Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

I've read Nothing to Envy, which is mentioned a couple of times in this interview, and it gave me literal nightmares. Actual, literal nightmares.

Now I want to read this Dear Reader book as well, but I don't know if I can mentally handle it at this stage in my life.

God help the people of the DPRK.

View on HN

This National Geographic documentary from 2006 had me sobbing like nothing I'd ever seen before, and I'm actually getting upset right now recalling it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8

Lisa Ling went undercover with an eye surgeon from Nepal on a mission to do 1000 cataract surgeries in 10 days. Cataract surgery in any modern country is an outpatient procedure, but in NK you are doomed to be blind forever.

This man, Dr. Sanduk Ruit[0], had to persuade the NK government to come to the country to do the surgeries and after he restored the sight of each of the thousands, who had been effectively blinded for years by their backwards government, they walked right past him and fell to their knees in tears of adulation to a picture of their Dear Leader. I've never felt a hatred as strong as I did then for Kim Jong Il.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduk_Ruit

I couldn't handle that section either. Those people have been mentally raped.

EDIT: Also the old (old!) man who, yelling, pledged to use his newfound eyesight to kill the American imperialists.

> This National Geographic documentary...

"This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

Ah, liberty!

Try this link: https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=AlJUGZPanB8

There's a big issue with those sources, however. North Korean defectors are paid essentially on how horrific their stories are, so there's a real incentive to make things up.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/world/asia/prominent-nort...

People always say things like this about despotic regimes while they're in power. Yet, every time they fall, we almost invariably learn that things were actually much worse.

Examples other than the Nazis?

Like, I remember in the original gulf war, we were told that soldiers were taking infants out of incubators at leaving them on the floor. An Iraqi refugee testified before congress that this was happening. Turned out to be total bullshit.

I would say the USSR, but thanks to people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we already knew how bad it was.

I mean...

> In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''

> Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/world/natalya-reshetovskay...

That book was quite literally written by the KGB [0], and his (ex-)wife had KGB ties [1].

From [1]:

>In 1974, shortly before The Gulag Archipelago was due to appear, Natalya Reshetovskaya was recruited by the KGB to try and persuade Solzhenitsyn not to publish.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn#KGB_ope...

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1431878/Natalya-R...

That's all according to a defector (which brings us back to the original conversation) and a member of MI5. The notes that form the basis of those claims are still classified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Andrew_(historian)

I was born in USSR, and lived in it enough to be able to reassure you it was not possible to publish a book there in 1974 just because you decided it for yourself. Even authors of fairytales were forced to make ideological "corrections", not to mention anything even distantly political.

Solzhenitsyn's typist hanged herself after she was compelled to give up one of three extant drafts of the book to the KGB. Who would do that over a collection of "camp folklore"?

Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, not to mention the Soviets. And that's just the beginning.

We're not a very humane species.

Both sides are full of examples, the same thing happened before both Iraq wars but at the same time there were vocal doubters of the early information about the Rwandan genocide and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.

We can never be certain how bad things are, but we do know how bad countries look after US intervention.

Read some of Anne Applebaum's stuff:

https://www.anneapplebaum.com/

In particular Red Famine:

https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on...