Noah Levine
Cor 110 V
Professor Gordon
2/27/2020
Labor Camps and Propaganda: The Horrors of The Hermit Kingdom
“I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace
and tranquility will return once more.” - Anne Frank
This quote by Anne Frank, was written in her diary just a few years before she was slaughtered in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the Nazis during World War II at the age of 15. Anne Frank is just one of millions of people who suffered during the Holocaust, which most people agree is one of the biggest atrocities to happen in human history. With the amount of suffering happening, it is amazing how Anne could find the good in anything. When we hear stories or first-hand accounts of the Holocaust we often think “How could people stand by and let this happen?” or “Nothing like that will ever happen again?” The sad truth is that since the late 1940’s North Korea has been abusing their citizens and a similar kind of suffering to the
Holocaust is taking place. The crisis taking place in North Korea, has been hard and has caused distress among many people. In North Korea, the Kim regime has been oppressing and mistreating their citizens for years. Ever since the Kim family took control of the country in
1948, they have cut off access to the outside world and treated their people like animals. Because of this, the country, officially but falsely named the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK), has been rightly called the Hermit Kingdom and is constantly at arms with most of the world.
Physical Suffering:
There are two major groups suffering because of the Kim family and the crisis in North
Korea. The first are the North Korean citizens themselves. The citizens thrown in labor camps, endure physical suffering such starvation, rape, beatings, tourture, grueling work and many other horrors. Furthermore, many people have likend North Korean prison camps to that or even worse of concentration camps in Nazi Germany. In North Korean camps, women are especially targets for guards. “Girls who reach puberty quickly face sexual abuse and rape by the prison guards.
Persons caught trying to escape, whether adults or children, face torture and public execution.”
(Express.co.uk) Some facts about these prison
camps are, that there are around 15-20 of them
scattered about the country and three generations of
a family can be imprisoned for one member's
crime. To give a first-hand account into the horrid
conditions which take place in these camps, Here
are a few stories of people who lived through the
atrocities. “Shin Dong-hyuk said his earliest
memory of life in a North Korean prison camp was
the public execution that inmates were forced to
watch when he was 5 years old. ‘Inmates… so hungry that they devoured live rats and the raw hooves of a goat… One 7-year-old girl was
clubbed to death for stealing a few grains of wheat’, Mr. Shin said. He said he felt lucky when a warden ordered the tip of his finger chopped off, rather than having him executed, for damaging a piece of sewing equipment” (The New York Times). Another story tells of what happens to someone trying to escape a labor camp. “The escapee was captured and brought back, not in a car, but dragged behind a truck. All of us saw him in the morning tied to the back of the truck and covered in blood… It would have been easy to mistake him for an animal, with his wild hair, his bruises, his crusts of dried blood, his bulging eyes. Then I suddenly noticed his mouth. So that’s how they shut him up. They had it stuffed full of rocks… As they withdrew, the commanding officer took his place beside the firing squad. ‘Aim at the traitor of the Fatherland
. . . Fire!’”
“Kim Hye-Sook was imprisoned in Camp 18 for 28 years at the age of 13 because her grandfather had escaped to South
Korea. This is one of many of her horror stories. ‘They would signal us to come over and make us sit down.
'There was a position in which we all had to sit. We’d put our hands behind our backs and kneel, and then raise our heads and open our mouths. 'They’d spit phlegm into our mouths. 'If we swallowed, they wouldn’t hit us. But if we gagged, they would beat us badly” (Dailymail.co.uk). These stories clearly illustrate the fright that people experienced and still do experience in these camps and how the Kim regime cannot keep getting away with this behavior. This story by Kim Hye-Sook
is particularly interesting to me because of the reason she was imprisoned in the first place was that her grandfather had escaped to South Korea. The fact that someone could be given life in a prison camp for doing nothing wrong and only being related to a “criminal” is an absurd concept
and really shows how
brutal and unforgiving the
North Korean government
is to its citizens. A
majority of the citizens
not imprisoned live in
poor conditions and are
either afraid of their government or falsely adore the Kim family. What is sad is that the Kim regime is so invested in promoting their god-like image to citizens, that even when the people are starving and dying in the street, Kim Jong-un will order statues of himself and the other members of the Kim family to be made, and will waste money on military demonstrations and parades instead of putting it to a
good use to help his people. A
prime case of this can be seen by
Kim Jong-un having his dead
father on display as if he was in
a museum. The building, called
Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, is
one of the most spiritual
attractions in North Korea.
It is clear how propaganda
by the government has
affected the citizens in that
a great honor to them is to
come and pray to their
dead leaders. Kim Jong-il,
who is on display, is
struggling to be preserved so because of this, Kim Jong-un is asking his citizens for more money as if the already poor and starving people did not have enough to worry about. “Despot Kim Jong-un is “forcing” factory workers to stump up to keep his dead ancestors embalmed – and on display to the public… So
Supreme Leader Kim is expecting his impoverished citizens to pick up the $320,000-a-year bill… The source said: “Some people think it is ridiculous how the authorities are ignoring their livelihoods while trying to raise money to keep dead bodies from rotting” (Mirror.co.uk). As you can see from this quote, although many North Korean citizens would gladly fork over their money to Kim Jong-un, there are those that are opposed.
