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(#10) They Built a Giant Luxury Hotel and Never Opened It
North Korea is all about appearances. How do you make it appear your country is way more prosperous than it really is? Build a huge luxury hotel in your capital that nobody can miss. Shaped like a giant rocket, the Ryugyong Hotel has 105 stories, is the 49th tallest building in the world, would have anywhere between three to seven thousand rooms, and five revolving restaurants.
But it's never had a guest stay in it, because it was never finished. Economic problems caused by the fall of the Soviet Union, combined with a complete lack of funds, left the tower unfinished. It sat as a concrete shell for over a decade, and rumors abounded of the concrete being shoddy and the elevators crooked. Construction has started and stopped several times, and it's currently being re-purposed into a "mixed-use" building.
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(#15) They Have an Official Website - And It's Not in Korean
Keeping up the facade of being a shining beacon of freedom, North Korea's website has pictures of monuments, gleaming new construction, sections about tourism and business - and no Korean language anywhere. The site is clearly meant for foreigners, as North Korea does not have the Internet, only a crude intranet.
Incidentally, the website is full of the standard North Korean propaganda the country boasts, including references to glorious victory in the Korean War (which ended in a draw), aggressive US ships, and the heroic soldiers of the country. Naturally, there are no references anywhere to "North Korea" - only Korea.
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(#5) They Once Nearly Went to War Over a Tree Stump
The "Axe Murder Incident" of 1976 started as a simple operation and nearly turned into a shooting war. UN Checkpoint 3 had been the site of numerous North Korean attempts to kidnap US troops. But the view of it was partially blocked by a tree, so US troop went out to cut it down. They were ambushed by North Korean troops, who claimed the tree had been personally planted by Kim Il Sung. They attacked the lightly armed US troops with axes, killing two.
The US responded by mobilizing massive force to remove the tree, sending hundreds of soldiers armed with machine guns and rocket launchers, moving tanks and attack helicopters into attack positions, and putting every American soldier in South Korea on alert. The tree was cut down without incident, but two North Korean observation posts were vandalized and the stump was left as a reminder of UN power.
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(#16) Kim Jong-un is Cracking Down on Western-Style Clothing
In preparation for the May 2016 Party Congress, Kim Jong-Un dropped the hammer on North Koreans wearing western clothing. Among the items that will now be policed by "inspection units" are t-shirts, short skirts, jeans, along with piercings and long hair. Kim had already mandated that men use his high-and-tight haircut. The ban applies to all of North Korea, but will be especially enforced in villages near the Chinese border.
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(#12) They Take American Tourists to a Museum Extoling the Virtues of Dead Americans
The "Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum" is a hub of North Korean tourism, and numerous American tourists have been taken there. This is ironic, given that it's essentially a celebration of killing US troops.
A gigantic Pyongyang monument to the DPRK "victory" over the corrupt UN in 1953 (which never actually happened), the museum bursts at the seams with war ephemera, including captured American guns, pieces of shot down planes and knocked out tanks, statues, and a captured US ship.
A DPRK soldier acts as a guide, pumping out regime propaganda about evil westerners. Most disturbingly, it's full of rooms of life-size murals and dioramas showing heaps of dead Americans being eaten by vultures. Again, all of this is gleefully shown to Americans, without a thought to hurt feelings.
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(#13) They Built Another Museum Dedicated to American Attrocities
Located in southwest North Korea, the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities was re-opened in 2014 to pay tribute to the DPRK citizens brutally killed during the Sinchon Massacre, where up to 35,000 people were systematically massacred over a three month period.
Except historians can't agree on what actually happened, what role Americans had in the killing (as opposed to vengeful South Korean troops), and even if the massacre took place at all. It's likely that the US officer the North blamed for organizing the killings never existed, and many scholars have said the killings were actually committed by communists eliminating less ideologically reliable communists.
Whatever really happened at Sinchon, the North clearly blames the US for it. As such, the Museum contains dozens of gory exhibits showing Americans torturing, mutilating, and slaughtering innocent DPRK citizens. The displays are unbelievably graphic.
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About This Tool
North Korea is still a country with a relatively closed regime. For decades, it has seldom interacted with other countries. The outside world knows little about it, people can only speculate based on various public news reports or the observations of a few travelers. Even travelers cannot communicate with too many locals, foreign tourists come into contact with are mainly tour guides, drivers and hotel attendants, etc.
Do you want to travel to North Korea one day? It is a chance to know some weird truths about North Korea, the random tool collected these 16 stories from the Internet.
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