NORTH KOREA

A PROJECT BY SASAN KASRAVIWhat accounts for how little the

public knows or cares about North Korea?

Since its founding in 1948 The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has made itself a focus of quite a bit of international attention and controversy.

The nuclear state is also generally known to the public for the ‘brain-washing’ of its people and for its massive and in many ways ridicu-lous propaganda campaigns.

North Korean is, in many ways stuck in time. Technologies like well crafted nail clippers are often a stag-gering shock to the North Korean

public, and compuers and CDs are looked out without the faintest rec-ognition.

The magnolia nation is trapped in the past in other, more dramatic ways. The current estimate is that between 150,000 and 200,000 North Koreans are detained in concentra-tion camps today. A state propo-gated famine killed an estimated 3.5 million people in just four years.

The Economist Intelligence Unit publishes a Democracy Index nearly every year since 2006 and in every single report North Korea has land-ed at the very bottom of the list, and in every study the DPRK’s score un-

cer “civil liberties” has been an un-paralleled 0.00 out of 10.

It’s likely that present day North Korea has the worst human right conditions of any nation, ever in history.

And yet, despite the attention, despite the brainwashing, despite the deaths, and despite the attroci-ties, intervention in North Korea doesn’t seem to be a major political concern for most people who would otherwise be well meaning and well informed.

This project attempts to explore that dilemma, to explain it, and to foresee a viable resolution.

1

CONTENTSBackground

What is North Korea?Life in North Korea

Death in North KoreaIllustrations of Concentration Camps by Escapees

North Korea and the West North Korea and Weapons of Mass DestructionWhy Doesn’t the West Just Attack North Korea?

North Korea and the East China and South Korea

“Change Comes From Within”Why Aren’t More People Aware of or Concerned for North Korea?

Why Do People Know So Little?Compassion Fatigue

CaricaturizationDenial

A Final Thought

2

4

12

18

22

5679

1415

1920

2324262728

North Korea and South Korea at night

3

BACKGROUND

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother,

from the age of doublethink — greetings!

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

4

North Korea is, to my surprise, a very difficult nation to describe in even its simplest aspects.

The natural way we make sense of new things is to relate it to what we al-ready know, but, in many ways, North Korea is too different from anything of the concepts we’re famil-iar with for quick descrip-tions to do it justice.

North Korea has been intentionally made so that it’s not possible to describe it in an original way; what is possible to say about it only comes in the form of clichés.

Clichés like Big Brother, the Prison State, and the insane dictator aren’t just too easy and overused, they’re also true. The late journalist Christopher Hitchens described this phenomenon by saying, “Totalitarianism is itself a cliché.”

The Democratic Peo-ple’s Republic of Korea (its official title) formally declared itself a nation in 1948, at the exact time that George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It’s a nation which very few people in the outside world know much about, and in which very few people know much of the outside world.

Korea was once a single nation which was eventu-ally occupied by Impe-rial Japan. Once Japan was defeated in the second World War, stewardship of Korea was split horizon-tally with the Americans essentially getting what became South Korea and Soviet Russia getting what became North Korea.

Not long after this sepa-

ration, a war broke out between the two Koreas in a challenge to change the border between the na-tions, which, after three years and two-and-a-half million killed civilians, was ultimately drawn al-most exactly where it started.

Since then, every-thing about North Ko-rea is modeled after its first leader, “The Great Leader”, Kim Il-sung, who ruled the nation until his death in 1994.

Hitchens, one of very few journalists to visit North Korea and write about it and the only jour-nalist to have reported from all three Axis of Evil nations, described North Korea in a 2005 lecture on the Axis of Evil:

There’s a picture of him on every wall, there has to be a pic-ture of him in every house, he is never off the television screen, he’s never off

the radio, all films are about him, and all plays are about him, all education is about him, all public events are about him, all holidays are about him.

Kim Il-sung is still, twenty years after his death, the President of North Korea. His son and successor Kim Jong-il was (and will forever be) officially the General Secretary of the Worker’s Party, and Kim Jong-un, the third-generation Kim now ruling North Korea, is the First Secretary of the Worker’s Party.

Every aspect of politi-cal life in North Korea is related to the cult of the leader and every aspect of life is political.

Where a North Korean lives, what he or she eats and drinks, does for a liv-ing, how much food they are given to eat weekly, how much of an education they’re allowed to have,

where they’re allowed to go, what transportation they’re allowed to use to get there, how late they’re allowed to be outside, who they’re allowed to speak to - everything is determined by a person’s “songbun.”

Songbun is in some ways derived from or nev-ertheless similar to the Imperial Japanese concept of honor, except more im-portant to every aspect of life and the only criteria by which a person’s song-bun is measured is their loyalty to The Party.

Poor songbun is also passed down three gen-erations, so that a per-son’s songbun is just as much measured by their own actions as it is by the actions of their parents and grandparents - many people are doomed from birth to a horrific life in labor camps because of something their grand-parent whispered to the wrong person.

WHAT IS NORTH KOREA?

This is not a black and white photograph

5

Anecdotes that have been supplied by defectors about their lives prior to fleeing are one of the only means we have to know-ing about life in North Korea; Barbara Demick’s book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, for example, excel-lently tells the stories of refugees and what their lives were like in North Korea long before condi-tions were so unignorably bad that they had to flee:

In the futuristic dys-topia imagined in 1984, George Or-well wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda post-ers. Such is the case in North Korea. Im-ages of Kim Il-sung are depicted in the vivid poster colors favored by the So-cialist Realism style of painting. The great leader sits on a bench smiling benevolently at a group of bright-ly dressed children crowding around him. Rays of orange yellow emanate from his face: He is the sun.

