All 14 episodes of the “Vice Guide to North Korea“. It’s simply indescribable.

(The embedded video is from episode 3 - Welcome to Pyongyang)

UPDATE: I want to promote this a little more because I’m simply fascinated by it, and because I gave it short shrift yesterday when in a hurry to post it.

Any sort of hermit kingdom/crazy nation always fascinates me, as does the prospect of travel to a country to which travel is prohibited. When I was a kid, I’d spend summers in Yugoslavia and wish I could go to then-forbidden Albania, just to see what a Stalinist paranoid kingdom looked like. I’d love to go to Cuba to see what Marxism-Leninism looks like in the 21st century. Are there resorts on Iran’s shore of the Caspian Sea?

North Korea, however, is the ne plus ultra of crazy, strange, paranoid, passive-aggressive Stalinist hermit kingdoms. I have scoured the internet for travelogues and photographs. I recall distinctly how East and West Germany progressed differently in the post-war era, but the difference was that most East Germans could get Western TV and radio, so they knew exactly what they were missing. Not so North Koreans, who are kept dirt-poor and ignorant. TVs show nothing but propaganda, and an errant aerial probably gets you thrown in jail. Radios get only official stations. Tourism is tightly controlled or non-existent. Journalists are let in sporadically.

The tale of Shane Smith’s visit - and internet documentary of it - is unbelievable, and I really urge you to watch it. Someday North Korea will be no more, and it will somehow, someday rejoin its richer brother to the South. Hopefully someday the people of North Korea will know some semblance of freedom as we know it - freedom to, rather than freedom from.

What makes this so amazing is its irreverence. Smith gets threatened with jail a few times during the video for perceived or real slights against the regime and Dear Leader. He refers to the famous Arirang mass gymnastic display as an “eyefuck” - a better description I’ve never read. He is brought down to an elaborate banquet hall on his first night at the hotel, and is the only guest. Despite that fact, the waitresses bring food to all the tables, and then carefully remove it shortly thereafter. It is all a choreographed show - to prove that the western lies and propaganda about North Korea’s food shortages are just that. Smith calls the food inedible, fried “matter”, and comments after a few days that his tour is little more than “crazy food, politics, crazy food, politics.”

He dances with a lonely tea shop girl along an empty four-lane highway. He visits a school where kids put on creepy, robotic shows. He sees the desks with adjustable height that was invented by the Dear Leader. He visits the Panmunjon DMZ from both the South and North, and shows you the differences. He sings karaoke - first trying out a North Korean song, which he pokes fun at, deeply insulting his host. He calls his political minder “Speedy Gonzalez”. He sings karaoke on his last night there - Anarchy in the UK. Totally surreal.

If you think of North Korea in the abstract, or you know of it only as a caricature of its real self (I’m thinking Team America World Police), take the time to watch all 14 episodes of this unique, groundbreaking, funny, and heartbreaking documentary. Seriously, it should be shown on Frontline or sold on DVD. It’s that incredible.

Also, make sure to read the bit on the website about how, exactly, Smith finagled himself a visa to visit the North.

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