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the
stellar pursuit of poverty
The
photo on the right is rather popular on the web. That’s OK, it’s
perplexing, it carries a message. What is the message?
Now
the game starts to get interesting. The accompanying web comments,
without exception, prescribe the darkness to North Korea’s
economic backwardness, they tell the story of wealth and poverty,
and in their irresponsible simplification (typical of web
writings) of social values they are, in essence, anti-communist
propaganda. But if socialism is dead and communism is
intellectually bankrupt, morally defunct, as they say, why does
the capitalist West care at all?
Yes,
North Korea is a poor country measured by GDP per capita ($1,800
by CIA 2011 estimate, world rank 167 out of 195). Poor country
with nuclear bomb and long range rockets - technics with huge
energy consumption. So, people of North Korea don’t waste energy
on excessive street lighting. No night shopping, no glamorous
signposts for all sorts of night life. And, with so many enemies
around, why allow easy night targeting?
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Now,
seriously, I don’t think the above militant explanation does it.
The western connotations on the darkness of night North Korea are
tainted by the western perception of poverty. It is in the rich
West that people living below
poverty level exhibit a propensity for violence, fatherless homes,
exotic culture, and slovenly living. Even lower IQ, genetically
"explained", is sometimes attributed to those people
besides labeling them as Christian sinners .This subconscious bias
makes it worthful to use North Korea’s darkness for the
anti-communist propaganda.
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And that is farcical because communism
is also a religion, one with rather high moral and social
standards. The photo on the right would be, on that sense, more
informative if for the white spots the gray shades are introduced:
one for neighborhood crime and drugs, second for broken families,
third for unemployment and luck of a vision to the future, fourth
for racism and chauvinism, fifth ...
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