She describes the im-pression this state propa-ganda and leader worship had on one defector:

Mi-ran had no rea-son not to believe the signs. Her father was a humble mine work-er. Her family was poor, but so was ev-ery family she knew. Since all outside publications, films, and broadcasts were banned, Mi-ran as-

sumed that nowhere else in the world was better off, that that most probably fared far worse. Mi-ran felt she was quite lucky to have been born in North Korea under the loving care of the fatherly leader.

In quantum mechanics The Totalitarian Principle states that everything that is not forbidden is com-pulsory.

It’s interesting not only how well this directly re-lates to politically totali-tarian North Korea but also the inverse is equally true and equally telling: everything that is not ab-solutely necessary to fur-thering the Kim objective is absolutely forbidden and punishable by torture and death.

This doesn’t just apply to the outside world, or ideas that could poten-tially be dangerous to the Kim regime, but more perversely it applies to any imaginable thing is ir-relevant to it. Those who are not chosen to study a certain field, even math,

are expressly forbidden to study it.

This principle doesn’t simply apply to academia but to every aspect of what a person might learn. Demick quotes Mi-ran admitting, “At the time I left North Korea, I was twenty-six years old and a schoolteacher, but I didn’t know how babies were conceived.”

Because of North Ko-rea’s insistence on isolat-ing its people completely from the outside world, and because of their com-plete inability to compete with it, North Korea’s tech-nology has been frozen in time. Demick writes that the people of North Korea have seen no technologi-cal advancement since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Similarly, Russian de-signer Artymy Lebedev described what he saw in the showcase city of Pyongyang, the best that North Korea can possibly muster to impress foreign tourists, by saying:

If we compare the details and realities

of everyday life with what we know from history, it’s possible to pinpoint the time in which North Ko-rea is living: it’s 1950. Even a well-oiled and finely-tuned time machine could hard-ly throw you back into the past with such accuracy.

The distance between the major North Kore-an city of Kaesong and the South Korean capi-tal Seoul is only about 25 miles, but the North Kore-ans who manages to travel that distance are often genuinely astonished and badly jarred by the sheer technological marvel of what they find there.

But it’s not the awe of looking up at the heights of what modern technol-ogy that’s the most telling. North Korea’s antiquat-edness shows in the face of the most unassuming scraps of what no one in The West with give a sec-ond thought.

Demick reports: A North Korean sol-dier would later re-call a buddy who had been given an Amer-ican-made nail clip-per and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edg-es, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sink-ing heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clip-per, how could it compete with Amer-ican weapons?

LIFE IN NORTH KOREA

North Koreans in line for the bus

6

With the end of Soviet Russia so the cheap fuel subsidies which North Korea had long been gifted by their Communist brothers to the north.

North Korea’s infrastructure is designed the way you would expect when all decisions are made by a leader who executes anyone who would think to question him.

Power generators were designed to need significant power to start operating, for example, and soon after the end of the subsidies power generators started dying out and becoming rusted monuments to a North Korea that could be seen at night.

Soon after that the economy col-lapsed entirely. For months North Korean workers would arrive to work at their factories only to stand at attention for ten hours and clean equipment that had long since stopped operating.

North Koreans get their food from weekly government rations, which gradually dwindled further and further. Meanwhile, the pro-paganda that covered every sur-face and every announcement with party slogans like, “LET’S CATCH MORE SPIES TO PROTECT THE FATHERLAND,” and, “LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY,” began to in-clude the slogan, “LET’S EAT TWO MEALS A DAY!”

The ensuing famine would be one

of the worst famines in modern his-tory.

In his speech on the Axis of Evil Hitchens lectures, “We don’t know how many North Koreans died in the famine of 90s and it’s impossible to find out, but it’s several million, and the average height of people in North Korea has shrunk by several inches.”

Desperate North Koreans stopped showing up to work to scavenge for anything to eat, which is easier said than done in a nation that’s not only arid but also highly industrialized.

People in factory towns like Chongjin had to walk several hours to get to any place where things nat-

urally grow, only to find that every-thing had already been picked clean.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s strict songbun system reserved insured that the most elite never went hun-gry, and the inner part and the mili-tary them had first go at everything that was left, leaving only the occa-sional scrap for most citizens.

In 2014 the United Nations Gen-eral Assembly commissioned a re-port on human rights in the Dem-ocratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The report concluded that the North Korean leadership and its current leader were guilty of vari-ous human rights abuses and crimes against humanity:

DEATH IN NORTH KOREA

A North Korean man seen by a tourist in the showcase city of Pyongyang, picking grass to eat.

North Korean Children noticed through a far away window. Pictures like these are strictly forbidden and journalists must try to sneak them out with them

7

Systematic, widespread and gross human rights viola-tions have been and are be-ing committed by the Dem-ocratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials. In many instanc-es, the violations of human rights found by the com-mission constitute crimes against humanity.These are not mere excesses of the State; they are essen-tial components of a politi-cal system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded.The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. Political scientists of the twentieth century char-acterized this type of politi-cal organization as a totali-tarian State: a State that does not content itself with ensur-ing the authoritarian rule of a small group of people, but seeks to dominate every as-pect of its citizens’ lives and terrorizes them from within.

Of course, all of this was widely available information well before February 2014.

A 2011 publication from Human Rights Watch on Genocide in North Korea states:

“Genocide Watch has ample proof that genocide has been committed and mass killing is still underway in North Korea.”

The Human Rights Watch report goes on to cite its own research and a report by Amnesty International, saying that around 200,000 political prisoners (the only kind of prison-ers) are currently kept in concentra-tion camps for life.

An estimated third of these are children, some of whom were born in these camps will spend their en-tire lives there as slave laborers.

The United Nations World Food Program reports that North Korea is facing the worst food shortage in the world today.

