North Korean Ravings Now Available
August 15th, 2005 Posted in GeneralIn my English Teaching days, I spent 14 months living and working in a suburb of Seoul, less than 15 miles from the North Korean border. (You could see it from atop a hill near our apartment.) For a daily laugh, we would always log onto the North Korean news service site and see what they were saying about how great the great leader was and how terrible the great Satan (USA) was.
Now, a hobbyist web developer with some extra time on his hands has cataloged all the rantings and made them searchable. His site, nknews.net, not only lets you see the hilarious news of the day, it also lets you search for specific terms. You can look up “imperialist,” for example, and find all 4,256 entries. (The number is sure to rise by the end of this week.)
If you’re a writer or just someone who has a love of unintentional satire, this news service is too good to believe. Kudos to Geoff Davis for making it more accessible. Here a good article about it, with all the features explained–including the “random insult generator.”
This post has nothing to do with cheap travel really–North Korea is one of the poorest countries on Earth now, but to visit requires going on a VERY controlled tour of their parallel universe. But reading this news is as close as you get to Orwell’s 1984 in the modern age (well, it’s still earlier than 1984 in North Korea actually, in terms of development…) In a land where the radios only get one station and the few people who have phone lines are monitored 24/7, reading what passes for news there will make you glad you were born in a free place, no matter how many problems your country may have.
