It’s fake or break for North Korea’s propaganda machine
- From: News Limited Network
- March 27, 2013 12:52P
THOSE crazy North Koreans. You just can’t trust them.
This week, Pyongyang’s generals put their “strategic” rocket units on a war footing, with a fresh threat to strike targets on the US mainland, Hawaii and Guam, as well as South Korea.
The heightening in tension came as the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo showing North Korea’s finest troops flexing their muscles, with a fleet of hovercraft with marines landing on an unidentified beach.
The photo featured at least eight hovercraft. Problem is, as The Atlantic points out, most of the craft look like they’ve been photoshopped.
FAKE? This missile, pictured during a parade in Pyongyang in 2012, was labelled a fake by German analysts.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/world-news/its-fake-or-break-for-north-koreas-propaganda-machine/story-fndir2ev-1226607597044#ixzz2OlshAole
Not long after the Atlantic’s piece, AFP issued a mandatory kill on the image, saying: “This general service picture… of March 26, 2013 is being removed due to excessive digital alteration, compromising its news content. Please remove all copies from your systems. We and thank you for your cooperation, and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Surely not. Pyongyang’s propagandists wouldn’t stretch the truth would they?
Well, turn back the clock 12 months and a parade in the capital that featured six meancing missiles.
All fakes, said analysts, after studying the pictures.
Clumsy fakes, in fact.
According to a report in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, undulating casings on the missiles suggest the metal is too thin to withstand flight. Each missile – a KN8 – was slightly different from the others, even though all were supposedly the same make. They do not even fit the launchers they were carried on.
NOT FAKE: These men are real men. What we don’t know is if they can fly those planes behind them. And if those planes have fuel.
“There is no doubt that these missiles were mock-ups,” Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, of Germany’s Schmucker Technologie, wrote in a paper posted on the website Armscontrolwonk.com that listed those discrepancies.
“It remains unknown if they were designed this way to confuse foreign analysts, or if the designers simply did some sloppy work.”
The latest photoshopping follows the release of a series of bizarre videos on North Korea’s propaganda site, Uriminzokkiri, which showed images of missiles raining down on New York City, Barack Obama in flames and – just this week – a video of paratroopers landing in Seoul, taking American hostages.
NOT FAKE: Propaganda posters in Pyongyang that threaten punishment to the “U.S. imperialists and their allies.” North Korea does good propaganda.
But it’s not just North Korea which dabbles in this photoshopping malarkey, hoping they’ll get away with it.
Chinese officials were the laughing stock with their “floating men” from 2012.
And Iran has a dodgy track record.
Apart from covering up Michelle Obama’s decolletage during the Oscars, the Islamic state has been accused of switching its pioneering space monkey with another that kind of looked the same, and photoshopping it’s latest stealth fighter onto an image of snowcapped mountains.
