Conclusion
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North Korea: Conclusion
We entered North Korea with quite some questions and left the country with many more questions... In the beginning of the tour we had a relatively possitive view on the country. Day by day, we noticed that things that were kept quiet of distorted, which changed our opinion. For example we are sure that the Bouddhists that were presented are not real, the children in the school did not really had lessons and we doubt the 'spontanious dancing' in the park... We think that a lot of things presented to us are 'beautified' by the gouvernement to present a positive view of the reality in North Korea.
Apart from this we were only shown the "top of the bill", although we can imagine the food shortage, the enery shortage, the poverty and the suppresion of the people. We still do not know if the people in the country are aware of this... We think that this depends on the position the people are in: the more you know, the more suppression you will notice. That brings us to the next point: maybe it is better not to know...
Of course that should be invalidated since in our opinion the gouvernement limits its people in their development by blocking almost all information that crosses the borders of North Korea. The ignorance of the people is a serious case; from that point of view we can endorse the term 'criminal state'. And we did not even mention the development of the country itself...
The socialist filosophy (which is a base for the Juche idea) is in itself not a bad idea, however the way this is practised fails a lot. The adoration of the Great Leader (Kim Il Sung) is in our opinion too excessive (the people are distributed over layers instead of one community) and a country like North Korea will never be self-sufficient because of the lack of fuel, the wrong climate and the lack of farmland for feeding the 22 million inhabitants...
We have a lot of questions unaswered and we are convinced that they will never be answered. We have to put up with this, although that is not an easy thing to do. A lot is wrong with this country and it will take a long time before this will change. Still we have hope, since for example China (and their leader Mao) progresses slowly but surely.... Another thing that we learned from this tour is that the information that receives us is limited. Our history books and musea present us a Western (US) view that hardly is compared to the Eastern one.
We realise as never before what freedom means and that we as Dutchmen from that point of view should never complain!
 North and South, hand in hand |