metro has been oddly picked as the spot where progress is being put on display with the greatest pride. At subway stations with triumphant names such as "Prosperity" and "Glory", buried deep underground, massive chandeliers light up examples of socialist art and elaborate carvings of flower motifs. It is all highly impressive, until the subway, too, is hit by one of the capital's frequent blackouts, and passengers on the steep escalators tumble over each other before they get hold of the handrail. Pyongyang also has its share of street hawkers, although the extent of this shadow economy is impossible to gauge, and officials pretend it is not happening. "What? Where?" is the reaction from a translator assigned to foreign visitors when asked about a fruit vendor sitting under a tree. On a street running parallel to the Taedong river, two men urinate on a wall, defying both government descriptions of a docile workforce, and perhaps also some Western ideas about a thoroughly policed society. Further up the bank of the river, dozens of workers inside a gated factory community are cheering loudly as they watch colleagues engaged in a game of volleyball. "They're taking a break," says a tour guide. "It is 3:20 in the afternoon."
Madmax, you owe me for giving you at least one response on this one. One of the funniest things about calling N. Korea socialist, I'd call it soviet style communist is that the past leader passed the "throne" on to his son. Even the Russians and Chinese never strayed that far from Marxism. If you've studied some Marx and his original idea of democratic socialism it is sort of humorous. Marx envisioned a withering away of the state and a sort of direct democracy. The big split of the Marxist movement occurred during the Russian Revolution. The Russian Social Democratic Party had the opportunity to seize power in the chaos after World War I, when the Czar was completely discredited.. Though they were perhaps a slim majority in a prominent city or two they're were tens of millions peasants and small farmers who had never had heard of Marx and socialism. This led to a civil war to control the majority. Many socialists said that this was undemocratic and not in line with Marxism and denounced this. They formed the Second Socialist International, which today this includes the Social Democratic Parties Around the World, like the British Labor Party, the French Socialist Party, the Geman Social Democrats. As you know they believe in a fair amount of public ownership of "the means of production" or at least control of the economy so that a wider group can benefit from societies weatlth. What is perhaps more important than the details of their ideology is that they believe in doing this through political persuasion, ie., to convince the average working person that this is the system that is in their best interest. Now a second group decided that the small group of socialist workers could seize power and represent and do right for the rest of the people, who didn't know better. If "you had to break some eggs to create a omelett," per Lenin that way ok". They formed what was and has been called the Third or Communist International. We've all seen what barbarism and repression that this has led to around the world. Often times the first persons killed were the socialists who contested the move against democracy from the beginning. The movie Reds portrays the split and early days that led to the split of the Socialist Party of the United States of Eugene Debs into the Socialist Party and the Communist Party here in the US. Of course to hard core capitalists and conservatives it was useful to portray socialism and communism as the same. At the present time we see the absurdity of talk radio and others try to portray poor Bill and Hilliary Clinton and virtual any Democrat as a socialist, or a communist because after all they are the same thing.
<i>"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."</i> I saw a recent picture of the eastern part of the world at night; you could see strings of lights outlining Japan and its cities. Also a fair number of lights in China and South Korea. However, right above South Korea, there was a hole that was almost completely dark. Somewhere in there are a bunch of cold, starving people without regular electrical power... pretty miserable.
Isabel I saw the same map. Of the whole world. It was awesome. You could see the outlines in lights of Europe, down to the heel of Italy , the US down to Florida. Japan, parts of coastal China. Africa had just a couple of lit spots. I was happy to see there are still some big blank spots in the US. The black spot for the Amazon was cool, too.
Hey, no problem. I was kinda hoping that someone else saw it and could remember it. Something about the lone light in North Korea.