The famine of North Korea has

physically stunted the North Korean population so severely that the aver-age North Korean is now six inches shorter than the average South Ko-rean.

Demick catalogs testimonies from refugees who say they that someone or they themselves resort-ed to eating grass, dirt, manure, and in rare cases the flesh of those who had already starved to death in or-der to temporarily stave off hunger.

A Washington Post article titled “Cannibals of North Korea,” reports at least one incident where a despa-rate, starving man resorted to kill-ing and eating his two daughters.

The recent UN report calls for immediate, unhesitating action to be taken to try Kim Jong-un and the upper North Korean leadership in an international court of law and to provide food aid and protection of basic human rights to North Korean citizens.

So why hasn’t this happened? A North Korean soldier standing alongside an American soldier and a South Korean soldier

8

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CONCENTRATION9

CAMPS DRAWN BY ESCAPEES10

11

NORTH KOREAAND

THE WEST

His voice was terribly sad. I understood that he did not wish to see what they would do to me. He did not wish to see his only son go up in flames.

My forehead was covered with cold sweat. Still, I told him I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times, the world would never tolerate such crimes…

“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria…” his voice broke.

- Elie Wiesel, Night

12

13

Official statements made by governmentsin reaction to Kim Jong-Il’s death in 2011

AustraliaJapan

PolandSouth Korea

TaiwanUnited Kingdom

United States

“Kim Jong-il will beremembered as the leader of a totalitarian regime who violated the basic rights of the North Korean people for nearly two decades.”

- Canada

We hope that their new leadership will recognise that engagement with the international community offers the best prospect of improving the lives of ordi-nary North Korean people. We encourage North Korea to work for peace andsecurity in the region.”

- United Kingdom

CanadaFinlandFrance

GermanyHungarySweden

CRITICISM OF NORTH KOREACALL FOR PEACE/STABILITYAmeniaAzerbaijanBangladeshBelarusCambodiaChinaCroatiaCubaEquitorial GuineaEthiopiaGhanaGuineaIndiaIndonesiaIran

JordanKazakhstanMongoliaMyanmarNepalNicaraguaPakistanPalestinePhilippinesQatarRussiaSyriaVenezualaVietnam

CONDOLENCES

“The message said that leader Kim Jong Il devoted all his life to the dignity and prosperity of the country and the people and most powerfully supported the cause of global justice and truth.”

- Palestine

The American Secu-rity Project has detailed a timeline of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and it shows that North Korea was beginning to develop nuclear weapons as far back as the early 1960s.

In 1985 North Korea signed the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nu-clear Weapons, promising to not seek nuclear weap-on development.

Coming into compli-ance with the treat, how-ever, required that North Korea allow an inspection of its nuclear power facili-ties, which it dodged for years.

In 1992, a team from the International Atomic En-ergy Agency was allowed to inspect North Korean nuclear power plants un-til they started to ask too many questions and no-tice too many inconsisten-cies and was disallowed

from continuing any in-spections.

A few months later, in 1993, North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Non-Prolifera-

tion Treaty, which made then-President Clinton concede to an agreement which required North Ko-rea to demonstrate in a few years’ time that it had no nuclear capabilities.

Somewhat obviously, this agreement wasn’t fol-lowed through on North Korea’s part.

Then-leader Kim Jong-il used baited food and electrical aid from West-ern nations with promises of discontinuing its nu-clear program in return, never keeping up its end.

As a result, many coun-tries began to cutoff their aid to North Korea, exac-erbating the famine.

During the height of the famine which was in the process of killing about four million people North Koreans, The U.S. offered to provide for all of North Korea’s power needs if it ends its nuclear program

in return, which would have effectively ended the famine over night.

North Korea refused the deal.

By 2002 then-President Bush had declared North Korea as being a part of what he called The Axis of Evil and by 2003 North Korea had backed out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and were openly testing nukes.

Western relations with North Korea lie in at an effective standstill, in which North Korea re-peatedly baits favors by making promises it has no intention of keeping, and Western nations, The United States in particu-lar, has little choice but to concede and hope for the best.

Ultimately, waiting for North Korea to surrender its nukes is a fruitless en-deavor.

14

NORTH KOREAAND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Ranges of various North Korean missiles capable of nukes are shown below. The innermost circle easily surrounds Seol and Tokyo

Visibly tarved soldiers march in a display of North Korea’s military power

Not content with Nuclear weap-ons, North Korea is also thought to possess chemical weapons as well biological weapons. This, com-bined with internal human rights violations as well the abductions of Japanese and Korean citizens makes North Korea guilty of violating at least the Genocide Convention, Nuclear Weapons Convention, and Biological Weapons Convention, any single one of which allows (if not mandates) the UN or any nation within it to intervene using military force.

However, The situation with North Korea is such that it’s really only those nations that know they don’t pose a military threat to North Korea (either because of their weak military or staunch anti-war posi-tions) actually a criticize it for these reasons (see my Kim Jong-il Death Map for reference). Western nations with threatening militaries which will get involved if they have to tend to take a much more reserved ap-proach.

This is most predominantly due to the hostage situation the North

Korea has set up using Japan (which it regularly shoots missiles over in a reminder of how easily they could nuke it), South Korea (there are enough conventional weapons alone aimed at all times at the 10 million civilians in the capital of

Seoul to obliterate the city in a mat-ter of hours), and its own people (who would be the real victims of a military strike).

Sure, if North Korea does fol-low through on any of its military threats, Western powers would be

North Korean Propaganda commonly depicts American Soldiers elaborately torturing Koreans for fun

WHY DOESN’T THE WEST

15

easily able to crush its military in a matter of a day, but given the atrocities it’s allowing North Korea to get away, this stalemate is pretty desirable.

