On the right I give you a 50 won North Korean "scrip" note. I have kept it all these years after a friend of mine John Byrd gave it to me after a visit to North Korea. Yes, that's right, he went to North Korea. You see, he is a big shot at the Central Identification Lab out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and goes all over the world looking for US MIAs. He found a WWII US bomber and crew off the coast of Morocco and finally let their family have some rest. He has been to Vietnam, and the Killing fields of Cambodia identifying bodies. He even had the task of identifying who was killed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Well, back a few years ago when things were not so tense, the North Korean government let the identification team into the Korean DMZ and beyond to look for MIAs. The whole time, the speakers from the North blared propaganda over and over, louder and louder. What did the South Koreans do? They just played a tape of a cow mooing to remind the North Koreans what a hamburger must taste like. John also told me the countryside of North Korea is beautiful and should have some of the best trout fishing in the world. I asked him "so why doesn't it?" He looked at me like the fool that I am and said "because they netted all the rivers and streams and have eaten all the fish." Kinda obvious eh? He also said there were only two programs on TV. It was either propaganda where some peasant farmer discovered the wonders of collectivism and shouted Socialist victory slogans or it was some program of the communist world defeating the Yankee imperialists. When you are told this over and over again from the time you come out of the womb, you should not wonder why the North Korean population feels as they do. John spoke to one North Korean military commander who had to go everywhere they went and asked if he ever thought of visiting the US. He said he would love to but if he left, the regime would murder his whole family all the way down to all of his first cousins. How charming.
Anyway, all you young folks out there, you do not have to wonder what Hitler and Stalin were like. They live in North Korea. I got a real bad feeling about how this is going to go down.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124511648024217217.html
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