November 23 and 24, 2017


News and Views


I FERVENTLY HOPE THAT THIS ESCAPE WAS NOT A RUSE FOR THE PURPOSE OF PLACING A SPY IN OUR MIDST, AS THIS WRITER SUGGESTS MAY BE POSSIBLE. I DON’T THINK WE CAN IN EFFECT PUT HIM IN PRISON WITH HIS INJURIES. I PERSONALLY THINK THAT THE FACT THAT HE TOOK SOME HALF A DOZEN BULLETS TENDS TO PROVE THAT IT WASN’T STAGED. AT LEAST WE SHOULD GIVE HIM THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT. I’M SURE HE WILL UNDERGO SOME RIGOROUS QUESTIONING AND MENTAL HEALTH TESTING BEFORE HE IS SIMPLY TURNED LOOSE HERE WITH NO SUPERVISION. SEE BOTH ARTICLES BELOW.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/north-korea-defector-dramatic-escape-health-reveals-countrys-conditions/
CBS NEWS November 23, 2017, 7:42 AM
Doctors reveal North Korean defector's grim health

The North Korean regime of Kim Jong Un has not said anything about the dramatic escape of one of its soldiers, who ran across the border into South Korea.

Most North Korean defectors head north and cross the border into China. Trying to escape by crossing the heavily-armed border with South Korea is considered a suicide mission, but this soldier survived, and may now provide some valuable information, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.

We don't yet know the identity of the North Korean soldier who daringly drove his army jeep to the border and then ran for his life. His former comrades fired off 40 shots, hitting him at least five times.

South Korean trauma surgeon Lee Cook-Jong operated on the soldier and says he found dozens of parasitic worms in his digestive tract, as well as uncooked corn; a sign of malnutrition.

The soldier is 24 years old, but at just 5 feet 5 inches and weighing 132 pounds, he is significantly smaller than an average 18-year-old in South Korea. Doctors have reportedly diagnosed him with tuberculosis and hepatitis B.

Last April, CBS News visited North Korea as it staged one of its elaborate military parades. Many of the soldiers we saw looked more like children -- likely the result of a brutal famine in the North during the 1990s.

South Korean intelligence officials will now want to question the defector about his escape, hoping he may provide a glimpse into Kim Jong Un's reclusive regime and information about whether recent United Nations sanctions are taking a toll.

"He would be questioned to see how legitimately he might be a real defector or is this actually not the case," said Suki Kim, who worked undercover as a teacher in North Korea for six months and has written extensively about defectors. She thinks this kind of escape is so rare and over the top, it could have been a setup by North Korea. She believes the North might have orchestrated it to try and create an incident with South Korea, using the soldier as a pawn.

"If North Korea government staged this dramatic, great escape, that really reeks of a Hollywood film – which in some way would not be that surprising – I think one thing I have learned by following North Korea for a decade and living there is that almost everybody's a victim. They are just serving the 'great leader.'"

© 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.



ONE OF THE THINGS I DISLIKE MOST IN A FEW OF THESE ARTICLES IS THAT SOME WRITERS HAVE A PENCHANT FOR FAILING TO DEFINE TERMS WHICH ARE DEFINITELY NOT COMMON KNOWLEDGE TO THE AVERAGE READER. OTHER THAN THAT, THIS IS A GREAT ARTICLE ON A SUBJECT THAT WE KNOW COMPARATIVELY LITTLE ABOUT – AN EYE WITNESS REPORT ON LIFE IN NORTH KOREA.

I AM BEGINNING WITH A MAKESHIFT GLOSSARY, GLEANED FROM THE LISTINGS ON MY FAVORITE SEARCH ENGINE GOOGLE.

MY BUGABOO OF THE MOMENT IS THE ACRONYM OR WORD, “PUST” – SEE PARAGRAPH THREE OF THE INTERCEPT ARTICLE.

1—WIKIPEDIA -- A NORWEGIAN VOCAL SEXTET (NOT THE ONE)
2—URBAN DICTIONARY – PENT UP SEXUAL TENSION (NOT IT EITHER)
3— A RUSSIAN WORD, SEE pust-govoryat -- “LET” AS IN “LET THEM TALK” a russian television show
4 -- YUST PUST Foundation -- http://www.yustpust.org/ -- STILL NO DEFINITION OF EITHER WORD HERE, BUT THE ORGANIZATION’S WEBSITE ISAVAILABLE, AND FROM READING THEIR INFORMATION BELOW, IT LOOKS LIKE THE CORRECT ITEM.