Hitchens summarizes:You could send a squadron of planes over North Korea and you could denuclearize it in an afternoon. But we can’t bet that they wouldn’t destroy themselves in an at-tempt to destroy us. It’s mor-ally not possible to take that chance. And if you refuse to pay any more tribute to them, if you say, ‘Right, we won’t give you any more food,’ you know who’s gonna go hungry and it’s not gonna be Kim Jong Il. And again, it’s very morally difficult if we say, ‘We hate you so much we’ll starve your population.’

Still, none of this is to say that The West is doing everything it can. It’s merely doing everything it has to. This distinction, conveniently, does not show itself readily.

As the chief enemy of Nuclear North Korea, The United States’ in-

volvement is strictly self-preservato-ry.

No politician runs with a “Liber-ate North Korea” platform. The web-site of Congressman George Miller, my Congressman, which claims he, “supports fundamental human rights” doesn’t so much as mention North Korea, uncontestedly the na-tion with the worst human rights violations currently on the planet. He’s by no means the exception.

America has a shameful history, in fact, of not intervening in any genocides it doesn’t have to. After the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, the same administration that conceded to North Korea’s bid for time to de-velop nukes was found by the Na-tional Security Archive (the other NSA: a non-governmental research organization founded to check against government secrecy) to have contributed to the Rwandan Geno-cide in the following ways:

1. The U.S. lobbied the U.N. for a total withdrawal of U.N. (UNAMIR) forces in Rwanda in April 1994;

2. Secretary of State War-ren Christopher did not au-

thorize officials to use the term "genocide" until May 21, and even then, U.S. of-ficials waited another three weeks before using the term in public;

3. Bureaucratic infighting slowed the U.S. response to the genocide in general;

4. The U.S. refused to jam extremist radio broadcasts inciting the killing, citing costs and concern with in-ternational law;

5. U.S. officials knew ex-actly who was leading the genocide, and actually spoke with those leaders to urge an end to the violence but did not follow up with concrete action.

Even the moment which the American military most deserves to be proud of, the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, was in many ways a matter of happenstance.

The United States Holocaust Me-morial Museum reminds us that the Roosevelt administration would not admit Jews seeking refuge from the Nazi persecution, though it was well aware of what that meant, and in some cases even deported asylum seekers back to Europe.

American Newspapers were al-ready reporting news of The Holo-caust before the attack on Pearl Har-bor, which went unresponded to or denied by the Government.

When irrefutable, photographic proof of the death camps reached the administration in 1943, it was classified as a government secret.

The United States government is perhaps no more self-serving than any other Western government, but with Russia and China holding veto power over any UN intervention, the United States government and the majority of its people are seem-ingly content to sit back and let The East sort out the situation on its own.

JUST ATTACK NORTH KOREA?

16

17

NORTH KOREAAND

THE EAST

‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not in-terested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resem-bled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safe-guard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to estab-lish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’

- George Orwell, 1984

18

Among the United States gov-ernment and people well-informed enough about North Korea to know why we can’t just barge in, the most resoundingly common sentiment is that the North Korea puzzle will be best solved by (or at any rate should be abandoned to) the East.

Western intervention in North Korea almost certainly means war. The peaceful solution lies in the hands of China, North Korea’s clos-est ally.

Among the forum moderators, jaywalker1982 argues:

China is key here. They have to stop protecting NK and allow more in depth inves-tigation, and stop forcibly repatriating so many defec-tors… In the West all we can do is put that pressure on China.

China did, in fact, distance itself from North Korea somewhat after what’s now come to be called the 2013 North Korea Crisis.

North Korea directly and repeat-edly threatened to nuke South Ko-rea, Japan, and the United States while it was at the same time shown to be testing nuclear weapons.

CrazyEddie041, however, holds that a solution is likely to be found through China:

China’s main priority re-garding North Korea is keeping the regime stable: they like having a friendly country between them and South Korea (and the Amer-ican troops stationed there), and they don’t like the idea of having to absorb mil-lions of refugees should the regime collapse. By keeping North Korea propped up, they can focus on other po-litical goals without having to watch their border.

Though it seem like it, it’s worth noting that jaywalker1982 and Cra-zyEddie041 aren’t in complete dis-agreement here.

The two agree that China has sig-nificant political power over North Korea as its only remaining lifeline and most willing-and-able military ally and neither is naive enough to think that China would act on any-thing other than its personal benefit.

The difference in the two views is in China’s priorities.

While jaywalker1982 is right in that The West can have no influ-ence on North Korea does through diplomacy, he believes that China’s inclination to not be threatened by military escalation along its bor-ders will persuade North Korea to appease The West; CrazyEddie041 believes, contrary to that optimism, that China would rather prepare for war than work for peace and there-fore wishes maintain North Korea as a buffer between the South Korea and its borders.

While it would make sense for a nation to want to protect itself rather than put itself directly at risk, I find myself somehow more per-suaded to think, maybe because of China’s own past and present hu-

man rights abuses and military en-thusiasm, that it would reach for the arrow and not the olive branch.

South Korea, while it for obvious reasons doesn’t have much weight in negotiating with North Korea, plays a vital role in the possible Korean reunification.That role is potentially compromised, however.

A Stanford study called, “The Cost of Korean Reunification” cites more than a dozen reports by gov-ernments, academics and invest-ment banks and averages them out to predict that the burden of South Korea taking on 25 million starv-ing, uneducated citizens would cost them between $2 trillion to $5 tril-lion, spread out over about 30 years.

The blow to South Korea’s cur-rently booming economy would be devastating.

And though it’s written in South Korea’s constitution that the official state position is in favor of Korean reunification, this is likely to seri-ously compromise South Korea ac-tually putting those words into ac-tion when it counts.

CHINA AND SOUTH KOREA19

The last remaining option is to let North Korea run its course and change from within.

