If you're interested in seeing just how good a snow-job the DPRK can pull on Western tourists to the socialist paradise, take a look at this photoset by a Dutch tourist given the full-court Potemkin treatment: looking through the hundreds of pictures you wouldn't have the slightest idea that you were looking at one of the poorest countries in the world, nor that something like 70% of North Koreans find it difficult to get enough to eat. Internal passports and all-too-credible threats of deportation to death camps do have a certain grim efficacy in motivating people to put up a convincing facade ...
By the way, the very fact that this chap's North Korean handlers let him keep his pictures ought to have tipped him off to the fact that they knew they were setting him up for use as a propagandist for the regime, but then again, one can't expect even so minimal a level of worldliness from any person naive enough to regard the DPRK as a worthwhile tourist destination.
[Via The Marmot’s Hole.]
PS: Andrei Lankov wrote an article a while back on the realities of North Korean tourism. A BBC reporter proved a rather more perceptive tourist than the one who took 301 shiny pictures of Kim Il Jong's gleaming socialist paradise.
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