“The YUST PUST Foundation (YPF) is a faith-based, nonprofit organization committed to providing support for education and humanitarian efforts in China and North Korea. Since 2010, YPF has played a vital role in raising public awareness, recruiting faculty, and providing financial management for its educational institutions. We also assist with humanitarian efforts benefiting young children in North Korea. Our organization consists of dedicated volunteers who have experience teaching at both universities and are passionate about aiding efforts in China and North Korea.”



https://theintercept.com/2017/09/04/undercover-in-north-korea-all-paths-lead-to-catastrophe/
The Intercept
UNDERCOVER IN NORTH KOREA: “ALL PATHS LEAD TO CATASTROPHE”
Jon Schwarz
September 4 2017, 11:19 a.m

THE MOST ALARMING aspect of North Korea’s latest nuclear test, and the larger standoff with the U.S., is how little is known about how North Korea truly functions. For 70 years it’s been sealed off from the rest of the world to a degree hard to comprehend, especially at a time when people in Buenos Aires need just one click to share cat videos shot in Kuala Lumpur. Few outsiders have had intimate contact with North Korean society, and even fewer are in a position to talk about it.

One of the extremely rare exceptions is novelist and journalist Suki Kim. Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to the U.S. at age 13, spent much of 2011 teaching English to children of North Korea’s elite at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.

Kim had visited North Korea several times before and had written about her experiences for Harper’s Magazine and the New York Review of Books. Incredibly, however, neither Kim’s North Korean minders nor the Christian missionaries who founded and run PUST realized that she was there undercover to engage in some of history’s riskiest investigative journalism.

Although all of PUST’s staff was kept under constant surveillance, Kim kept notes and documents on hidden USB sticks and her camera’s SIM card. If her notes had been discovered, she almost certainly would have been accused of espionage and faced imprisonment in the country’s terrifying labor camps. In fact, of the three Americans currently detained in North Korea, two were teachers at PUST. Moreover, the Pentagon has in fact used a Christian NGO as a front for genuine spying on North Korea.

But Kim was never caught, and she returned to the U.S. to write her extraordinary 2014 book, “Without You, There Is No Us.” The title comes from the lyrics of an old North Korean song; the “you” is Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father.

Kim’s book is particularly important for anyone who wants to understand what happens next with North Korea. Her experience made her extremely pessimistic about every aspect of the country, including the regime’s willingness to renounce its nuclear weapons program. North Korea functions, she believes, as a true cult, with all of the country’s pre-cult existence now passed out of human memory.

Most ominously, her students, all young men in their late teens or early 20s, were firmly embedded in the cult. With the Kim family autocracy now on its third generation, you’d expect the people who actually run North Korea to have abandoned whatever ideology they started with and degenerated into standard human corruption. But PUST’s enrollees, their children, did not go skiing in Gstaad on school breaks; they didn’t even appear to be able to travel anywhere within North Korea. Instead they studied the North Korea ideology of “juche,” or worked on collective farms.

Unsurprisingly, then, Kim’s students were shockingly ignorant of the outside world. They didn’t recognize pictures of the Taj Mahal or Egyptian pyramids. One had heard that everyone on earth spoke Korean because it was recognized as the world’s most superior language. Another believed that the Korean dish naengmyeon was seen as the best food on earth. And all of Kim’s pupils were soaked in a culture of lying, telling her preposterous falsehoods so often that she writes, “I could not help but think that they – my beloved students – were insane.” Nonetheless, they were still recognizably human and charmingly innocent and for their part, came to adore their teachers.

Overall, “Without You, There Is No Us” is simply excruciatingly sad. All of Korea has been the plaything of Japan, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China, and like most Korean families, Kim has close relatives who ended up in North Korea when the country was separated and have never been seen again. Korea is now, Kim says, irrevocably ruptured:

It occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land … behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.

The Intercept spoke recently to Kim about her time in North Korea and the insight it gives her on the current crisis.

suki-kim-visa-north-korea-1504280542 Suki Kim’s North Korean visa. Photo: Suki Kim

JON SCHWARZ: I found your book just overwhelmingly sorrowful. As an American, I can’t imagine being somewhere that’s been brutalized by not just one powerful country, but two or three or four. Then the government of North Korea and, to a lesser degree, the government of South Korea used that suffering to consolidate their own power. And then maybe saddest of all was to see these young men, your students, who were clearly still people, but inside a terrible system and on a path to doing terrible things to everybody else in North Korea.