Mental Suffering:
Besides physical suffering, North Korean citizens also suffer mentally although most don’t know it, which is possibly the saddest part of their situation. This is due to the constant propaganda they have been force fed since they were babies. This propaganda is so powerful in fact, that most North Koreans would not bat an eye to their fellow citizens dying from starvation
and will cheer for a statue of Kim Jong-un or a missle test. The propaganda promotes the agenda of the Kim regime in that it depicts North Korea as the best, most powerful and richest country in the world, the Kim family as gods, and the United States of America as a villain. In fact, most
North Koreans have been bred from kindergarten to hate the U.S. and regard us as the enemy. In fact, while in kindergarten, North Koreans are taught to stab cardboard figures of U.S. soldiers in gym class and are taught an extremely altered history of the world. According to Yahoo News,
“For North Koreans, the systematic indoctrination of anti-Americanism starts as early as kindergarten and is as much a part of the curriculum as learning to count… a dummy of an
American soldier with a beaked nose and
straw-colored hair… students beat him
with batons or pelt him with stones — a
favorite schoolyard game, the teacher
says.” (Yahoo News) Propaganda also
follows the North Korean citizens
everywhere they go. There are constant military parades, posters and pictures of the Kim regime in a 1984 esque fashion. The citizens are also required to have pictures of Kim Jong-un in their homes and clean them everyday as well as bow and kiss the statues of him. “With complete control over what its people hear and see, the government makes heavy use of the newspapers – all of which are published either by the State, government, army or other organs – to spread the image of an idyllic nation being targeted by other nations almost as a result of sheer envy. The US is the main target for this
scorn, with the media regularly sending the image that an attack from the “imperialist” US is imminent” (thejournal.ie)
Government Control:
The newspaper The Pyongyang Times, is an excellent example of how the government limits the flow of information into the country, and edits the media people consume to match their agenda. The website itself looks like it was put together in the late 90’s and is barely
updated. This speaks to the
isolation and lack of interaction
that North Korea has with the
outside world. On the website,
there is an entire section dedicated
to “Supreme Leaders actives”
which shows how much the
citizens revere Kim Jong Un and find him god-like. The Pyongyang times is an excellent microcosm of North Korea, and it shows how brainwashed and suffering the people living there are. Most of the articles on the website talk about the greatness of North Korea and how terrible the United States is. The articles are also mostly a few sentences long and are poorly written which possibly speaks to a low literacy rate in North Korea. All of the articles also conveniently leave out how North Korea is actually looked at by the world and the tens of thousands falsely imprisoned in concentration camps and instead focuses on what Kim Jong-un is up to, or how great the recent missile test or military parade went. This paper is just one of a handful published in North Korea and it shows just how
repressed and conditioned the citizens are in that the only information they can get is what the government wants them to believe.
Who else is suffering?
The second group of people who are suffering from the crisis in North Korea, are the people living in South Korea, China and a small part of Russia which are the countries that directly border North Korea. These people live in constant fear of nuclear war or attacks on them, due to the extremely volatile state of the North Korean government. Imagine having to worry about your life and your family everytime you leave the house. This is a reality for Woo
Jong-il, who did an interview with The Guardian. “He still remembers the moments when stray bullets would fly through the air, terrifying the hundreds of families scattered along the border… he has two concrete bunkers in case of an attack. In just a few short steps, the 72-year-old can run out of his living room and down a short flight of narrow concrete stairs into a cold and damp box in the ground below his house, with only a single bare lightbulb… “I don’t feel safe, this is
the front line,” Woo said in an interview at
his home, an hour’s drive north of Seoul, the
South Korean capital. “We’re in the most
danger, it’s nerve-wracking. Weapons these
days are so good, the front lines will be
completely destroyed if war breaks out” (The
Guardian). Woo, is just one of tens of thousands of people who will never know if the next day will be their last.
North Korea is a prime example of a dictatorship getting too power hungry and is a modern reincarnation of the Nazi party in Germany during World War II. When looking into the current crisis in North Korea, it reminded me of the novel 1984 by George Orwell. In that novel, people are force fed propaganda and made to believe that they live in the greatest country in the world. The people in 1984 are constantly supervised, tortured and not allowed to express their opinion. They live in the shadow of “Big Brother”' who is the supposed leader of the country.
