It is safe to say that a considerable majority of people in the west believe the DPRK to be a demonic hell, run by dictatorship, ruined by poverty, isolated from the outside world. Stories are pumped out about regular public executions at a whim, defector stories about horrific concentration camps, and claims that the Kim family is a dynasty bent on preserving itself through mythological recitals. All of these claims share something in common however, namely they lack factual cohesion, eroding in people’s faces for all to see the ugly truth behind this façade of empathy on what these stories truly are: propaganda.
In 2007, Park Yeon-mi “defected” from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, claiming to have walked across the Gobi desert in 2009 without winter clothing (The temperature lows often reaching -40 degrees Celsius by night, and 45 degrees Celsius by day) to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, a nearly 700 kilometer trek. She appealed to miracles in order to keep her absurd claim alive, going on to thank Christian activists and human rights organizations. After spending time in South Korea, she resettled to the United States where she created a lucrative career for herself by making speeches and lectures with libertarian organizations such as Atlas Foundation and Freedom Factory. In 2014 when she was relatively unknown to the broader public she appeared at the One Young World Summit, a global forum hosted by mega-corporations and banks such as Citi, Google, Facebook, Shell, Coca-Cola, among others and spent 15 minutes on stage quickly going from cheerfully smiling to sobbing about her contrived horror story, in one swoop bringing western opinion to its knees in sympathy to her cause. A few years later she’s a millionaire with a book documenting her life living in a cozy apartment in Manhattan, receiving endless attention with her agenda to bring down the DPRK’s government and communism.
But there is a problem with her claims about life in the DPRK, which are not only inconsistent, but downright incongruous to much of her own stories and information. For example, she claimed they had starved to the point where eating grass and dragonflies was necessary during the initial escape, but in a later interview with her mother, told interviewers that they never were in a position where they felt as if they had starved. Park Yeon-Mi also claimed that they had to escape across multiple mountains to cross the border discretely, yet upon physical observation of the specified area in Hyesan there were no mountains, only a flat river with marshlands. Park claimed there were no maps of the outside world in the DPRK, yet one online search easily disproves this claim, showing pictures from foreign journalists, amateur photographers, diplomats from Rason to Pyongyang with classrooms adorning maps on the walls. The morning KCTV (Korean Central Television Agency) broadcast which most Koreans watch shows a map of the world during the start of their routine news programs every day. Other defectors, often forced to give testimonies at the threat of having citizenship revoked or being permanently detained by the NIS under the National Security Law have also challenged Park Yeon-Mi’s bizarre recollection of events. There are many more inconsistencies, and her family back home has done everything in their power to disown her for in many ways making the situation worse on the peninsula, both for the inter-reunification talks between the north and south as well as pressuring the US government to bring forth even more genocidal sanctions to the country. To make matters worse this is not an isolated phenomenon among defectors, which brings us to this question: why do defectors lie?
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic was a particularly vilified country, with emphasis on the anti-fascist wall dividing the German people. After a series of economic reforms stemming from Perestroika, a situation had arisen causing internal strife and conflict, and countries which existed as a counterweight to the Warsaw pact in NATO had agreed to sanction trade, knowing that the eastern bloc was on its last leg due to overdependency on oil exports, hanging on a thin string of diplomacy with allies for agricultural and industrial production. USIA (United States Information Agency) along with Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia attempted to appeal to potential defectors or people who had grown weary of their situation, baiting them with promises of a better life in the west, claiming a life of luxury and wealth. After the USSR had become a cornerstone of human history, people flooded in to the new German republic only to discover that they had been lied to by a handful of people, often former high paid defectors about the economic realities. Many became homeless or were unable to find jobs, having to adapt to the incredibly harsh life before them.
The defectors from Northern Korea can be categorized in two forms, those who are paid to lie, and those who left with genuine grievances from economic or political difficulties, with the latter often being tricked by the former through psychological affirmations over radio programs and balloons from the south saying that they are missing out on reality. This situation has created many double-defectors who are desperately doing everything in their power to travel back from south to north due to large unemployment rates and crushing social policies in south Korea which have had a traumatizing effect for the deceived.