SUKI KIM: Right, because there’s no other way of being in that country. We don’t have any other country like that. People so easily compare North Korea to Cuba or East Germany or even China. But none of them have been like North Korea – this amount of isolation, this amount of control. It encompasses every aspect of dictatorship-slash-cult.

What I was thinking about when I was living there is it’s almost too late to undo this. The young men I was living with had never known any other way.

The whole thing begins with the division of Korea in 1945. People think it began with the Korean War, but the Korean War only happened because of the 1945 division [of Korea by the U.S. and Soviet Union at the end of World War II]. What we’re seeing is Korea stuck in between.

JS: Essentially no Americans know what happened between 1945 and the start of the Korean War. And few Americans know what happened during the war. [Syngman Rhee, the U.S.-installed ultra right-wing South Korean dictator, massacred tens of thousands of South Koreans before North Korea invaded in 1950. Rhee’s government executed another 100,000 South Koreans in the war’s early months. Then the barbaric U.S. air war against North Korea killed perhaps one-fifth of its population.]

SK: This “mystery of North Korea” that people talk about all the time – people should be asking why Korea is divided and why there are American soldiers in South Korea. These questions are not being asked at all. Once you look at how this whole thing began, it makes some sense why North Korea uses this hatred of the United States as a tool to justify and uphold the Great Leader myth. Great Leader has always been the savior and the rescuer who was protecting them from the imperialist American attack. That story is why North Korea has built their whole foundation not only on the juche philosophy but hatred of the United States.

pyongyang-school-girls-1504280533
North Korean girls outside Kumsusan Palace where Kim il-sung is embalmed. Photo: Suki Kim

JS: Based on your experience, how do you perceive the nuclear issue with North Korea?

SK: Nothing will change because it’s an unworkable problem. It’s very dishonest to think this can be solved. North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons. Never.

The only way North Korea can be dealt with is if this regime is not the way it is. No agreements are ever honored because North Korea just doesn’t do that. It’s a land of lies. So why keep making agreements with someone who’s never going to honor those agreements?

And ultimately what all the countries surrounding North Korea want is a regime change. What they’re doing is pretending to have an agreement saying they do not want a regime change, but pursuing regime change anyway.

Despite it all you have to constantly do engagement efforts, throwing information in there. That’s the only option. There’s no other way North Korea will change. Nothing will ever change without the outside pouring some resources in there.

JS: What is the motivation of the people who actually call the shots in North Korea to hold onto the nuclear weapons?

SK: They don’t have anything else. There’s literally nothing else they can rely on. The fact they’re a nuclear power is the only reason anyone would be negotiating with them at this point. It’s their survival.

Regime change is what they fear. That’s what the whole country is built on.

JS: Even with a different kind of regime, it’s hard to argue that it would be rational for them to give up their nuclear weapons, after seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi.

SK: This is a very simple equation. There is no reason for them to give up nuclear weapons. Nothing will make them give them up.

JS: I’ve always believed that North Korea would never engage in a nuclear first strike just out of self-preservation. But your description of your students did honestly give me pause. It made me think the risk of miscalculation on their part is higher than I realized.

SK: It was paradoxical. They could be very smart, yet could be completely deluded about everything. I don’t see why that would be different in the people who run the country. The ones that foreigners get to meet, like diplomats, are sophisticated and can talk to you on your level. But at the same time they also have this other side where they have really been raised to think differently, their reality is skewed. North Korea is the center of the universe, the rest of the world kind of doesn’t exist. They’ve been living this way for 70 years, in a complete cult.

My students did not know what the internet was, in 2011. Computer majors, from the best schools in Pyongyang. The system really is that brutal, for everyone.

JS: Even their powerful parents seemed to have very little ability to make any decisions involving their children. They couldn’t have their children come home, they couldn’t come out and visit.

SK: You would expect that exceptions were always being made [for children of elites], but that just wasn’t true. They couldn’t call home. There was no way of communicating with their parents at all. There are literally no exceptions made. There is no power or agency.

I also found it shocking that they had not been anywhere within their own country. You would think that of all these elite kids, at least some would have seen the famous mountains [of North Korea]. None of them had.

That absoluteness is why North Korea is the way it is.

JS: What would you recommend if you could create the North Korea policy for the U.S. and other countries?

SK: It’s a problem that no one has been able to solve.