North Korea forum moderator told to me, “I would love to see the NK and SK reunited, but that change can only come from within NK if we don’t want to see the War repeated.” This isn’t an uncommon sentiment among North Korea activists and political experts, and it’s frankly not as lazy a notion as it might seem at first glace.

Kim Il-sung was God-on-Earth to the North Korean people and Kim Jong-il was, from his child-hood, revered nearly as much as his father and known to be as deific, but Kim Jong-un was a relatively un-known person when he came into power - even to North Koreans.

It makes sense that people would be more naturally inclined to fight against him than they were his fa-ther and his father before him.

Additionally, no one gets nuked when North Korean politics just change from within.

Just hours ago, as of this writing, North Korean leadership publically referred to a building collapse in North Korea as an “unintended ac-cident.” Surely, some would think, this is sign of progress that will lead to a real solution.

This simple appeal of this op-tion, this last remaining reason that

people have to as-sume they don’t need to care about what’s going in North Korea and that it’ll take care of itself, is exactly the reason it’s the most destructive approach to the topic.

There are three possible ways for North Korea to change internal-ly: through will-ing resignation of power from

the Kim regime, through a military coup, or through a civilian revolu-tion.

Regarding the former-most, the most important thing to under-stand about the Kim-regime is that it doesn’t have famine, concentra-tion camps, and economic nihility, it is all those things. Those things only exist by its design.

In Nothing to Envy, Demick re-counts Mrs. Song’s story of how after the famine hit a black mar-ket of food gradually started being formed, which the military couldn’t shut down because its own soldiers were in such desperate need of it.

People began to capitalistically trade goods and labor for food that had been snuck into the country and within a few months Mrs. Song would go to the makeshift market but rice, bread, grapes, oranges, even pineapples - foods that had been unheard of in North Korea since its inception.

Under the guise of protecting people’s newly acquired savings from harmful inflation, the North Korean regime eventually issued a new currency and discontinued all previous currencies.

When people took their life’s sav-ings to be exchanged for the new currency, they found out that there was a limit of how much money each family could exchange: about

30 US dollars. Countless people lost all of their long-earned savings over night and within a week the death and famine were back to haunt them.

Nineteen Eighty-Four warns that totalitarian dictatorships aren’t in power for any reason other than for the sake of power itself, and the only way of knowing they have that power is to make people do things they don’t want to do, and to torture them cruelly - it will never let go.

A military coup is also highly un-likely.

The North Korean political hier-archy is established in such a way that no one who would even think to so much as question Kim Jong-un isn’t near enough to Pyongyang (or alive long enough) to have any impact whatsoever.

As far a civilian revolution goes, that would require that people know that they’re so oppressed and to have the slightest concept of what it is they want instead, which is just not the case in North Korea.

Besides, everyone is a spy against everyone else and people are put in concentration camps for so much as muttering the wrong thing in their sleep.

Even if the citizens of North Ko-rea could all band together against their government, they don’t pos-sess anything close to the means to overcome them through force, and civil disobedience only works when the government needs its people to exist.

As it stands, most of the North Korean population isn’t providing much if anything to the economy and even if they were, North Korea’s economy has an inexhaustible get-out-of-jail-free-card by bargaining with The West over false promises to disarm their nuclear weapons or just ask China for help.

They could start kill off every ci-vilian with reckless abandon and, with things the way they are now, no one would stop them.

They’re already doing it.

“CHANGE COMES FROM WITHIN”20

Part of a series of photos snuck out of North Korea by a visitor titled “Pictures North Korea Doesn’t Want You to See.” Siblings pose in front of their mandatory household portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, in front which funny poses are expressly forbidden.

21

WHY AREN’T MOREPEOPLE AWARE OF

OR CONCERNED FORNORTH KOREA?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be

washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne, Meditation XVII

22

The first and most obvious reason that people don’t care very much about North Korea is that they don’t know anything’s wrong.

Maybe a vague sense that it’s not a pleasant place, or that it’s a com-munist-and-therefore-bad state, but people who can name names and are aware of specific conditions in the country are by far the minor-ity, even among otherwise well-in-formed people.

One survey respondent summed up everything they knew about North Korea by saying, “I know that the leaders spend their money on themselves and that the leaders pay for big water parks that only the elite are allowed at.” Commonly, re-sponses were very general. Another respondent said, “It’s a creepy op-pressive place led by communist.”

In addition to surveying my Facebook friends, I wrote to several moderators of online North Korea-related forums. One moderator with the username elbac14 elaborated:

Very few people care about North Korea because no-body is taught about it in school. I didn’t know any-thing about North Korea or the Korean War until a picked up a book (Nothing to Envy) during a summer between university.

Most people said that North Ko-rea wasn’t in the news enough or taught about in schools enough for them to know as much they’d like to, but that’s it’s either polite gesturing or excuse making. As a respondent to my survey put it: “This informa-tion isn’t exactly hidden or brushed aside.”

Several attempts have been made to bring awareness about North Korea to the public. Written works have only reached those who have either been curious enough already to seek it out or who read political commentary avidly enough to have stumbled onto it, neither of which is a very large population.

More visuals attempts have in-

cluded many galleries of pictures taken by journalists and tourists during visits of North Korea as well a few documentaries with video footage of life inside North Korea. The problem though is that North Korea is extremely careful about what parts of North Korea visitors get to see.

The city of Pyongyang, in which most visitors are kept, is not just the best of everything North Ko-rea can muster with its money. To live anywhere near Pyongyang a person must constantly prove and prove again their strict devotion to the party. North Koreans outside of Pyongyang aren’t allowed to even travel to it without strictly enforced permits.

