There are, in fact, just two subway stations that seem to meet this description. They are the only two stations foreigners are ever brought to. North Korean officials claim the whole system looks like this, but it’s impossible to know if any other stations even exist. One foreign visitor was able to escape his minders and tried to make his way into a station never before visited by an outsider. He found it closed. Some North Korea watchers believe parts of the system exist, but none are in use, and that there is just a shuttle that runs between the two show stations while visitors are present, with actors playing the part of busy commuters. The elaborate game North Koreans play to keep the illusion of a working system in place is straight out of ‘The Truman Show.’

Another pivotal North Korean talking point revolves around the devastating famine of the mid-1990s, and how it impacted the country’s present economy. Scholastic, like North Korean propagandists, claims, “Unfortunately, juche (self-reliance) has not always worked. In the mid-1990s, floods and drought led to terrible famines. Many people died or lost their homes. Today, North Korea is a poor country.”

Juche has never worked. North Korea has been reliant on foreign handouts from its inception. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has held the Western world hostage with threats of nuclear advancement and war in exchange for food aid. The famines of the ’90s, which killed one to two million people, were not due to natural causes. They were directly caused by the policies of North Korean leaders, who prioritize their own caviar and movie collections over the health and welfare of their people.