January 15, 2012
I’ll be honest. I did not think North Korea would survive a third Kim. I was really hoping it would not. Perhaps I was a bit naïve, but I thought almost certainly there would be some sort of political uprising, a revolution perhaps? Over the years, the borders have become much more porous, especially with China. Most North Koreans no longer live in an information vacuum. They are now aware that South Korea is not the famine-stricken denizen of capitalist horrors its government tried to portray for so many years. Yet the North Koreans are still starving. They are still held captive. And they are being shipped off to labor camps for everything from throwing away newspaper with a picture of their Great Leader on it, to not mourning properly or genuinely enough for the death of L’il Kim. It’s a fucking mad house. The paranoia and backwardness is unparalleled in human history. And this has been going on for generations. Admittedly, I have no idea what it must be like. I have no idea what it feels like to be repressed for even a second, much less from the day I was born. I have no idea what it must feel like to suddenly find out that the rest of the world is nothing like what you’re government has told you. I have no idea what it must be like to watch your child or mother die of starvation. But people are people universally, no? Perhaps not. But honestly, I thought Kim Jong il would be the last. I thought there was no way a 24-year-old boy, educated in Sweden no less, could take up that mantle of cruelty and run with it, convincing military commanders and party leaders, who had been in their positions before Jong Un was even born, to follow him unwaveringly. I thought for sure the Korean people knew that the government cannot imprison millions. Half the military is starving. The local law enforcement is worse off than the military. A revolution of millions cannot be held back. The rest of the world would be forced to deal with this dirty little secret they’ve been trying to shove under the rug since the 1950s. And I am not the only one. I’ve seen and read interview after interview with North Korean refugees whose opinion is the same. When Jong Il dies, so will communist North Korea. The people won’t stand for it. The people are already educated about the rest of the world far too much to ever fall back into blissful ignorance. You cannot unsee and unhear the cell phones and South Korean television shows and MP3 players and South Korean and American music. You can’t unhear and unsee the news programs and images on black market television sets of downtown Seoul and New York and Paris. This is an eye-opening that can’t be undone. The North Koreans are no longer in total social darkness. And I don’t, I really do not, understand why they have not taken their freedom into their own hands. I am usually not an idealist at all. I am not naïve. And I am not stupid. And maybe there is something about human nature that becomes permanently warped over so many generations of repression of even the most basic human rights. Perhaps I am perpetuating a spoiled, globally ignorant, ‘stupid American’ stereotype. But goddamn. The rest of the world only let Hitler fuck around for less than 10 years before we’d had enough. The Kims have been doing the same goddamn thing since 1949. What the fuck am I missing here?
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7 minions who have sucked on my crap:
Docile minds and bodies are a painfully difficult thing to reprogram after they have been trained, beaten, and brainwashed into submission.
If more than one generation has gone through this, then there is no collective memory, not of the fact that things could be different, but of in what way it could be made to happen. Of course one cannot unsee and unhear glimpses of utopias that one has witnessed, but translating these into practical tools for one's own country, one's own mentality and history is much more difficult than it might look.
Kim Jon-un was supposedly educated in several different places, and is said not to have been very good at school :) Taking human nature into consideration, could you blame the little fuck if he actually liked the idea of bossing people around now that he has tasted it? There are a lot of people whose fat bellies depend on keeping that little shit in power. They are a minority on the whole, but I believe they will do anything to retain their status, even if they have to imprison him and fake his existence.
It takes a long time for a starved body to get used to food again. A bird released out of its cage too late in the game might never learn to properly fly, but it might nest up in a tree from which its fledglings will make up for the previous generation. It took the former Yugoslavia ten years to break up after its 'father' and another 'beloved' leader, Tito, died. Ten years. And it ended in bloodshed. Hitler fucked around for more than ten years altogether, and the blatant repression he exercised was merely the most obvious aspect of the entire apparatus. What brought and kept him in power before that was a lot of petty human self-gain, complicity, collaboration, indifference to the suffering of others, and actual willingness to put one's fate in the hands of someone else, because it felt comfortable not to be responsible.
Finally, since timing and timeliness is inscribed in the title and theme of my own blog, sometimes certain things work only when the time is right. Not before, and not after.
This might be the longest comment I have ever left on anyone's blog, but as you see, you really got me with this. Being ignorant would have been so easy, thank you for giving it the finger.
Being ignorant lightens the load in your brain. I see why people stagnate there passively. I guess they look all the way across the globe and wonder how the politics and human rights of an alien part of the map affects them, how it affects whether or not they get their kids to soccer on time or the price of milk. For a lot of people, the dead weight of the truth of what is happening to the trapped and oppressed is overwhelming and too horrible to think about. And it is. It's incredibly overwhelming to read the memoirs of some of the North Koreans who have escaped either the country or one of the labor camps or both. The stories they tell are easily on par with the Holocaust, only we're talking about North Korean children who are born in these camps thanks to NK's "three generation" policy. These kids are never meant to be let out. They are not even considered human enough to be taught who Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un are. Yes. Try to let that sink in for a minute. An entire country that exists down a rabbit hole of reality, orbiting around a personality cult, worshipping the Kims as gods on earth, yet there are Koreans born and raised in North Korean concentration camps who are so subhuman that they are not even told who their leaders are. I am also well aware of the financial toll the sudden liberation of NK will be on China, South Korea, and the United States. This is one of the reasons they'd rather the NK situation just go away. I've seen polls that have been conducted of a random sampling of the SK population and their biggest concern regarding reunification is how they will be affected financially. On the one hand, it's appalling. On the other hand, it's human nature. And who am I to judge when my country is not bordered to the North by a country with whom we are still technically at war? Gah. I need to shut up. I'm not even sure where my point went. But yes, I know exactly what you mean. Ignorance would be easy, but this particular issue just really gets me going. I know I can't save the world just by being concerned and writing about it. But this has been something that has bothered me since 94, the first time I lived in SK. The amount of time and energy and resources expended by certain countries to keep the situation with NK status quo is just sickening.
