alt Hacker NewsAn official atlas of North Korea
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My small-town public library growing up had a great resource that I did not appreciate at the time: an English translation of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia[0].
I really wish I had spent time with it. If nothing else it would have given me some questions to ask my history teachers.
On the map of Europe, Poland has a strange nonexistent river flowing through it. It enters the Baltic Sea more or less where the Vistula river really does. But going south it mysteriously veers east into Belarus.
The Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (which China claims as "South Tibet") is not shown as a part of India in the Indian map, as a hat tip to their political masters the PRC. And the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is also shown as, I imagine, "disputed" with a dotted line.
(I'm a South Korean.)
> According to the prevailing narrative in North Korea, the war was won by the communists and since then, the entire Korean peninsula has remained united under the rule of the Korean Workers’ Party.
This is either not true at all or the writer phrased strangely — both of the governments (South & North) recognize that the war is still on-going and they have an enemy that is controlling the other half of the peninsula that they do not control. However, both of the governments also argue that they are the only legal government that is ought to control the whole peninsula and does not recognize each other's legitimacy. For example, ROK(Republic of Korea, the government that controls the southern part of the peninsula)'s constitution writes that it's government governs the whole peninsula and it's islands. It's like how both PRC(People's Republic of China, i.e. China) and ROC(Republic of China, i.e. Taiwan) both argue that they are the only legal government over all of China (i.e. Mainland China and Taiwan combined).
> Therefore, when looking at the maps in this atlas, it should come as no surprise that Korea is always shown as one country, with no reference to the other country that exists at the southern tip of the peninsula.
It is universally agreed between the two governments (and their citizens) that a unification should happen at some point, so it is obvious that we should be using a map that covers the whole peninsula. We (as South Koreans) also learn 'our country' as the whole peninsula.
> This North Korean world map is centred on the Pacific Ocean, which gives Korea a privileged position on the global stage.
Not going to lie, sometimes it feels that some of the Westerners act like that they don't even think of the remote possibility that they might not be the center of the world…?
South Korean maps do this, China maps do this, Japanese maps do this, I'm pretty sure South East Asia countries also do this, it's a normal thing to do. There's nothing special about having the Pacific Ocean centered.
> According to the prevailing narrative in North Korea, the war was won by the communists and since then, the entire Korean peninsula has remained united under the rule of the Korean Workers’ Party.
(Emphasis mine)
TIL. Now I'm really curious how maintaining this fiction works (or doesn't) in practice.
> According to the prevalent narrative in North Korea, the war was won by the communists.
Well - it depends on how one wants to call the result of the war.
I think there was not necessarily a winner; there was a stalemate/truce, with China guaranteeing North Korea to not lose, but not necessarily win either. That does not mean North Korea won, but I don't think one can necessarily say that they lost the war either.
I am fully aware of how the propaganda in North Korea works, but some articles are also heavily biased. The biggest danger to North Korea actually comes from the success model in South Korea, as well as the internet. The internet kind of nerfed Scientology (see what Ron Miscavige said and described how Scientology changed over the years, so if one of the big guys can quit, the whole business model they established decades ago, is dead and decaying). Sooner or later Kim Jong Fat will also lose out to the internet. You can not permanently cut off million of people, with the assumption they won't be able to understand how strategic lies work. It also does not work in Russia either, though Russia is of course nowhere near as isolated as North Korea right now.
I wish there was a CD rip of the encyclopedia available so I could comb through the rest.
> the war was won by the communists and since then, the entire Korean peninsula has remained united under the rule of the Korean Workers’ Party.
This makes me wonder what the reasoning is, or even if they officially do, for preventing North Korean citizens from migrating south? If it's all united as one country then why would someone be prevented from moving there?
I'm wondering what the infrastructure shown in red on the maps is. Railways? Roads? It's obviously very rough, whatever it is. I'm looking at the UK and it looks like Ipswich and Great Yarmouth (or Lowestoft) or on there, but not Norwich. It's interesting to see what is considered significant or strategic from their point of view.
Another interesting one is The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: https://bse.sci-lib.com/
From every account I’ve read, North Koreans suffer greatly, maybe not holocaust level but we’re totally fine to allow their suffering to continue unabated. If I was a North Korean I’d hope someone was coming to help me at some stage . Weird situation .
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Since no one else has noted it: they show rail lines and only rail. No roads on those maps. This includes some quite obscure ones like the railway between Labrador and Sept-Iles, Quebec. (It has almost no traffic and it serves a small town and a mine and it's not connected to the rest of the North American system.) Similarly they depict sections of rail in Canada that were out of service many years before this map was published. So they're quite out of date. To not show that Canada is linked by rail with the USA at Detroit is a definite oversight, too.
Seeing through the lens of railroads is probably an artifact of both ideology and the economic reality in North Korea. And maybe also the implicitly military purpose of these maps.