There are posters all over that say “Big Brother is watching you”. In fact, the story is told through the diary of the main character, Winston Smith, who could be killed or thrown in a labor camp for expressing his true thoughts about life and the government. This is also analagous to what happend with Anne Frank during the Holocaust and with the current situation in North
Korea, because in these three examples, people are terrified of their govenmrnt, are not given freedom of speech, are punished for expressing their thoughts and opionons, and were constantly
being tourtured and killed in
concentration camps for
foolish reasons. In North
Korea, the posters of “Big
Brother” are posters of Kim
Jong-un, the citizens are
taught to hate the United
States and they are made to bow and pray to their leaders like gods. Kim Jong-un is “Big Brother '' to the citizens of “The
Hermit Kingdom”' as they are fed a twisted version of the world. They are starved, beaten and
put in labor camps for minor offenses. In fact, it is reported that in 2011 when the former leader
Kim Jong-il, Father of Kim Jong-un, died, thousands of North Koreans were given prison sentences lasting months or years because they did not cry enough at the funeral or come to the mandatory mourning events. According to Dailymail,“Sentences of at least six months in labour camps are also apparently being given to those who didn't go to the organised mourning events, while anyone who criticised the new leader Kim Jong-un is also being punished”
(Dailymail.com), The prisons they are put in are no cake-walk either, they are forced labor camps where inmates usually work over 15 hours a day. As mentioned before, the guards constantly humiliate, beat, rape and starve prisoners. Apart from the constant mental and physical suffering by the citizens, people who are the residents of the countries neighboring
North Korea are also suffering because they live in constant fear of attack or nuclear strike. In fact, many South Korean homes near the border have underground bunkers in them in case of an attack by the North. Although the situation seems grim, due to the Singapore summit, where
President Trump and Kim Jong-un met face to face, economic sanctions that have been imposed, as well as other diplomatic talks and meeting world leaders have had with North Korea, the crisis seems to be improving. According to the article “North Korea Showdown” which was published in May of 2017, “ When he went to North Korea in 2013, there were too many cars to count, as well as an abundance of cell phones, you can see the emergence of a public consumer culture…
If sanctions and negotiations won’t work, some experts hope that North Korea… will become less of a threat as it moves towards a more market-oriented system” (CQ Researcher) Aside from this, there have been reports of less anti-U.S. propaganda than there used to be. In the end, it is hard to say what will become of the situation. Only time will tell.
References
Haas, B. (2017, August 25). Living on the edge of oblivion: life along the North Korean border.
Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/25/living-on-the-edge-of-oblivion-life-alo
ng-the-north-korean-border
Lee, J. H. (2012, June 23). In North Korea, learning to hate the US starts early. Retrieved from
https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-korea-learning-hate-us-starts-early-120658377.html
Pinnington, R. (2017, November 3). Brutal life of North Korea children: Propaganda in schools
and forced to watch executions. Retrieved from
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/875134/North-Korea-child-labour-abuse-Kim-Jon
g-un-Human-Rights-Watch
Reilly, G. (n.d.). Propaganda nation: how North Korea spreads its message. Retrieved from
https://www.thejournal.ie/propaganda-nation-how-north-korea-spreads-its-message-3093
43-Dec2011/
Reporter, D. M. (2012, January 13). North Koreans face labour camps for not being upset
enough about the death of Kim Jong-il. Retrieved from
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2085636/North-Koreans-face-labour-camps-up
set-death-Kim-Jong-il.html
Sang-hun, C. (2013, August 20). North Korean Defectors Tell U.N. Panel of Prison Camp
Abuses. Retrieved from
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/asia/north-korean-defectors-tell-un-panel-of-
prison-camp-abuses.html?searchResultPosition=11
The Pyongyang Times. (n.d.). Retrieved February 23, 2020, from
http://www.pyongyangtimes.com.kp/
Walters, G. (2014, February 21). Voices of the damned: These horrifying stories from
concentration camp victims reveal, with chilling clarity, why this week North Korea was
likened to Nazi Germany. Retrieved from
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2565240/Voices-damned-These-horrifying-stor
ies-concentration-camp-victims-reveal-chilling-clarity-week-North-Korea-likened-Nazi-
Germany.html
White, S., & Acton, M. (2019, July 14). Kim Jong-un begs North Koreans for cash to keep his
dad's body frozen in ice. Retrieved from
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/kim-jong-un-begs-north-18209546
North Korea Showdown. (2017, May 9). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from
https://moodle.elon.edu/pluginfile.php/1656975/mod_resource/content/1/N Korea.pdf
Pictures to Use:
Image showing a satellite view of a North Korean labor camp courtesy of the Washington Post
Image showing brutal conditions inside a North Korean labor camp courtesy of Dailymail.co.uk
Image showing people weeping at Kim Jong-il’s funeral courtesy of dailymail.co.uk
Image showing a North Korean military parade courtesy of CNN
Image showing Kim Jong-il on display like he is a god courtesy of Mirror.co.uk
Photo showing an example of propaganda used by the government bringing up children to hate
America courtesy of yahoo news
Photo showing a map of labor camps in North Korea courtesy of American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Screenshot of the website “The Pyongyang Times”
Image showing a typical south korean bunker incase of attack by the north, courtesy of dailymail