In Pyongyang, visitors can never choose where to go or when to go there. Each visitor is assigned two caretakers, each to monitor and in-sure that the visitor does not and cannot see or hear anything he or she isn’t allowed to and also to watch the other guide to insure that their work isn’t compromised. Still, what can be said is often telling and shocking nonetheless. Hitchens ex-plains:

Even though though the re-gime makes every effort to only show the good bits of the country, it can’t stop you from seeing from the bus as you go cross-country old people picking up individual grains of rice from the fields people trying to eat grass. It’s not possible to conceal a thing of this kind.

Searching YouTube for “North Korea” and arranging the results by views reveals that the most attention any such video has gotten is VICE’s documentary Inside North Korea (in 10th place as most viewed North Korea video) has gotten 3,449,734 views in years. The top search re-sult, a musical parody of “Gangnam Style”, has gotten 43,999,754 views in one year.

Another North Korea web-forum

moderator who I spoke with regard-ing North Korea, CrazyEddie041, partly attributed the lack of atten-tion to how long the problem’s be-ing ongoing:

Human rights have been an endemic problem in North Korea since it was founded, and the famine that killed so many people started two decades ago. There’s nothing new to get enraged over, so people don’t; they just kind of accept that North Korea is a sinkhole and don’t want anything to do with it.

It’s worth noting, however, Joseph Kony and The Lord’s Resistance army were ongoing problems long before “Kony 2012” went viral.

Since Kony 2012, the strategy of North Korea activists have modeled their efforts after it. Relatively short videos with sweeping melancholy orchestration highlight the traves-ties of the North Korean famine and concentration camps.

Cornerstone Ministry, an inter-national Christian ministry con-cerned with North Korea posted a video, titled “The UNSPEAKABLE HELL of North Korea Concen-tration Camps Illustrated Video Shocking Cruelty”, that compiles illustrations of prisoner condition, torture methods, and executions in North Korean concentration camps.

The video was thumbed down by 43% of viewers through YouTube’s rating system. The first comment one sees looking at the video is, “This is not proof these are draw-ings.”

In an attempt to avoid this same disconnect, Human Rights Watch posted a 15-minute video in Febru-ary which combined some draw-ings of camp conditions with face-to-face video interviews with real defectors who lived in those camps: so far it’s gained only 132,229 views. While that number isn’t nothing, it still pales in comparison to the one-hundred million views of the video it tries to emulate.

WHY DO PEOPLE KNOW SO LITTLE?23

It seems that neither news articles nor drawings, are enough to make the public believe and care about what’s going on in North Korean concentration camps, but the solution may be more nuanced than just finding a way to more disturbing images more in the face of the public.

The uploader of the mirror of “The UNSPEAKABLE HELL of North Korea” offers additional commentary, adding, “If this does not sicken, horrify, & utterly revolt you, you are probably emotionally and/or mentally ill & unstable, and you are probably in desperate need of psychiatric help.”

Compassion Fatigue is a psychological condition. When used in the direct medical sense it typically re-fers to a the gradual lessening of a person’s ability to feel compassion over time. Sometimes called, Second-ary Stress Syndrome, the condition was first diagnosed among nurses in the 1950s. It develops over time as a person is exposed to witnessing trauma that engages their compassion consistently enough and for a long enough time that it over reduces the brain’s natural ca-pacity for compassion in the same way that drug ad-dicts degrade their natural capacity for feeling pleasure. The word “callous” is evidence enough, however, that the notion of compassion hardening with wear like skin after hard labor was noticeable well before The Fifties.

Journalism Analysts, like those at The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, use the term compassion fatigue more broadly to mean that the general population’s exposure to traumatic images has dulled society’s overall capacity for compassion and reduce the efficacy of photojournalism. In an online self-study Unit on Photography and Trauma, the col-lege teaches:

Reports about international crises — war, famine, disease, brutality and other major conflicts abroad — can have mixed effects “at home.” Journalist, photographer and scholar Susan Moeller has written extensively about the subject of “compassion fatigue”, a phe-nomenon in which news stories about partic-ularly egregious events abroad elicit less com-passion from readers and viewers because they do not perceive that there is anything that can be done about the situation, and they find it difficult to understand the complexity of factors that result in unspeakable crimes against humanity. As such, they “tune out.”

As such, it’s not necessarily in the best interest of eliciting widespread awareness and concern for human rights abuses to saturate media with horrific pictures from North Korean concentration camps if we even did have images to share.

jaywalker1982, a moderator at a North Korea related web forum, offered this insight when I asked him about

this issue: “In my personal opinion, more imagery of the human rights plights would be helpful. Not necessarily gore, though, as that would alienate some people - just metaphorical like tankman.” I was extremely impressed with this distinction, which was casually slipped into a long wall of text on the issue. He’s absolutely right. I think the images that would most effectively get Americans and other people of the civilized world to care would be the ones that show North Koreans as liv-ing, dignified human beings who want and deserve the same things that they do.

This distinction is what accounts for how much global support the Arab Spring received from the youth of the international community, who felt so much solidarity with their Arab brothers and sisters that they were in-spired by their protests to create the Occupy movement, but how so very few of them felt that same solidarity and compassion for their Syrian brothers and sisters by wanting to intervene when they were having chemical weapons used against them by their government.

At any rate, while direct images of the atrocities hap-pening would certainly prove to all but the most staunch denialists that there are truly horrible things being done to their fellow human beings in North Korea, I think the sorts of images and interviews that would be most effective to show in The West, that would most invite action, should try to present North Korean defectors as brave people who are capable of seeing the wool that’s been pulled over their eyes with a little bit of help and who are capable of and willing to make brave sacrifices for their own cause.

COMPASSION FATIGUE

Images like this illegally snuck out portrait have the potentialto remind us that North Koreans are humans, like us.

