Aim High in Creation!: A One-of-a-Kind Journey Inside North Korea's Propaganda Machine

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I’M LYING ON A KHAKI BED at the top of the Yangakkdo Hotel: home to almost every entrepreneur, hack, spy, missionary, NGO and other misfit lucky enough to have snared a visa to the most isolated nation on earth. Unless, of course, you’re cross-dressing NBA star Dennis Rodman, in which case you’re probably greeting the day in the lavish palace of North Korea’s basketball-mad leader, Kim Jong Un.

The Yangakkdo thrusts above Pyongyang from an island in the Taedong River. At a distance it’s impressive—an ominous monolith dwarfing the landscape, like Stanley Kubrick’s plinth in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Closer up, the cracked glass and corroded casing reveal that the skyscraper, like so much else in this mysterious place, is a barely functional facade. According to rumours I’ve collected so far, the forty-six floors below my room are totally empty. Floor Five, which is accessible only via a hidden staircase, reportedly has banks of surveillance monitors—trained on every foreigner on my floor.

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