PBS Frontline: Glimpses of a North Korea Seldom Seen in the West

PBS’s “Frontline” enjoys some morbid good timing on Tuesday night, presenting its report “Secret State of North Korea” in the wake of the execution last month of Jang Song-thaek, uncle of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and the return to the country this month of the former N.B.A. player and amateur diplomat Dennis Rodman.

The focus of “Secret State” is the movement of information into, and out of, one of the world’s most sealed-off countries. Its most dramatic element are snippets of film shot inside North Korea by members of an underground network of citizen journalists organized by a Japan-based news agency. There’s no way to judge how characteristic the images are, but there’s no denying their grim fascination. Piles of rubble, ox and hand carts and abandoned, starving children are recurring themes.



Around this raw reportage, the program investigates the question of whether North Korea is approaching a tipping point where the flow of information into the country could foster radical change. We’re shown DVDs and thumb drives containing movies and television shows being smuggled across the border, and North Koreans huddled in their bedrooms watching them. Perhaps the most significant change the program reports is the explosion of cellphone ownership since these devices were reintroduced five years ago. The phones for sale can call only within North Korea but can be illegally adapted to make international calls.

“If a government is willing to kill as many people as necessary to stay in power,” says Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korea, “it usually stays in power for a very long time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/arts/television/pbs-frontline-looks-inside-a-notoriously-closed-country.html

A regime that "is willing to kill as many people as necessary to stay in power" is hard to overturn internally. And possession of nuclear weapons (a dictator's best friend) enables the regime to resist external pressure. It indeed "usually stays in power for a very long time".