24

Reddit.com is a website that aggregates links that users submit regarding a specific topic, that are then rated and commented on by its millions of international users. For example, a user might submit a link to a news article on the melting West Antarctic ice sheet, after which other users either vote it up or down a list of recent submissions to arrange the links in order of importance. The same rating system is then applied to arrange the comments for each article. I took every article from the last month that was voted into the top 10 news articles of that day and looked that the top rated comment for each article.

North Korean new generation losing faith in the regime: After decades of absolute control, Pyongyang’s iron grip on the lives of ordinary citizens is finally slipping

South Korea Defence Ministry says North Korea is not a real country, exists solely for the benefit of Kim Jong Un, and must disappear soon.

North Korea has written an official letter of complaint to Britain over a London hair salon’s advert implying leader Kim Jong-Un has a bad hairstyle

Satellite images taken on Wednesday include hints that North Korea may be preparing to detonate multiple nuclear devices at once

North Korea calls Obama a “powerful pimp” and “gang-ster” for South Korea’s “prostitute” President; says South Korean president’s behavior like a “crafty prostitute eagerly trying to frame someone by giving her body to a powerful pimp”. The North then said it was ready for “full scale nuclear war.”

Full-scale large military drone operations will start shortly in Japan and its nearby airspace to monitor Chi-nese military activities and North Korea’s nuclear and missile development

North Korea offer condolences to South for Sewol Ferry disaster

North Korea arrests 24 year old American citizen trying to claim asylum in DPRK

North Korea accuses US and allies of “worst human rights abuses”; says defectors to South Korea who exposed human rights abuses are “terrorists” and that North Korea’s masses are leading happy lives. The North said that human rights investigations would only make it achieve “Final Victory” faster.

I remember reading an account of a younger North Korean escapee, where she mentions that the trigger for her was seeing “Best Before” dates on food aid. The idea that food could actually be left alone long enough to spoil indicated that maybe life really WAS better outside North Korea.

I like how “must disappear soon” sounds infinitely more intimidating and threatening than any of the bombastic rhetoric that’s ever come out of North Korea.

North Korea just gets funnier every day.

It’s April, nothing to worry about it’s just the annual “threaten to turn South Korea into a sea of fire” festi-val.

A large percent of NK’s public statements sound like they were written by angry teenagers.

Oh no! They’re not putting people in their planes!

Don’t forget that they are still Koreans to the north. Different ideologies, different circumstances, different leaders, but Koreans all the same.

What an idiot.

Not now North Korea. It’s Russia’s turn to be the bad guy.

Note: the coloring matches headline to comment and doesn’t denote anything in itself

25

Doing any level of internet re-search on North Korea immediately demonstrates the caricaturization of North Korea in popular media. Parody songs like “Kim Jong Style” are hardly the only example of this.

North Korea is widely parodied and poked fun at from films like Team America: World Police to meme images of the pudgy, boy-faced Kim Jong-un on various in-spections captioned with the run-ning joke that he assumes every item he’s inspecting is food that’s being served to him.

Strangely, this is how the average young person knows anything at all about North Korea, aside from the occasional headline after a routine North Korean military threat.

Answers from survey respon-dents reporting where they learned what they know about North Korea included the answers, “Thousands of memes with the dictator with the crazy hair cut,” and most tellingly, “SNL, NPR, The Colbert Report, The Onion.”

Only one of the four sources that the latter respondent listed isn’t completely devoted to comedic parody, and this is by no means an exceptional case - it’s the norm for young people. As pervasive as this is though, it’s worth noting that the

historical norm isn’t much better.Publications have sardonically

reported on North Korea for many years, like the 2011 Telegraph ar-ticle reporting that North Koreans are made to believe that Kim Il-sung has the power to control the weath-er with his thought, that he got elev-en holes-in-one playing golf for the first time, that he wrote 1,500 books while attending university, and that, “Kim wrote six full operas in two years, ‘all of which are better than any in the history of music.’ ”

North Korea forum moderator jaywalker1982 complains:

All these rumors once again just trivialize and mask the REAL problems in the nation and many take the country as a joke.

Demick concurs:North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoc-trination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, ev-ery song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s di-vinity. Who could possibly resist?

The important thing to note is that, more than anyone itself, it’s North Korea itself that’s painting this caricature.

Every decision it makes and ev-ery monument it builds force any-one who knows the least bit about North Korea to think, “Of course they did.”

Hitchens wrote that “Totalitari-anism is a cliche,” and the cliche of North Korea has been repeated many, many times over.

I think this has made the public consensus on the North Korea situ-ation gradually shift from “It would be hilarious if it weren’t so horrible” to it having been decided that it’s okay to laugh, which has eventually made people lose sight on how hor-rible it really is.

CARICATURIZATION26

I’m sitting on a plastic chair in the newspaper lab at school, eating a cake I can’t identify with a black plastic knife because all of the forks were gone by the time I showed up to the “party.” My friend Julius asks me how I’ve been and I tell him that I’ve been working on a project on North Korea. With a look of real-ization he laughs, “Oh, that survey you posted on Facebook was real? I assumed your account had gotten hacked.” I laugh, too.

We talk about the project for a while over the sound of music com-ing from the celebration the class was having to commemorate the end of the semester.

After a while I say my goodbyes to the class and head back home when Julius follows me out to walk with me for a while and finish our con-versation. He flatters me for most of the walk by telling me that he thinks I’m right, even though he hadn’t used the same reasoning when he first heard my topic and agreed. I take the bait and ask.

Talking to Julius always brings out my innermost cynic. We got to know each other through being 22-year-old philosophy majors at the same community college who would indulge each other’s cynicism by laughing at how terrible our lives and the human experience itself is.