It’s not a system that they can moderate. The Great Leader can’t be moderated. You can’t be a little bit less god. The Great Leader system has to break.

But it’s impossible to imagine. I find it to be a completely bleak problem. People have been deprived of any tools that they need, education, information, intellectual volition to think for themselves.

[Military] intervention is not going to work because it’s a nuclear power. I guess it has to happen in pouring information into North Korea in whatever capacity.

But then the population are abused victims of a cult ideology. Even if the Great Leader is gone, another form of dictatorship will take its place.

Every path is a catastrophe. This is why even defectors, when they flee, usually turn into devout fundamentalist Christians. I’d love to offer up solutions, but everything leads to a dead end.

One thing that gave me a small bit of hope is the fact that Kim Jong-un is more reckless than the previous leader [his father Kim Jong-il]. To get your uncle and brother killed within a few years of rising to power, that doesn’t really bode well for a guy who’s only there because of his family name. His own bloodline is the only thing keeping him in that position. You shouldn’t be killing your own family members, that’s self-sabotage.

JS: Looking at history, it seems to me that normally what you’d expect is that eventually the royal family will get too nuts, the grandson will be too crazy, and the military and whatever economic powers there are going to decide, well, we don’t need this guy anymore. So we’re going to get rid of this guy and then the military will run things. But that’s seems impossible in North Korea: You must have this family in charge, the military couldn’t say, oh by the way, the country’s now being run by some general.

SK: They already built the brand, Great Leader is the most powerful brand. That’s why the assassination of [Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother and the original heir to the Kim dynasty] Kim Jong-nam was really a stupid thing to do. Basically that assassination proved that this royal bloodline can be murdered. And that leaves room open for that possibility. Because there are other bloodline figures for them to put in his place. He’s not the only one. So to kill [Jong-nam] set the precedent that this can happen.

pyongyang-airport-north-korea-1504280527 A North Korean woman holds a sign that reads “The Sun of the 21st Century” in honor of Kim Jong-il’s 60th birthday at Pyongyang’s Sunan International Airport. Photo: Suki Kim
JS: One small thing I found particularly appalling was the buddy system with your students, where everyone had a buddy and spent all their time with their buddy and seemed like the closest of friends – and then your buddy was switched and you never spent time with your old buddy again.

SK: The buddy system is just to keep up the system of surveillance. It doesn’t matter that these are 19-year-old boys making friends. That’s how much humanity is not acknowledged or valued. There’s a North Korean song which compares each citizen to a bullet in this great weapon for the Great Leader. And that’s the way they live.

JS: I was also struck by your description of the degeneration of language in North Korea. [Kim writes that “Each time I visited the DPRK, I was shocked anew by their bastardization of the Korean language. Curses had taken root not only in their conversation and speeches but in their written language. They were everywhere – in poems, newspapers, in official Workers’ Party speeches, even in the lyrics of songs. … It was like finding the words fuck and shit in a presidential speech or on the front page of the New York Times.”]

SK: Yes, I think the language does reflect the society. Of course, the whole system is built around the risk of an impending war. So that violence has changed the Korean language. Plus these guys are thugs, Kim Jong-un and all the rest of them, that’s their taste and it’s become the taste of the country.

JS: Authoritarians universally seem to have terrible taste.

SK: It’s interesting to be analyzing North Korea in this period of time in America because there are a lot of similarities. Look at Trump’s nonstop tweeting about “fake news” and how great he is. That’s very familiar, that’s what North Korea does. It’s just endless propaganda. All these buildings with all these slogans shouting at you all the time, constantly talking about how the enemies are lying all the time.

Those catchy one-liners, how many words are there in a tweet? It’s very similar to those [North Korean] slogans.

This country right now, where you’re no longer able to tell what’s true or what’s a lie, starting from the top, that’s North Korea’s biggest problem. America should really look at that, there’s a lesson.

JS: Well, I felt bad after I read your book and I feel even worse now.

SK: To be honest, I wonder if tragedies have a time limit – not to fix them, but to make them less horrifying. And I feel like it’s just too late. If you wipe out humanity to this level, and have three generations of it … when you see the humanity of North Koreans is when the horror becomes that much greater. You see how humanity can be so distorted and manipulated and violated. You face the devastation of what’s truly at stake.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Top photo: The Ministry of Railways’ painting of a train that Kim Jong-il once rode in; he was said to have died on a train while traveling tirelessly to oversee the well-being of his people. Kimjongilia Exhibition, 2002.