North Korea's Information Isolation

Jen at Ambrose-a-rama has great links about what life is like inside North Korea, including one to a piece with this stunning statement:

When I visited North Korea on a tightly managed trip in 2005, I was well into an hour of chatting with a local mountain guide, a former military man, when he paused and asked sincerely about a detail of American nuclear policy: “I don’t understand why you had to use nuclear weapons in Iraq.” He was a handpicked interlocutor for foreigners, with a warm coat and privileged access to information, and he was, by all evidence, convinced that America had nuked Iraq (or was willing to maintain the charade that it had). I had a hard time coming up with another closed society in which the words from the top had been so efficiently delivered to the bottom. If that’s what he thinks about the occasional use of nuclear weapons, I wondered, what else does he believe?

I have a sudden vision of a sci-fi type movie where the dome is lifted off of an entire society who never realized how the world really works around them. Mind boggling and so very sad.