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North Korea Looking For Friends On Facebook
crimeandpunishment writes "North Korea has apparently decided this social networking thing is worth doing. Just days after launching Twitter and YouTube accounts, it appears to have added Facebook to the list. It probably won't get too many friends in South Korea, which has already blocked access to the North Korean Twitter account for containing 'illegal information' under its security laws...and says the Facebook page could suffer the same fate."
Points taken, but the two Koreans are also much more alike than the Germans or Iraqis in other regards. Ever since the Silla dynasty unified Korea in 676, the Korean peninsula (or at least a big portion of it) was under a common ruler until 1945. There are no isolated minority culture, no minority languages, no nothing. It's just a big swath of Koreans from the Yalu River to the island of Jeju.
Contrast that with the Germans, who managed to found a unified nation only in the 19th century.
50 years of brutal oppression cannot take everything away. We still speak the same language, eat the same food, and observe the same holidays (at least some of them). The notion of shared cultural heritage runs strong in Korea, along with the feeling that it's our "destiny" to be unified again. You may say it's not sensible (there are certainly many people who feel that way), but you cannot deny that the feeling is there.