By: Fontana Smith on July 23rd, 2016
Isn’t it curious how we as people tend to be so caught
up in our own lives that so many of us have no idea what is going on outside
our own realities? I admit, I thought I knew the just of the horrors happening
in North Korea. Just this year North Korea launch, successfully I might add, a
hydrogen bomb. This unnerved me but only because I was worried about my own
safety. Never once have I stopped and considered the treatment of the people
living there. I had heard of the brainwashing but I honestly thought it was
because they had to want to keep the Kim family in power. I saw reading the
book Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden as an extra unneeded task to complete
this class. I was so completely,
irreversibly, and unmistakably wrong.
To start, I’ll give a brief history of the semi newly
divided Korea, I’ll start with Kim IL Sung, “eternal leader” of North Korea.
Kim IL Sung fled with his parents to escape Japanese rule. After joining a
youth communist group in school, was arrested and released for his ideology. He
joined the Korean resistance fighters against the Japanese. The Soviet Union
took notice and sent him to train with other operative in combat. Upon the end
of WWII and the surrender of Japan, Korea was divided into North communist
Korea, and South democratic and U.S. supported Korea. In 1950, after becoming
the first premier of North Korea two years’ prior, Kim IL Sung launched an
unprovoked evasion of South Korea. Britannica Encyclopedia article on Kim IL
Sung states, “Hoping to reunify Korea by force, Kim launched an invasion of
South Korea in 1950, thereby igniting the Korean War.”[1] The Korean War was a civil
war much like our American Civil War. It put brothers against brothers, and
North and South Korea are great examples of what could have been the United
States if the South would have won.
As with our own American history, the differences
between North and South Korea are as different as night and day. Let’s begin
with North Korea who tries to completely contain and brainwash its people as I
previously stated. Kim Jong Eun as well as his predecessors, his father Kim
Jong IL and grandfather Kim IL Sung, have been fairly effective at keeping
their people in their dark about anything they find threatening to their rule.
Let’s start with the age old saying that ‘knowledge is power.’ North Korean
leadership limits the amount of information available to their public and
censors or bans anything they don’t like. Instead they use things like
propaganda and lies to paint a very dim and dark picture of the rest of the
free world. They limit any and all publications or sources that would defraud
their government or ideologies. North Korean leaders have effectually placed
their people in a glass box. The population is lead to believe that as bad as
the situation may get in North Korea, the outside world is much worse and they
should be thankful have such a loyal and protective leader. North Korea wants
their people to believe that to be a strong nation they should be self-reliant.
However, history shows that North Korea has only survived through the continuous
help and generosity of other nations, both friendly and foe alike.
South Korea is a democracy well on its way to being an
extremely wealthy country. It’s average current citizens not only make
staggeringly more money than North Koreans, but they also have a better
standard of living than most of the core elites of North Korea. “An elite
family in Pyongyang does not live nearly as well –in terms of material
possessions, creature comforts, and entertainment options –as the family of an
average salaryman in Seoul.”[2] For many years South Korea
tried to ease tension between their nations with the Sunshine Policy[3], a program that gave North
Korea over half a million tons of fertilizer each year for free. South Korea
has successfully provided for their people, especially in the way of food. Boys
from South Korea are taller and weigh more than their Northern malnourished
counterparts. Basic nutrition needs and other fundamental human rights are met
in South Korea. They not only have funding and food to feed their citizens with
a diverse and booming economy, but they also have programs set up for North
Korean defectors that offers defectors classes, rent free place to live, job
training, and a 2-year monthly allowance to get on their feet.
In North Korea, a South Korean would find absolutely
none of the same curiosities. If they weren’t killed after being tortured for
information, they would lucky be sent to one of the many incarceration camps. Their
lives would then consist of torture, hard labor, fighting for survival, and
ultimately an early death. With that said, North Korea does not only reserve
this ‘special treatment’ for South Koreans specifically, but for any defectors
caught and anyone who has committed crimes against North Korea’s current or
past leaders. If you can’t be used to further their agenda, then you are
worthless. These crimes can be anything, like having a relative defect to South
Korea as in Shin’s case.
