A must read: Professor Kim's article on North Korea's mass games

"The Bitter Tears Behind Pyongyang's Games"
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/IK08Dg01.html


Watch: Mass Games backdrop warmup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhKU8dz4ah8&feature=related

The Juche Ideology

-JSH

On February 18th and 19th, 2008, Dr. Kim Hyun-sik, who was a former professor at Pyongyang University and a tutor to the dictators' family, came to educate the UNC-Duke student body on North Korea -- an isolationist regime defined by the complete indoctrination of its citizens and the torture and execution of those who fail to obey the State. Particularly on the second night of his presentation, Professor Kim interestingly focused on the totalitarian nation's Juche Ideology and the effects of such an indoctrination on an entire populace. The ideology's inculcation of complete submission to the State, the credence of Kim Il Sung as the Father and Kim Jung Il as the Son, the government's ubiquitous propaganda, and nearly perfect isolationist efforts, put its citizens under a deep spell. To this day, North Koreans are illusioned about the outside world, and their hermit kingdom remains their only reality.


At the presentation, Professor Kim cited the Ten Principles of the Juche Ideology. They are the following:

1. We must give our all in the struggle to unify the entire society with the revolutionary ideology of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.

2. We must honor the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung with all our loyalty.

3. We must make absolute the authority of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.

4. We must make the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung? revolutionary ideology our faith and make his instructions our creed.

5. We must adhere strictly to the principle of unconditional obedience in carrying out the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung's instructions.

6. We must strengthen the entire partys ideology and willpower and revolutionary unity, centering on the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.

7. We must learn from the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung and adopt the communist look, revolutionary work methods and people-oriented work style.

8. We must value the political life we were given by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung, and loyally repay his great political trust and thoughtfulness with heightened political awareness and skill.

9. We must establish strong organizational regulations so that the entire party, nation and military move as one under the one and only leadership of the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung.

10.We must pass down the great achievement of the revolution by the Great Leader comrade Kim Il Sung from generation to generation, inheriting and completing it to the end.

One of Professor Kim's most salient anecdotes from amongst a stream of startling experiences was one that underscored the bizarreness of the Juche Ideology -- bizarre at least to the rest of the world afar from North Korea's totalitarian paradigm. Where Professor Kim taught at Pyongyang University, student leaders were selected by the Worker's Party according to generational loyalties. The student chosen for Class President had a father extremely loyal to the State. Being awarded the occupation of fisherman (which is one of the country's most prestigious civilian occupations), the father had the Worker's Party's trust in frequenting outside of the country's borders yet not venturing to other lands, and also had fish to eat in an isolated land riddled with starvation.

On one unfortunate day, the class president was stripped of his title and subjected to much humiliation by the entire school. The reason: his father was reported to be missing, to have allegedly run away. This was just one example of the norms created by the Juche Ideology. The Juche Ideology creates a single-minded society, in which it is everyone's goal and purpose in life to serve the State and bring as much glory to Kim Jung Il as possible. Behind every action and motivation are the Juche principles. One's application of the Juche principles affects himself, his children, and grandchildren. Disloyalty is punishable for up to three generations.

This true story ends with the son of the fisherman reclaiming his position as class president. A dead body was washed ashore some time later and wrapped around his wrist was a ball of tape tightly wound. Cutting the ball of tape to its very center appeared a picture of Kim Il Sung. Though the body was decayed, the picture remained well-preserved. This dead man was found to be the student's father, and the boy was immediately exalted back to his position as class president. Professor Kim also recounted a similar story in which during a flood, the mother chose to save a painting of Kim Jung Il from the waters instead of her drowning child. The Juche Ideology embodies the deification of the dictators, and even the iconification of them. Taught from birth, it is their life, their drive, their sole purpose.

To find out more about what it is like in North Korea, watch the National Geographic documentary Inside North Korea; it can be found on youtube. An international eye doctor is allowed inside North Korea for 10 days to perform cataract surgery on patients. Entering along with him is an American reporter (her sister is the journalist who is currently captured by the North Korean government; see previous blog entry for news article) who has hidden cameras in the doctor's equipment providing real footages of North Korea. Whether out of fear or genuineness, watch the people's unconditional praise and worship of Kim Jung Il as god.

