大象传媒

North Korea's propaganda playground, or the US propaganda playground?
1. North Korea as you say is one of the world's most private and closed countries.
2. @uriminzok: is the United States Codes for other countries ...youtube account and a Twitter feed. The Twitter account, which opened last Thursday under the name uriminzok, which supposedly means 鈥渙ur nation鈥� in Korean, has garnered more than 3000... Uriminzok is an "English" word that doesn't translate into anything in Korean. Our Nation in Korean is "鞖半Μ 氙检”", and one has to wonder why the Korean wasn't used IF this propaganda was being aimed at South Korea.
3. I have never heard Kim Jong Il addressed as "Great Comrade Kim Jong Il"; rather, he is generally addressed as "Dear Leader".
4. The "extraordinary YouTube video" shows American choreography; whereas North Korean choreography would be less West Side Story and more military precission. If you watch the video closely, sometimes the dancers are not aligned perfectly. Would "Dear Leader" release such a sloppy video, or would this video be "perfect".
5. What is the point of this activity...The answer, it seems, is to wind up South Korea and it seems to have worked. If South Korea cannot tell a genuine North Korean video from an evident fake, if it wastes the time in trying to block this video (and others like it), some South Korean technocrat has too much time on his hands, or is following instructions from the United States.
5. Propaganda playground, but whose?

An interesting post. Although very entertaining to watch it is too sad to think how oppressed and deluded these poor people really are. It would be wonderful to think that these people could be liberated and brought into the 21st century but that of course has it's own set of issues.

To Bluesberry:

2. Uriminzok is a romanised phonetic representation of the utterance 鈥橃毎毽臁扁��, which more accurately translates to 'our race' or 'our people'. As for the English ID, it is common in Korea, indeed most of Asia, that when signing in to any online account to use English characters. Often the software will not allow a Hangeul (Korean alphabet) id. Check out any youtube video from Korea 鈥� most have English usernames.

3. Just because YOU have never heard of it, does that mean it doesn鈥檛 occur?

4. American choreography??? What in this piece denotes an American style dance? What does that even mean? In fact, there are certain movements throughout this piece (2.40-3.15 in particular) that are distinctly Korean in style 鈥� the kind of movements that can commonly be seen in several of the traditional forms of Korean dance.

5. Why would the US or ROK waste money and time on a piece (which is actually quite impressive to watch regardless of the politics) that celebrates the leader of DPRK? Just to ridicule it? That doesn鈥檛 make any sense! I am not suggesting that ROK/US don鈥檛 play their own propagandist games when it comes to the North 鈥� ROK media certainly do 鈥� but your final inference is a bit of a stretch, no?

It's genuine. 100%. I know because I have been there and seen shows like this. The music is North Korea Top 40. There is no No. 41. (There are only +/- 40 songs in the country it seems because they are all written by the Pyongyang Music Company) The staging and choreography is classic, straight out of the 50s, which is probably the last time the producers saw anything from the West. The only things phoney are the smiles on the performers.

Rory Cellan-Jones.

"..the Democratic People's Republic of Korea ... the world's most repressive and closed country.."

luckily, I'm in the United Kingdom, the world's foremost surveillance society. :-)

This is an appalling abuse of blogspace to launch a lazy attack on a country to try and stereotype its people. I would call it Western propaganda, but it isn't that good. Stick to technology, oh, you're no good at that either. Reporting about a few tweets and calling it a blog about technology?!?!

Oh, ignore BluesBerry, he's usually posting conspiracy theories over at Richard Black's blog. Anyone heard his ideas about HAARP? I've never known ionospheric research to be so sinister.

Interesting that South Korea has deemed it necessary to block access to the Twitter feeds and Youtube videos. Surely the government there prides itself on its citizens having the freedom to look up (and talk about) any information they want - as an educated populace I would have imagined that most South Koreans would see these videos and tweets and know exactly what they were.

There's something disturbingly compelling about this video, but I can't work out what it is - Wait - Of course, I've just realised - I'm a Divine Ruler too, so this is right up my street. All I need to do is find a smallish independent nation state, provoke a bit of a civil war, then step-in, take control of half the country, subjugate the population using violence, torture, starvation and so on, then rule over them using a spurious proto-mystical political premise for over half a century, and I've got it made!

And to think I nearly missed this and went down the pub!

Who's the idiot whom thinks that this was American made to look like N.K. propaganda!? The Latin Alphabet is used so that it appeals to Westerners like BluesBerry. Do I think that S.K. is over reacting? Of course. How would South Korea be any more moral than the North if it started regulating it's net. However, this was made for South Koreans, Japanese, Americans, Europeans, and,....Venezualians.....O.o

Blueberry - the writer of this article arrived at his translation 'Great Comrade Kim Jong-il' via Google Translate which explains why the translation is somewhat awkward. I would imagine that the Korean itself reads naturally.