Shin’s uncle defected after the Korean civil war, and
because of that the rest of his family remaining in North Korea was put into an
incarceration camp.[4]
It is North Korean law that up to three generations can be punished for a crime
committed by an ancestor. Shin’s parents were chosen to be a couple, not by
choice and untimely Shin was bred of those actions.[5] The thought of someone
breeding other human beings makes me feel sick. Other crimes could be anything
from getting into a fight with someone above your station to taking advantage
of trading to support your family, because any form of capitalism that takes
money out of the hands of the government is obviously distained by North Korea.
It is what one would come to expect from a totalitarian government. Kim Jung
Enu, like his forefathers before him, have no limit on what he can exercise
complete control over. They are utterly above the law, and sometimes extend
that that curtesy to other members of the core caste as well.
Korean’s caste system consists of there are main
groups. “To identify and isolate his perceived political enemies, Kim IL Sung
created a neofeudal, blood-based pecking order in 1957”[6] Ironic to me that a communist
government would create such a strict caste system since communism is based on
complete and total equality of all citizens, but more on that in a moment. The
core or elite upper class, “numbering between 100,000 and 200,000 out of 23
million,”[7] is a list of family bloodlines
proven to be loyal to North Korea through war or farming, as well as proven
prison guards and certain military personnel. These members can go to school at
the University, are entitled to first pick of luxury items like fruit and
liquor, and receive a substantial portion of rice over the average citizen. In
Escape from Camp 14, Blane explains the importance of rice and how it is seen
as a sign of wealth and status to Koreans.[8] North Korea fails to
provides enough rice to feed its people each year that many people, especially
living in the camps, have to live without it in their day to day diet.
Under the core class is the neutral or what I would
consider to be the middle to poor class consisting of soldiers, teachers, and
technicians. “At the bottom was the hostile class, whose members were suspected
of opposing the government.”[9] The type of people in this
caste includes but isn’t limited to: former property owners, Christians,
families of defectors, those who worked for the Japan government prior to World
War II. These people and their descendants are not allowed to attend the University
in Pyongyang and either work in mines or factories if they aren’t imprisoned in
a camp.
Going back to the irony of North Korea’s claim to
communism, even though the caste system is an excellent example of inequality
among citizens; I have plenty more to tell you about. The Kim family alone
“maintains at least eight country houses.”[10] Most include several
amenities familiar to America’s upper class such as basket courts, media rooms,
indoor pools, bowling, skating rinks, shooting ranges, just to name a very
small few. During the 1990s famine when North Korea received donations, Kim
Jong IL demanded to control the donations.[11]World Food Program survey
found that even after the donations which should have made a tremendous
difference to the state of starvation across the country. Bottom line, people
were still starving. Along with this, Korea has defrauded multiple insurance
companies on false claims that resulted in over 100 million dollars being sent
directly to the Kim Jong IL.[12] So why then doesn’t North
Korea have the fuel to power its own electric grid more than two hours a day,
but plenty of power to power the electric fences of the prison camps? Or better
yet, where are the funds to help feed its people?
On top of this, North Korea calls itself the Workman’s
Paradise. People are imprisoned and punished for sometimes minor mistakes in
mines and factories. The society the Kim dynasty has created first makes
thieves and then punishes them for it. Living conditions in North Korea are
deplorable at best for anyone specifically the working class. Imaginary faults
have landed quite a few of the lower hostile class –all the way up to people
from the core class –into North Korea’s 50-year-old prison camps. Places like
this where generations are forced through slave labor, torture, starvation to
repay a previous generations implied fault are a complete mocker of human
rights. As well as every organization who says they are against the inhumane
treatment of people and yet are standing by while these people suffer.
Nothing in North Korea is equal. From classes, to
laws, housing, food, and education, the best privileges are reserved a very
small fraction of people while the rest of the population lives starving and
sometimes inhumane condition. Nothing about that screams equality to me. The
real question is: if we wouldn’t stand for innocent people to be rounded up,
enslaved, tortured, and kill for their beliefs during WWI and the Holocaust,
why are we allowing this to happen now North Korea?
[1]Encyclopædia
Britannica Online, s. v. "Kim Il-Sung", accessed July 23, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kim-Il-Sung.
[2] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 41.
[3] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 23.
[4] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 57.
[5] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 17-18
[6] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 34.
[7] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 37.
[8] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 52.
[9] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 35.
[10] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 41.
[11] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 87-88.
[12] Blaine
Harden, Escape From Camp 14 (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), page 38-41.
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