About North Korea

by JSH

Overview

The event Beyond the Border: North Korea seeks to educate Carolina and Duke students and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill community about North Korea and its current political, religious, and social climate through the first-hand knowledge and experiences of a North Korean defector.

As a Carolina student, I’ve noticed that students have little knowledge of North Korea. Students only know—and vaguely—that North Korea is associated with political words that President Bush has frequently uttered: “nuclear weapons” and “axis of evil.” My peers naively ask me whether I am from North or South Korea without realizing that a reply “North” would mean that I am from a “hermit kingdom” of confinement, a Stalinist regime of oppression and starvation, and an Orwellian nation of illusion. More than just a political association, North Korea should be realized as a grave humanitarian situation, where people are brainwashed, stripped of their freedom, brutalized, and killed through a massive system of concentration camps.

The “Hermit Kingdom” of Confinement

North Korea’s citizens are not allowed to voluntarily leave the country. There is no such thing as leaving, only risking one’s life and escaping. Despite the perils of armed guards, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, and harsh mountainous conditions, in the past 10 years a hundred thousand North Koreans have made it across border into China, North Korea’s northern neighbor. Sadly, one-hundred-thousand is minute compared to the 23.30 million still living under Kim Jung Il’s cruel iron fist. Likewise, a southward escape across the Korean peninsula’s DMZ line, the most militarily fortified border in the world, is another unyielding solution.

How many of those one-hundred-thousand survive after escape is hard to determine. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations worldwide advocate the safety of North Koreans as refugees in China. But China blatantly disregards the international promulgations, collaborating with its communist ally to actively search and seize these “criminals,” to impose brutal treatment upon them in Chinese prisons until their eventual repatriation to North Korea. Upon repatriation, they are punished for the felon crime of defection: executed or imprisoned in concentration camps—tortured and subjected to inhumane amounts of labor, often in dangerous working conditions with little to no food and water.

The Stalinist Regime of Oppression and Starvation

There is an estimated 200,000 prisoners in North Korea’s numerous concentration camps, most serving life-time sentences. Citizens are imprisoned even for the most trivial of crimes, such as stealing a piece of bread in order to survive. (In the mid-1990s a severe famine hit North Korea on top of its already chronic food shortage. An estimated three million people died). The government also imprisons citizens arbitrarily for “posing a threat” to the state and its Juche ideology that practices the worshipping of Kim Il Sung and his successor son Kim Jung Il as gods. Family members of political defectors are imprisoned for up to three generations. This is the government’s grotesque form of punishment for successful escapees and also serves to dissuade citizens from attempting escape.

In the mid-1990s, a famine devastated North Korea that forced its citizens to flee the country in search of food, despite being ignorant of the outside world. As more people continue to escape North Korea, more information leaks out of the “hermit kingdom” of confinement to evidence a Stalinist regime of oppression. The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has published extensive research on North Korea’s human rights violations, one of which is The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps. This publication is a compilation of testimonies from thirty in-depth debriefings conducted by the South Korean government of escapees and defectors who were either former prisoners or prison guards. It reveals the specific brutalities that one would experience in North Korea’s concentration camps. Not surprisingly, the exclusive testimonies coincide and also parallel in the level of brutality. Prison-guard sketches of the camp’s blueprint match satellite images. Both prisoners and prison guards can pinpoint exactly where they worked and stayed in their respective concentration camp.

The Orwellian Nation of Illusion

It is remarkable how much North Korea resembles George Orwell’s 1984 dystopian society. North Korea’s citizens are kept isolated from the rest of the world and only fed government propaganda. There is no political or religious freedom. Any sort of dissension is preemptively eliminated through the secret system of concentration camps—people just seem to “disappear”—and the entire country’s fervent worship of Kim Jung Il as a god is very real. Citizens believe they are a part of a “worker’s paradise,” despite the fact that the majority of the population is impoverished; the average North Korean is seven inches shorter than his South Korean counterpart because of malnutrition.

The North Korean government is obviously morally depraved. People are worked and killed off like cattle whenever the government deems necessary. It controls people’s minds by propaganda, and anyone disillusioned is simply eliminated through the system of concentration camps. Thus, countrymen have continued worshipping their leader for decades, their very leader who sanctions violent crimes against them and brainwashes the entire country in order to maintain control.