I ask him on the last leg of our walk together what he’d had in mind and he told me that he thinks people don’t like thinking about North Ko-rea because they’re in denial about how bleak and horrible everything in the world is. We laugh, and he keeps explaining:

I think people feel like they have this right to be happy. You know, like, “the pursuit of happiness” and all that. They feel like that’s what they have to do in life. So when it comes to climate change or whatever big is-sue, they kind of just ignore it so it doesn’t interfere with their happiness.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more it resonates with me. Sure, not nearly as many people ignore global warming as they ignore North Korea, but look at the language they use: you never hear “Delay our im-pending doom: carpool” or “At this rate the Polar Ice caps will melt by 2063, go vegan so we can push that back to 2081.”

In some way or another our di-rect engagement with these issues is coupled with the sense that we can solve them in a relatively straight-forward way. This is probably actu-ally due to how complex an issue like climate change is. When a prob-lem has thousands of different fac-tors it’s somehow more gratifying to take a swing and miss.

In a lot of ways, the North Ko-rean issue is too simple. In my sur-vey, regardless of how little someone knew about North Korea, they knew exactly how they felt about us inter-vening.

One participant described what they knew about North Korea as it being where M*A*S*H took place, that they might practice Shinto reli-gion, and that it has “probably very interesting food.” And yet this same participant’s stance on what the US should do in regards to North Korea was:

I think we should support

but fucking back off. I think we need to fix our country, while showing support for humanity outside our bor-ders as well. We have no right being the world’s po-lice, but we should support those who suffer in any way we can.

Climate Change is a complex and big enough disaster that anyone can drive a Hummer, eat meat, not re-cycle and still genuinely feel like they’re fighting global warming. North Korea’s much too straightfor-ward for that: everyone knows what war is and what it costs, everyone knows the harms of intervening in another nation’s affairs, everyone knows why aggravating a nation with nuclear weapons is dangerous.

So they just don’t think about it. Sure, they feel bad for the starving, tortured people when they’re re-minded of them, but they know, be-fore they’ve heard what exactly the atrocity the feel bad for is, that peace won’t change it and war isn’t an op-tion they’re willing to consider. So they just don’t think about it.

Maybe he, and maybe I, don’t feel the pull to look away from some-thing like North Korea because we’ve both given up the notion that the world will ever be an overall “nice” place to live in.

DENIAL27

Finally, there’s one more form of denial that I think is important to mention. Among all the jingoist, isola-tionist, optimist, ill-informed, buck-passing, and naive reasons I’ve written about thus far, this is what makes the most sense to me: through the long course of com-piling and writing all of this, this is how I rationalize people who I think are smarter, better-informed, and more compassionate than I am seem to not find North Korea to be as important as I do.

Every apparent option I’ve explored so far and have been able to think of isn’t likely to work: Sanctions won’t work as long as North Korea has allies in the world, de-nuclearization won’t work because nuclear weapons are the only thing keeping the hollow corpse of the Kim regime alive to begin with, China won’t eliminate North Korea because it wants to share a land border with a US-allied state, neither China nor South Korea will inter-vene eliminate North Korea because they can’t handle the financial burden of North Korean refugees, North Korea won’t collapse on its own for economic reasons because it’s not being held up by its own weight, North Korea’s leadership won’t voluntarily resign their power because the torture and cruelty and famine are all part of the point of why they’re in power, North Korea’s mil-itary won’t organize a coup because every position of power is completely contingent on delusional loyalty to the leader, and North Korea’s people won’t rise against their leadership from within because they lack the lan-guage concepts and physical means to compete with North Korea’s powerful military.

The only remaining option is the one that everyone already knows about, that everyone knows will end North Korea’s disgusting human rights violation, and that no one wants to choose. No one wants to go to war. Everyone knows who’s allied with who. Everyone knows what weapons would be involved.

And given that, if I were in charge, the option I prob-ably would be pursuing to make change in North Korea would be to educate the world on what’s going on and make them want to change it and to gradually incentiv-ize China and Russia to abandon their alliances with the Kim regime and wait for it to collapse and pick up the pieces: more or less what world leaders are already trying and have been trying for decades and made no progress doing. I would also probably get the UN to set aside a huge sum of money for taking care of potential North Korean collapse so that South Korea and China won’t have to bear the burden on their own.

But I will say this: if the World War proves to be in-evitable because of any of the many, many other poten-tial causes, if the doomed fate of the current political climate is to erupt into a terrible storm, I would never be able to wash off the disgusted shame of having fall-en into the storm because I couldn’t run fast enough, rather than having had the courage, compassion, and dignity have stepped forward to oppose it.

A FINAL THOUGHT28

Works Cited

“Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Re public of Korea.” Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. CrazyEddie041. Message to the author. 17 May 2014. E-mail. “Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.” Self-Study Unit 3: Photography & Trauma. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. Print. “The Economic Costs of Korean Reunification.” Spice Stanford. Stanford, n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. Fisher, Max. “The Cannibals of North Korea.” Washington Post. The Washington Post, 05 Feb. 2013. Web. 20 May 2014. “Foreign Affairs.” N.p., n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 10 June 2013. Web. 20 May 2014. “Genocide Watch.” Genocide Watch. Human Rights Watch, n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. Jaywalker1982. Message to the author. 17 May 2014. E-mail. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty Four. St Ives: Penguin, 2003. Print. “Russian Designer Artymy Lebedev Visits North Korea. His Insight on His Adventures. Part I - Main Details. - Imgur.” Imgur. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. “The UNSPEAKABLE HELL of North Korea Concentration Camps Il lustrated Video Shocking Cruelty.” YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. “The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Evidence of Inaction.” The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Evidence of Inaction. The National Security Archive, n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. World News. Reddit, n.d. Web. 20 May 2014.

29