North Korea and industry

July 17, 2012 by Joshua
in NorthKorea

North Korea’s propaganda focuses a lot on industry — from the posters of mining, energy, factories, etc to what they show off to tourists. They showed us giant factories, barrages (I had to look it up too), train and subway museums, and stuff like that.

The U.S. hides industry. What do we stick in your face? What can you not miss in America? Ads. Stores. We motivate personal consumption. And for all their posters of the Kims we stick ads in your face a lot more than they do.

The U.S. would never show off a factory, to the extent we still have them. That makes sense in many ways. Factories don’t benefit people. The stuff they make does. I think the government there shows of what it does as opposed to what benefit they create. They seem more interested in demonstrating they’re doing something than that they’re improving people’s lives. That focus creates a system promotes building stuff over helping people.

The U.S., on the other hand, creates a system that makes people feel like they don’t have enough and want more.

As usual, I’m not judging or comparing. Just juxtaposing, or rather sharing thoughts in the order they came to me when I visited there.

Incidentally, while we differ on industry versus ads and stores, both nations have in common how much we show off our militaries.

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