North Korea propaganda against the USA

[jts]

First a quote from John Stuart Mill:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Next one and a half hours of North Korea propaganda about how bad the USA is.

[Brant Gaede]

Needs work.

[anthony]

Outstanding sentence: "...almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error".

[Peter]

In our mythology we use the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes to show that one must never contradict the supreme leader in a kingdom or a dictatorship. In North Korea the extravagant, miraculous things attributed to Kim Un are so ludicrous little kids probably understand they are a complete fabrication. Indoctrination and propaganda can work to a degree in a closed system as we have seen in many cults, but I bet there is a *look* that passes between two or more people who see the extravagant claim as the lie that it is.

So what is the psychology of the fearless leader, who insists the lies are the truth and all must believe? To me it sounds like North Korea’s elite have the minds of evil children. I remember reading about propaganda films shown in The Soviet Union bloc that showed blacks rioting in America, but what impressed the viewers the most was how affluent our poorest dressed compared to them. And they were looting electronics not available in Communist countries.
Peter

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This reminds me of a Udemy course I took recently on how to use public domain material for YouTube videos by Alun Hill.
 
He caused a scandal in the online world a couple of years ago when he made a fake documentary as a goof and posted it on YouTube. The title: "North Korea Documentary: How Americans Live Today, Survive By Eating Birds And Snow: North Korea TV."
 
Then he egged viewers on with aggressive comments. The thing went viral, then hit the mainstream as if it were a real documentary.
 
Here's the video:
 

 
And here's just one article that came out about a mainstream media with egg on its face:
 
'How Americans Live Today': Fake North Korean Propaganda Video Punks The Internet
by Hunter Stuart
03/13/2013
Huffington Post
 
From the article:
 

An English-dubbed version of an apparent North Korean propaganda video that went viral online this week turned out to be a big joke.
 
The video, titled "How Americans Live Today," features an English voiceover purportedly translating the original Korean narration. The phony translation describes hyperbolic scenes of Americans being forced to live in tents and eating melted snow in order to survive.
 
The man behind the farce? British travel writer Alun Hill, who doesn't speak a word of Korean.
 
. . .
 
Although Hill's version was published by a range of media sites, including Mediaite, Wired, BuzzFeed, The Week, Slate, The Daily Caller, Yahoo, Telegraph and The Washington Post, it seems none of them traced it back to Hill's YouTube page.

 
This is a perfect example of a press strategy called "trading up the chain" by Ryan Holiday. 
 
Except this one was to goof on the mainstream, generate traffic to the video, and make a little money on the ads, rather than publicize an agenda.

 

Hill mentioned this video in his course, but did not go into the goof. But if you go to his YouTube page and sort the videos by popularity, he has a bunch of North Korea documentaries getting hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. Some are quite long and they are funny.

 

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Outstanding sentence: "...almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error".

Wish I had written this.

--Brant

consumed by envy

[Peter]

"...almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error".

That is good and is also referred to as a light bulb going off in in comic strips, La cue balle dans ze cornair pockette in French, and a comet diving through the Earth’s atmosphere on its way to its rendezvous with the sun, in Carl Sagan speech.

Here is a gruesome sci fi scenario. If a heart attack could be induced from a satellite under direction from flying nanobots, guided by the CIA, then after Kim Junk Un is neutralized in North Korea, how many relatives of his and Army Generals would also need a heart attack before the north and south unite? Would this plot work in a comical movie starring Peter Sellers?