Apologies to ragashree, but Ima do this anyway.
I think its persuasive that they believe in Juche and their government because they have no reason not to, non-propagandistic sources are very scarce as the government has nearly full control over public information.
They have anti-Western views that haven't been inspired by the government? How? Were they exposed to a source of information other than the government somehow? Very few of them may have been, but I just don't see how a significant percentage of North Koreans could have.
No, but the information I am giving you is consistent with expert consensus, this is why I am asking you to watch youtube videos created by BBC, National Geographic and other reliable journalistic sources. The videos are readily available on youtube. The journalists weren't experts, but they interviewed experts.
I think you're being very rationalist, assuming that people simply choose the best from a set of ideas presented to them.
However the Korean people had a social reovlution on the promise of equality and social ownership of the means of production, not in order to install a personaliy cult. It is unlikely for this memory to have disappeared completely. Likewise they can in many cases now see that a tiny bureaucracy lives in luxury, even reserving the right to use the elegant Pyongyang metro system purely for its own use. And you're telling me that there's no way that a great number of people of people could silently (at least, to the outside world silently), resent this?
Plenty of revolutions inhsitory did not happen because of an enlightened set of rational philosophies being presented from the outside, but rather because the people percieved injsutice instinctively and becuase their suffering became too much to bear. Do you think the Chinese workers and students who set up the Commune of Shanghai in 1967 were acting on the basis of foreign news sources, or on their own instinctive drive for equality and control over the wealth they created? (And in part on the memory of the original reovlutionary struggle in the country). In fact the main riving force here was that the masses percieved the contradiicton between the words of the regime, and its actions.
Now I am not saying that in itself a "national" movement, isolated form others, is neough. That would be the antithesis of what I think. But neither do I buy that people simply select, rationally, between different schools of thought offered to them. Rather that human consciousness is contradictory, confused, and ofen instinctive. Examples from other former very isolated states like Albania would seem to back me up on this.
Regarding the reports you mention, BBC is far form reliable. The BBC is actually terribly dishonest. For example they constantly refer to the resistance fighters ina fghanistan as "the Taliban", despite the US army having admitted that the great majority ar enot religiously motivated. Likewise the BBC with regards to Thailand, reported that the cause of the recent problems was "a corrupt populist President sowing hatred for the rich amongst the poor", as its main editorial line.
Nat Geographic is perhaps more interesting. But I was thinking more of a serious study, seeing as you spoke with such certainty.
[/YOUTUBE]
I'm expecting for a 3-0 or something like that, oh yeah!
