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North Korea releases new propaganda posters! Expert suggests ‘they are worried’

Jamie Weinstein Senior Writer
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Monumental news comes out of North Korea as the brutish Communist regime announces the release of two new propaganda posters to try to confuse their long-suffering subjects into believing that things are actually going swimmingly in the Hermit Kingdom.

“New posters have been produced in the DPRK to help more splendidly spruce up Pyongyang and hasten the harvest this year,” reports NKNews.org, a North Korea news aggregation site, drawing from North Korea’s state run media.

The first poster carries the caption “Let’s develop Pyongyang, the capital city of revolution, into a world-class city!” and depicts a North Korean man smiling as fellow citizens garden amidst the Pyongyang backdrop.

The other poster carries the caption “Let us all go for harvesting!” and features a smiling North Korean man, well, harvesting joyously.

The pictures stand in stark contrast to actual ordinary life in North Korea, well-recognized to be among of the must oppressive and closed regimes in the world. Freedom House gives North Korea its worst ratings for both political rights and civil liberties.

“Since you are always dealing with the Orwellian world of communist/DPRK propaganda it is always look here and not there, so there is a lie in the heart of it somewhere,” Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller when asked about the posters.

“So what would the Google-decoder-translator ring say? Probably they’re having a big harvest problem and they are worried about their industrial growth. And they should be worried about both of those things since they seem to be on the verge of another big hunger crisis and their economy is sputtering along just months away from the year 2012 which is supposed to be this almost mystical 100th anniversary of the birth of their founder, the ‘Great Leader’ Kim Il Sung, when the DPRK is supposed to be a strong, prosperous country.”

Signs don’t look good that North Korea will achieve such prosperity by Jan. 1, 2012, according to Eberstadt.

“It doesn’t look like they are going to get there between the end of September and Jan. 1,” he said using great understatement.

When asked what he considers the stability of the North Korean regime to currently be, the author of the “The End of North Korea” said, “it is really hard for any outsider to say.”

“We have a miserable record of outside observers of predicting instability in totalitarian societies,” he explained. “I don’t think we will really know how close North Korea is to the edge right now until someday we get our hands on the Pyongyang archives.”

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