Photo Credit: Department of Defense
North Korea -- a nation in the dark?
Is this what we are meant to interpret in this image made by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program showing the Korean peninsula at night?
Are we to accept the visual veracity of this picture as further proof that our world has become increasingly dependent upon images as a way of understanding extremely complex realities?
The image is an explicit form of rhetoric -- loaded with not so subtle ideological meaning. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark."