Americans Live Today by Eating Birds and Snow: Video - Facts

Story:

North Korea TV – How Americans Live Today, Survive By Eating Birds And Snow.
A new release on North Korea TV today, showing how Americans live and how many of them have to eat snow and birds to survive.

They show the poor conditions of the houses, how many people have to eat birds and snow whilst living in tents.

You also will see the “snow soup kitchens”, which are on every street corner (except in Oregon) and a former Republican Candidate, who tried to get elected in snow soup kitchens free Oregon and was defeated to cries of “give us our snow soup kitchens”.

Analysis:

The ‘documentary’ message comes with a video purporting to be from North Korea, with an English translation that claims to show and explain how Americans live today – surviving by Eating Birds and Snow, and living in tents outside homes. Although the video presentation appears real, and the video went viral since it was posted in March 2013, the message conveyed is not a fact.

Picture Suggesting Americans Live Today by Eating Birds and Snow — Americans Live Today by Eating Birds and Snow

About the Video

Firstly, it should be noted that the YouTube video in question coming with the title “North Korea Documentary: How Americans Live Today, Survive By Eating Birds And Snow: North Korea TV” is listed in category – Comedy, Documentary, Entertainment. In the same YouTube channel, you can see another video (second one in this article) with the title “North Korea Comedy Show – Hitler Discovers That Americans Eat Snow and Songbirds,” which is again a video parody that (falsely) translates to show Americans eat birds and snow, and live in tents. This video is actually a scene from the German film Downfall (Der Untergang), when Hitler realizes that he is defeated in Berlin, and lets off his anger at his Generals. This is in fact a famous video, parodied many times on YouTube. The original scene from the movie with the right translation can be seen here. Coming back to the Korean video in question, the English voice over is not an actual translation of the video. The video was actually posted by Alun Hill, a British travel writer who has in fact made it as a satirical humor. The titles and description of the first two videos is suggestive of same. Later, the comedy writer even added satirical comments in his video description:

I can’t believe that so many Republicans from Oregon, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wired, Yahoo News, MSN News, the Daily Telegraph, dozens of websites and international tv and radio stations etc thought that this was true.

… nor that people still comment as if it were true – they never read this bit.

They’re probably Republicans – or from Oregon.

Or, worse, both!

Popularity

The video clipping in question became so popular that even reputed news papers thought it to be true; with the claims that it reflected how Americans live today surviving by eating birds and snow. However, Alun Hill later told The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) over phone that he received the original video from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, and was told it depicts the failure of European democracy. Although it is unclear exactly who made the film and when, the video actually features European countries like Romania, not America. So to conclude in simple terms, the video messages showing Americans live today by eating birds and snow is just a satirical humor that went viral.