[Pastiche]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

You don't know that. Maybe they are proud to be North Korean and under that system. You're in China IIRC. Don't you run into people all the time who are proud to be in PRC, praises it and bash everything else. They'd never leave!

No sympathy here. It's sports and Portugal did what it needed to do.

Just finished reading this book. Answers alot of questions about North Korea. Brings up alot of new and scary questions however.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/bo...nest-race.html

Highly recommend it.

In this book, therefore, I aim to explain North Korea's dominant ideology or worldview — I use the words inter- changeably — and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism and the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. Far from complex, it can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader. More must be added perhaps, if only to explain that "therefore" to an American reader, but not much more of importance. I need hardly point out that if such a race-based worldview is to be situated on our conventional left-right spectrum, it makes more sense to posit it on the extreme right than on the far left. Indeed, the similarity to the worldview of fascist Japan is striking. I do not, however, intend to label North Korea as fascist, a term too vague to be much use. It is enough for me to make clear that the country has always been, at the very least, ideologically closer to America's adversaries in World War II than to communist China and Eastern Europe. This truth alone, if properly grasped, will not only help the West to understand the loyalty shown to the DPRK by its chronically impoverished citizens, but also to understand why the West's policy of pursuing late Cold War-type solutions to the nuclear problem is doomed to fail.