I remember watching a documentary by British journalists who were allowed inside the capital Pyongyang, which serves as North Korea’s (eerie) showcase to the rest of the world, where they have erected buildings too lavish for the country’s poverty. The journalists were taken by the tour guide into Pyongyang’s museum and led into a room only laden with a few desks with pencils. There they were adamantly told that their “Great Leader” invented such things as desks and pencils that the country graciously uses today. Also in the capital, pictures of Kim Il Sung everywhere display his omnipotence like a god. People’s minds are literally encapsulated by the country’s ubiquitous propaganda.

Politics

Politically, government and religion are inseparable. Kim Jung Il, the son of Kim Il Sung, is the supreme godhead and leader. As dictator Kim Jung Il spends 30-50% of the nation’s GDP on military and has created the fourth largest standing army in the world comprised of two million soldiers—yet North Korea is one of the poorest countries. It is no wonder that its citizens are starving to death. Instead of the corrupt totalitarian government feeding its starving people, it has long been indicted of developing nuclear weapons, arming terrorist organizations in the Middle East, and passing nuclear intelligence on to enemy countries such as Syria.

In October of 2007, after 14 years of halted negotiations from breaching a 1994 non-proliferation agreement with the U.S., North Korea has finally agreed in six-party talks with the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia, to submit an accurate report of all its nuclear facilities in exchange for one million metric tons of fuel oil or the economic equivalent thereof. The deadline for this report was by the end of 2007; it is now 2008 and North Korea has yet to comply with a full statement.

Vision for North Korea-UNC: Our Mission

Our purpose is to research North Korea's political, economic, social, and cultural climate and history; to increase interest and organize a study of its current affairs; to facilitate discussion and debate; and ultimately raise awareness of its human rights violations. In close collaboration with Duke's VNK, we actively work to raise funds and be an outspoken voice for public awareness on behalf of North Korean refugees. Anne Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History writes:

“…as in Stalin’s time, North Korea’s leadership doesn’t want anyone to know any of these details [about concentration camps], since such revelations not only will damage their foreign reputation but also put their own regime at risk…

Certainly after absorbing such details, it will be more difficult for Americans or Europeans to sit down and negotiate, coldly, with their Korean counterparts and not mention human rights violations. South Koreans, when they know the details of life in the North, will also find it more difficult to argue in favor of appeasing the Northern regime. If these stories filter back to the North Korean police and administrators, those officials too will find it more difficult to justify their own behavior, or to claim that they don’t know what is really happening in the country’s concentration camps. And if the full truth about the camps becomes known to the wider population, then whatever support remains for the state constructed by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il will begin, even more decisively, to ebb away.

This is not to say that words can make a dictatorship collapse overnight. But words certainly can make a dictatorship collapse over time, as experience during the last two decades has shown. Totalitarian regimes are built on lies and can be damaged, even destroyed, when those lies are exposed. The greater and more detailed evidence that can be provided, the more damage the truth can do.”

This is exactly what our organization seeks to do: spread the truth. We may only be one organization at one university, but we are one of many organizations at many different universities that spread the truth to our fellow students, who can then join us to exponentially spread the truth to the world around us. Our organization seeks to bring human rights to the forefront. We do not want North Korea to just be a political issue, but we want North Korea to be intricately tied with human rights.

We want people to realize that understanding a part of the world so unlike ours is like beholding an abstract work of art. Both are mentally hard to grasp. Although we may not completely understand, it does not mean we don’t try to. Rather, we are challenged to stretch our minds, to rally our creativity, to push beyond our normal limits of thinking—so that we may arrive at a closer understanding. Others’ sufferings are distant to us, and closing the gap of estrangement takes focus. But by doing this, unreality that arises from an idle mind becomes more and more our reality—reality that people who are not any different from us are suffering, that people who are very much like us desire the same basic rights—universal human rights. And ultimately, understanding can move us to action.

The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps

http://www.hrnk.org/hiddengulag/preface.html
By Anne Applebaum

From Preface:
"Painstakingly, David Hawk and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea have compiled an enormous amount of information, including not just the numbers of prisoners and the locations of camps but also the details of camp life — the winter cold, the numb fingers, the workplace accidents — that make the stories more vivid. Those details are also what make this report so powerful.

