One of the North Korean government’s methods of keeping power is using propaganda to convince the North Korean people that, despite living in a repressive, crumbling, starving Stalinist hellhole, that they’re actually “the luckiest people on Earth” with “nothing to envy in the world,” because everywhere else is so much worse.
The DPRK’s state-run media frequently takes Western media images out of context to create poverty supercuts, and while that famous video of Americans drinking “snow coffee” was a hoax, the genuine article isn’t by any means less batsh*t. Their latest hit is using the famous “Stoner Dog” meme picture, aka Riley the Stoned Birthday Dog, as an example of American income inequality. Billionaires hold lavish birthday parties for their dogs while the common folk starve! Death to America!
As seen in a video released on YouTube, KCTV’s talk show Today’s World used the picture of Riley during a segment about poor conditions in the US.
KCTV commentator Lee Chung-song claimed in the clip that American billionaires are buying $15,000 dog collars for their pets, paying for dog hotels and spas or even hosting expensive birthday parties for their canines, such as the one enjoyed by Riley, while many homeless people are forced to live in boxes, he said.
The TV clip also shows images of dogs apparently at a tea party, and another surrounded by glasses of champagne, used by the programme as further evidence of America’s deep inequality.
Amazing. And that’s not even my favorite part…
KCTV also used a picture of Giant George, the world’s tallest dog, though his inclusion shows no clear relation to the show’s theme on inequality. [The Guardian]
What kind of sick people would deliberately grow dogs so big! Stay in North Korea, where the rules may be strict, but at least you don’t have to worry about dogs the size of horses.
As with all things North Korea, the big question is whether the people actually believe any of this bullsh*t. No one can say for sure, but observers seem to agree that people have more access to outside sources of information than ever before. According to Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea, from 2013:
It seems that in border areas and major cities, one out of every three or four families has a DVD player nowadays. A study by the InterMedia research group concluded that in 2009, the penetration rate was 21% and 5% for VCD and DVD players, respectively. From my own research, it seems that in the borderland areas of the country, some 70 to 80 percent of all households were in possession of DVD players by early 2012.
Still, it should be noted that a recent exposé about FIFA America exec Chuck Blazer reported that he was keeping an apartment in Trump Tower just for his cats. And this dude could not possibly look more like a North Korean propaganda cartoon:
Turns out, North Korean propaganda isn’t that far off. Of course, in one North Korean defector’s account I read, the first thing he saw when he fled across the border to China was a dog bowl filled rice and meat scraps, and thought “Wow, even the dogs eat better than us here.”
So maybe “look how lavish these dog parties are” isn’t the most effective messaging strategy.