Sunday, February 15, 2015

Overcome thoroughly the manner of working like extinguishing fire

Not a catchy slogan but free recipes are always nice.
I read this BBC magazine piece about North Korean propaganda slogans this evening. It triggered two questions:
1. Where's the inflection point between "North Korea as convenient source of surreal entertainment" and "North Korea as source of genuine misery and an extant totalitarian state"?

2. Wouldn't propaganda slogans serve as excellent candidates for Markov tomfoolery?

I only have an answer for the second question. The answer is, of course, Yes.

I started off using the BBC's translated list of NK slogans and generated new ones in a very basic fashion. A few examples follow:

Let the whole nation join efforts to open up a broad avenue to independent reunification in this year that marks the 70th anniversaries of national resurrection and legendary hero of the proclivity to imports and ensure domestic production of coal and cement to the death!

Let us fiercely raise the sports wind across the Party Central Committee headed by the Moranbong Band to bring about a great golden age of construction by thoroughly applying the spirit of the office of the dignified powerful Paektusan nation.

Let us glorify the Kumsusan Palace of the Songun revolution and the 25th anniversary of the Workers' Party of Korea as the buglers of the country prospers; the less books we read, the later the country in all aspects as the major fronts of building a thriving socialist country.

OK, so these are virtually indistinguishable from the original slogans. It isn't a large text sample, but perhaps more importantly, there's noticeable consistency (about a third of the ~300 slogans begin with "Let us").  It isn't surprising: propaganda is intended to be simple, inspirational, and accessible. It doesn't usually vary from the basic idea of inspiration plus action equals solidarity.

With that it mind, I should add additional slogans to the training set. They should ideally include material from a variety of movements and political entities. This means that the final product will make less contextual sense, but hey, the goal here is to generate content in the absence of context.

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