"Some, of course, will avoid reading it, fully knowing that if they do read it, they will have to change their tactics, or at least think differently about the political problems posed by North Korea. Certainly after absorbing such details, it will be more difficult for Americans or Europeans to sit down and negotiate, coldly, with their Korean counterparts and not mention human rights violations. South Koreans, when they know the details of life in the North, will also find it more difficult to argue in favor of appeasing the Northern regime. If these stories filter back to the North Korean police and administrators, those officials too will find it more difficult to justify their own behavior, or to claim that they don’t know what is really happening in the country’s concentration camps. And if the full truth about the camps becomes known to the wider population, then whatever support remains for the state constructed by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il will begin, even more decisively, to ebb away.

"This is not to say that words can make a dictatorship collapse overnight. But words certainly can make a dictatorship collapse over time, as experience during the last two decades has shown. Totalitarian regimes are built on lies and can be damaged, even destroyed, when those lies are exposed. The greater and more detailed evidence that can be provided, the more damage the truth can do."





This is exactly what our organization seeks to do. We may only be one organization, at one university, but we are one of many organizations, and many different universities, that spread the truth to our fellow students, who can then join us to exponentially spread the truth to the world around us.

Engaging North Korea: Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy

http://cns.miis.edu/research/korea/nuc/engage.htm

On this is site is a quick overview of the Sunshine Policiy. Please read this site, as a thorough understanding of the Sunshine Policy will aid in the discussions and debates next semester. Keep in mind that this site is only a recommendation to gain a minimal knowledge of the Sunshine Policiy and that also, it was last updated in September 2005. Other links will be provided for source dynamic at a later time.

Country profile: North Korea

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/country_profiles/1131421.stm
Author unknown
October 2, 2007

Overview

After the Korean War, Kim Il-sung introduced the personal philosophy of Juche, or self-reliance, which became a guiding light for North Korea's development. Kim Il-sung's son, Kim Jong-il, is now head of state, but the post of president has been assigned "eternally" to his late father.

Decades of this rigid state-controlled system have led to stagnation and a leadership dependent on the cult of personality.

AT-A-GLANCE Politics: Supreme leader Kim Jong-il heads a secretive, communist regime which tolerates no dissent Economy: North Korea's command economy is dilapidated, hit by natural disasters, poor planning and a failure to modernise International: With its nuclear ambitions, North Korea presents a serious challenge to those trying to rein it in; the two Koreas are still technically at war Timeline

Aid agencies have estimated that up to two million people have died since the mid-1990s because of acute food shortages caused by natural disasters and economic mismanagement. The country relies on foreign aid to feed millions of its people.

The totalitarian state also stands accused of systematic human rights abuses. Reports of torture, public executions, slave labour, and forced abortions and infanticides in prison camps have emerged. A US-based rights group has estimated that there are up to 200,000 political prisoners in North Korea.

Pyongyang has accused successive South Korean governments of being US "puppets", but South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's visit in 2000 signalled a thaw in relations. Seoul's "sunshine policy" towards the north aimed to encourage change through dialogue and aid.

But this tentative reaching-out to the world was dealt a blow in 2002 by Pyongyang's decision to reactivate a nuclear reactor and to expel international inspectors. The country is said to have a handful of nuclear weapons and a uranium enrichment programme. It has declared itself a nuclear power and has an active missile programme.

In October 2006 North Korea said it had successfully tested a nuclear weapon, spreading alarm around the region.

Diplomatic efforts have aimed to rein in North Korea's nuclear ambitions. After years of on-and-off talks, a deal was thrashed out in February 2007 under which Pyongyang agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor in return for fuel and aid.

North Korea admitted International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, who verified the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor in July. This began what IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei called a "complicated process" that would eventually disable the reactor and other nuclear facilities in the country.

The February deal was delayed in June over the slow unfreezing of North Korean funds held in a Macau bank under US-instigated sanctions. Progress followed swiftly on their release, when South Korea resumed food aid and supplied fuel oil to the North.

North Korea maintains one of the world's largest standing armies and militarism pervades everyday life. But standards of training, discipline and equipment in the force are said to be low.

In 2002 US President George W Bush named the country as part of an "axis of evil".

Leaders

Eternal president: Kim Il-sung (deceased)

Chairman, National Defence Commission: Kim Jong-il

Beyond the elaborate personality cult through which he rules, little is known about Kim Jong-il's character.

"Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il

He is rarely photographed and is almost never heard in radio and TV broadcasts.