So..
Where to begin! Prefacing my comment with:
I know nothing definitive of course.
I have often asked why African Americans "allowed" themselves to be enslaved. I don't think I'll get the answer to that in my lifetime. What?! White folks felt their emancipation was more important than they did? Of course, some slaves enjoyed some tiny creature comforts and likely some did not care about "freedom" much at all.
Freedom to me means I can get up every day at 5am and go to work and never make what I feel I'm worth and sit in a cubicle that is smaller than a jail cell. Yes, we are told we have options and that we should want better, but there is a different line for each person. Do I work with a great group of people who collaborate extremely well given diverse backgrounds. Yes? Well, then I give myself permission to become complacent. Really, I actually feel guilty making the negative comments above. In the current economic CLIMATE, I actually am doing rather well.
So....what was shit heaped on your shoulders yesterday is not so bad today, given a certain paradigm.
But, in the end, if I am not CEO, then I have myself to blame..that's it, myself. So, in the end, I personally feel the Koreans could organize and overcome. WHEN they have gotten to the point where death is preferable to the way they live now.
It's like small children who are abused. Some will recognize it for what it is (even absent sane adult intervention). Some will run away. Some will try to placate their parents in order to avoid abuse. Some will grow up to abuse or worse. There really is no solid explanation. Some people cope; some do not.
Am I devoid of compassion? In certain instances, I am a complete bleeding heart.
There is always a bully around the next corner and he is always susceptible to the person who will dare call his bluff. Maybe the first person gets smacked to the ground for saying, "You are an egotistical, megalomaniacal, dictator shit hole!!" But others will hear the dissent. And THAT is what truly scares the machine. So, yeah, WTF happened to the one or two big-mouthed Koreans who should be leading the revolution?
My passivity likely stems from the fact that I don't intend to slip below middle class, and that's a fight within itself. You think we don't have the same type of manipulators and dictators here? They are just less transparent. Even "charity" is often not what it appears to be. As long as you NEED someone for welfare, housing assistance, food pantries, Extreme Makeovers, etc., you have relinquished control. But...try to criticize this "magnanimous" behavior.
I mean really, life is a bowl of crap and we all just have to decide how much of it we're going to lap up.
Oh, and not to mention that I feel sometimes our government really believes a Kim regime is whacked enough to attempt to nuke the fuck out of us.
On a lighter note--love my Kia (Australia can't get enough of them) and loved being a student of Taekwondo. It is somewhat baffling that the level of success has not caught the attention of even the most primitive and oppressed North Korean.
I'm really not sure I even believe they have the nukes to do it with. Yeah, they probably have the technology but not the finished product. They haven't even been able to get missiles too far past their own shores. The more I think about it, the more I do believe that the mindset and mechanisms are completely different. I was raised with the notion that my life is in my hands. If I want it, I have to tools to achieve it, and if I don't achieve it, I'm the one to blame, as you said. But that comes from being raised in the US, where the focus is on the individual and not the state. When you're raised in a socialist/communist environment, one that has had 50 years to ingratiate itself deep in the brains of society, the focus is not on the self, what the self wants, how the self can achieve it. The focus is on the state, what the state requires of you, you are not an individual but you belong to the state. You're nothing more than a mouthpiece, a walking propaganda poster, and all your blood, sweat, and tears are owned by the government. They are being taught that individual wants and achievements are evil and capitalist and AMERICAN. It's hard for people in free societies (or relatively free) to wrap their brains around that, around what that sort of thing does to a person's humanity.
In that case I suppose it's pretty arrogant for us to project our expectations on them. There must obviously be an appeal, no matter how indiscernible by us. Perhaps it's akin to the appeal felt by persons who commit crimes just so they can stay incarcerated.
Otherwise, I feel the situation would change. There have just been too many people in the World who one day decided they would no longer live a certain way.
Sorry to belabor the point, but well, we have soldiers who would gladly and voluntarily give their lives for America.
We have operatives, etc who would never consider another line of work, although they are essentially being used by our government.
Not an exact comparison, but everyone believes in something.
If the Japanese felt hari-kari restored honor, then suppose that the Koreans also want to retain their empathic state with the "state".
Let's not forget anti-Semitism was largely met with stoicism on behalf of those with the most to lose, and still is. Did they WANT to die? I'd say they likely wouldn't have chosen it. Were they clueless about their final disposition? I'm not buying that, either. And they certainly were not stupid.
Lots of pot stirring here, but after you cross over a certain line of conspicuity (obviously many North Koreans do know of others who live differently), then it remains that we can hand wring all day and may only be borrowing issues.
And finally, yes, I'm throwing it out there--while I believe life is shit, I also believe we were imbued with free will. That's how I reconcile all this and sleep at night. Would I help if asked? OF COURSE. But I'm not going to assume that I know what is best for others.
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