There are also many personal reasons for defections, such as the Korean war (which is still active under armistice) in which families were separated from each other causing irreparable heartbreak and misery. Freedom of travel exists for Northerners contrary to popular belief, several thousand of whom are employed in China and commute between the two countries for work related purposes, or to visit family. There is also a large ethnic community of Koreans in Japan who are loyal to the DPRK with jobs and families. The DPRK government has poured half a billion dollars in the course of 50 years to support those living abroad through institutions such as Chongryon in the form of high quality education. So why are defector stories such a big deal? The United States government has close ties with the ROK, supplying hundreds of millions of US dollars in the form of weapons trade, fortifying against the threat of potential hegemony from non-aligned countries such as China, Russia, and even the DPRK. The narrative is upheld quite tidily by the severe impact from existing sanctions and networks which attempt to justify imperialist intervention between the two sides. Those who defect are immediately weaponized through blackmail and propped on to media channels at the threat of being imprisoned for making positive claims about their homeland. In the documentary “Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul,” a defector describes how he was imprisoned under the National Security Law for writing positive comments about Kim Il Sung and placed under surveillance to avoid breaking the stigma about the North.
Abroad spending is solidified through activities by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is payed by US tax dollars, admitted to by the director Hubert Younghman Lee himself. Much of their focus lies on stories relating to rumored executions of those in high ranking positions, lies which themselves have already been dismantled by stories of the same individuals surfacing alive and well a few days later, but gives enough time for Washington to find an excuse on passing new bills to apply more pressure against the supposedly “rogue” regime. This is not the only country targeted by the organization, as warhawks in the past have used it for platforming Nayirah al-Sabah’s testimony to justify involvement in Iraq, which became a travesty that created public outrage.
And…. We’ll Always Have Paris?
US exceptionalism has created a sort of ideal self-image of an empire built on strong ideological values, democracy, liberty, justice for all, and the need to spread these values. Consequently the results of the actions pertaining to such “democratization” efforts abroad have generally been in an attempt to gain access to untapped resources for the world market. This is not limited to natural or industrial resources, but rather conflict itself. In creating instability and leveraging countries teetering on the edge of economic and political crisis, the United States has found ways to insert itself to profit off war. In the case of the DPRK, the ROK is a large client within the west’s sphere of influence and so long as the cause is framed justly the world rushes to its aid for the sake of maintaining a considerably homogenous and normalized view on world security. This security is reached through intervening on what are seen as the worst offenders to this type of economic and political order, with Iran, Cuba, China, and others at the front line. The thinly veiled consideration for a universal model of human rights has been broken by the empire itself through the forging of relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia, India, and others that exist outside of the western purview on what is considered a moral or ethical obligation towards human treatment and dignity.
Understanding Socialist Korea’s Formulation of Governance
The DPRK is scarred from war. Pyongyang was flattened to the ground, bombs were pelted on almost every square mile of the north. Western media portrays Kim Jong Un as a trigger happy individual who would like nothing less than to bring the US to its end, but this is a distortion created from people’s lack of understanding on the historic circumstances which they have lived through. The US nuclear arsenal is comprised of approximately 6,185 warheads, compared to ~40 in the DPRK. Looking at the war it is obvious that human lives are of no consequence to the American government, therefore from the viewpoint of the Worker’s Party of Korea, exercising caution and a healthy amount of paranoia is incredibly important to maintain regional sovereignty and safety. The DPRK has pledged not to use its arsenal, but keeps it as an insurance policy in the case of a scenario involving mutually assured destruction or future threats against the Korean people.