After the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994, Kim Jong-il did not immediately assume his father's titles; there were reports that Kim Il-sung's first choice as successor was the younger brother, Kim Yong-ju. Kim Jong-il eventually became head of the Korean Workers' Party in 1997.

He is credited with writing six operas in two years, and with personally designing the huge Juche tower in Pyongyang.

In recent years he has met several world leaders, including the South Korean president and the Japanese prime minister. He has attended summits in Moscow and Beijing.

Mr Kim is sometimes caricatured as a reclusive playboy with bouffant hair, platform shoes and a taste for cognac.

There has been speculation about his health. Mr Kim is said to have gastric problems arising from his love of spicy food. Other reports suggest that he has liver problems. North Korea watchers believe that one of Mr Kim's three sons will become the dictator's anointed heir.

Kim Jong-il was born in Siberia in 1941 during his father's period of exile in the former Soviet Union.

But official North Korean accounts say he was born in a log cabin at his father's guerrilla base on the country's highest mountain - an event marked by a double rainbow and a new star in the sky.

Premier: Kim Yong-il

Media

Radio and TV sets in North Korea are pre-tuned to government stations that pump out a steady stream of propaganda. The state has been dubbed the world's worst violator of press freedom by the media rights body Reporters Without Frontiers.

Press outlets and broadcasters - all of them under direct state control - serve up a menu of flattering reports about Kim Jong-il and his daily agenda. North Korea's economic hardships or famines are not reported.

However, after the historic Korean summit in Pyongyang in 2000, media outlets toned down their fierce denunciations of the Seoul government.

Ordinary North Koreans caught listening to foreign broadcasts risk harsh punishments, such as forced labour.

North Korea has a minimal presence on the internet. The web pages of North Korea's official news agency, KCNA, are hosted by the agency's bureau in Japan.

North Korea

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/northkorea/index.html



Abstract: North Korea is currently engaged in behavior that is even condemned by China, North Korea's longest supporter. On October 9th, 2007 North Korea set off a small nuclear device. The director of the CIA has said that the test was a "failure" and that the U.S. does not regard North Korea as a nuclear state. North Korea announced its intention to conduct a test on October 3, six days prior, and in doing so became the first nation to give warning of its first nuclear test. The US agreed to meet with North Korea for one-on-one talks concerning the financial crackdown.

Article posted in the New York Times

North Korea is the last Stalinist state on earth, and the latest country to join the nuclear club. Secretive, isolated, heavily militarized and desperately poor, it took steps in the 1990s toward thawing relations with South Korea, but has spent much of the last few years in a still unresolved set of negotiations with its neighbors and the United States over its nuclear program.

North Korea has taken a consistent anti-Washington line since its creation in 1948, denouncing both the United States and South Korea as a puppet of the U.S. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 the North has not attacked its neighbor, but to this day keeps large concentrations of troops and artillery focused on Seoul, and has regularly engaged in provocations like kidnappings, submarine incursions and missile tests over the Sea of Japan.

The country's founder, the so-called Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, was succeeded at his death in 1994 by his son, the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-il, an eccentric playboy invariably seen (in his few public appearances) in platform shoes and a khaki jumpsuit.

Read More...

In 1994, North Korea reached an agreement with the United States to shelve its nuclear program. In 2002, President Bush included Pyongyang in the "axis of evil," and American officials charged later that year that North Korea had violated the earlier agreement. Pyongyang declared the agreement void and expelled international nuclear inspectors. China joined with the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia for what became known as the six-party talks. In 2005, an agreement was reached and then scuttled by North Korea, angered by an American-led crackdown on banks doing business with it.

On Oct. 9, 2006, North Korea set off a nuclear device - a small one, which apparently did not detonate completely, according to experts on seismic recordings. Governments around the world condemned the blast, including China, which has been Pyongyang's chief protector for decades. In a policy shift, American officials agreed to meet with North Korea for one-on-one talks concerning the financial crackdown.

In February 2007, an agreement was reached under which North Korea would shut down its plant at Yongbyon, at which it had manufactured nuclear bomb fuel, in return for shipments of fuel oil. Early deadlines for action under the agreement came and went, with North Korea charging that funds from frozen bank accounts had not been returned. But after the funds made their way back to Pyongyang after a complicated series of transactions, the government announced in June 2007 that it was allowing international inspectors to return. - Ford Burkhart, May 31, 2007

News about North Korea, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Related: Times Topics: Kim Jong Il