It’s not quite vacation season yet here in the United States – believe me, when vacation season starts, every Alaskan knows it because of the non-stop stream of rental RVs headed north – but the season is evidently different in other parts of the world. Like, say, North Korea; not a place one would think of as a popular tourist destination.
And yet, North Korea, that isolated Stalinist regime run by a stunted little gargoyle
with bad hair from a long line of stunted little gargoyles with bad hair, has recently received the first group of tourists since the country was locked down during the COVID-19 panic.
What these tourists had to say about their visit was both revealing and troubling:
A group of Western tourists were treated to a surreal performance of North Korean schoolchildren dancing and singing against a backdrop of animated ballistic missiles during the first officially sanctioned trip to the Hermit Kingdom in five years.
The unsettling choreographed display was just the tip of the weirdness iceberg for the handful of thrill-seeking travelers from the UK, France, Germany and Australia who made the four-day trek to the Asian country’s remote Rason region last week.
One tourist revealed the trip was so closely monitored by Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime that he even had to ask permission to use the bathroom.
You probably already noted that no Americans were included among the tourists. That’s no surprise; the United States isn’t exactly on good terms with the Hermit Kingdom. But these are nevertheless people who are more or less products of the civilized Western world:
…Young Pioneer Tours, a company that facilitates trips into the country, was finally able to resume operations after being thwarted for the last half-decade.
“The North Koreans aren’t robots. They have opinions, goals, and a sense of humor. And in our briefing we encourage people to listen to and understand them,” Rowan Beard, who runs the company, told BBC.
Beard told the outlet once they received the green light, the tourism group had no trouble filling its available slots, which sold out in just five hours.
Note: If the North Koreans aren’t robots, it’s not due to any lack of effort on the part of their government to make them so. Elementary school kids doing a dance in front of an animated ballistic missile launch? Having to ask permission to use the facilities? This sure wasn’t “The Love Boat.”
See Related: ESCALATION: North Korean Troops Moved to Kursk Combat Zone
Senior North Korean General Wounded by British-Made Missiles in Strike on Headquarters in Russia
Even so, there’s a little niggling curiosity here. While every one of these tourists ran the risk of ending up like Otto Warmbier due to the vicious North Korean government, getting to see North Korea firsthand would carry a certain fascination, in the same way that a line of traffic will slow down so people can rubberneck at a four-car pile-up. These tourists were no doubt shown a carefully selected and prepared series of Potemkin villages, but the way they were treated – they were accompanied everywhere by handlers and cautioned to say nothing critical of North Korea’s leaders, at risk of imprisonment – there’s no hiding that.
It’s common among the radical leftist nuts in the Western world, when cautioned that communism has failed every time it has been tried, to piously insist that “Real communism hasn’t been tried yet.” Well, real communism has been tried in North Korea, and these tourists got served up a red-hot helping of what communism does to a country and its people. We should remember that.