The Korean war and US pressure also had a profound impact on the DPRK’s ideological foundations. The arduous march of the 1990s put the country to test in its resolve after the fall of the USSR, as the majority of imports and exports had simply ceased to exist, leaving people with major food insecurities. According to the testimonies of defectors themselves, the United States intentionally sabotaged live animal crops in economic zones through means of trading incredibly desired immediate necessities (food, namely rice) in return for livestock, creating a dependency which exacerbated the famine in the hopes of creating an unstable situation. The US used similar strategies of economic destabilization most famously in Chile when installing the dictator Augusto Pinochet, as shown below in the extremely cryptic communique between Richard Helms and Richard Nixon:
Despite attempts of subversion, the DPRK through self-reliance remodeled agriculture and industry with a more domestic mode of production and has since seen a dramatic increase in economic security and welfare. The Korean people have found themselves able to push forward with the ideological base of the ruling party, called the Juche idea which is thanked and admired for bringing them prosperity. The Juche idea has roots grounded in Marxism-Leninism, with its objective still being to reach a stateless and classless society in the death of the imperialist era. It emphasizes heavily on people being the masters of society, creating grassroots socialist democracy at all levels. Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, are seen as a long procession of leaders in the eyes of the west, glorified to death. This glorification stems from the fact that Kim Il Sung liberated the country, fought the Japanese occupation, and brought the Korean people dignity as human beings. In the South many accept and admire Kim Il Sung in private as an important figure of Korean history, and his exploits against imperialism have been archived and recorded by many countries. Again in typical ignorance, Confucian values towards leadership as well as Korean culture and tradition are entirely ignored in the vilification of the DPRK. Wailing for example is portrayed as a hysterical fit that’s a byproduct of personality cults, when this very same tradition also existed in the south until not too long ago and is something which is held with high regard in the grieving processes or honoration of individuals. Park Chung-hee, a former president and ardent anti-communist in the ROK upheld many of these traditions despite US impositions on political and cultural life.
But is There Democracy?
The constitutional document of the DPRK states in article 4:
“The sovereignty of the DPRK resides in the workers, peasants, working intellectuals and all other working people. The working people exercise power through their representative organs — the Supreme People’s Assembly and local people’s assemblies at all levels.”
Also, it has guaranteed the existence of other political parties and the right for suffrage:
“All citizens who have reached the age of 17 have the right to elect and to be elected, irrespective of sex, race, occupation, length of residence, property status, education party affiliation, political views or religion. Citizens serving in the armed forces also have the right to elect and to be elected. A person who has been disenfranchised by a Court decision and a person legally certified insane do not have the right to elect or to be elected.” (Article 66)
Newspapers in Socialist Korea regularly show the results of elections, as well as the variety of candidates to choose from, as shown below in an example from the Pyongyang Times:
As it should be with any socialist system, these are generally working class candidates. The economic system has very little stratification except for some minor entrepreneurial activity in special economic zones such as Rason in an attempt to build productive forces through external assistance or agreements. This has brought down room for corruption or bribery, with people sharing collective and common goals through different approaches. This structure lives up to the very top of the WPK’s leadership, where deputies can be voted in and recalled by popular vote, including but not limited to the Supreme Leadership. The SPA (Supreme People’s Assembly) is the highest organ of power in the state, and is composed of elected deputies from around the country.
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?
It is vital to understand that the DPRK is comprised of flesh and blood human beings. The country is been demonized nearly to a point of no return in the west. If you share sentiments against imperialism and human exploitation it is vital to cast aside preconceptions and to see that history has created a unique set of struggles under different class interests. Every nation has the right to self-determination, to find its own way of developing a political system, as well as the right for people to choose whether or not it is appropriate to overthrow their own governments. Every sympathy thrown out by imperialist powers, whether it be in Chile, or Bolivia as we recently saw with the expelling of Evo Morales through the usage of force, the US and its allies will exercise their own interests rather than that of the people. Support and solidarity is fundamental for people who have fallen under the highest form of class struggle against an international bourgeoise.
It is an internationalist’s obligation to find the truth of conflict and to dismantle pretenses for oppression. Without addressing this issue, there is no hope for national liberation, no hope for the dismantling of imperialism. Socialist Korea is a vital and symbolic icon to the struggle of the toiling masses, and we should learn from their courage and vitality despite the onslaught they face in the current world order. Manse!
Additional Resources:
“Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul,” Documentary
“NED ~ America’s Meddling Machine”
“My Brothers and Sisters in the North,” Documentary
“Dispelling Myths about North Korea”
“Homegrown Outcasts: North Koreans in Japan”
“Why are the leader and former leaders so important?” -Interview with DPRK citizen
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