Lessons for reform with love from North Korea

[Bohra spring]

The below is so similar to Bohra tyranny. 2 regimes so alike. Same solution to break the back of oppression ...educations, information and suffering bring down the evil Dia's dynasty

By Mick Krever, CNN

Who controls the Hermit Kingdom?

According to a North Korean defector – a former regime insider who was one of Kim Jong Il’s favorite poet-propagandists – it is not the 31-year-old dictator Kim Jong Un.

“When Kim Jung Il died and Kim Jong Un succeeded him, people saw the transfer of power from father to son,” Jang Jin-Sung told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in London. “What they did not see also was what happened to the apparatus of the totalitarian system that supported the rule of Kim Jung Il.”

That apparatus, Jang said, is the Organization and Guidance Department, or OGD – it was Kim Jung Il’s education as he rose through the ranks, and was full of his university friends.

It is an “old-boy’s network” made into a massive surveillance organization.

“Kim Jung Il had the OGD as his old boys' network,” Jang told Amanpour. “Kim Jong-un may have friends in his Swiss school, but he has no one inside North Korea.”

Jang is the author of a new book, "Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee – A Look Inside North Korea."

“After the execution of Jang Song Thaek [Kim Jong Un’s uncle], he has become an orphan – not just in terms of family connections, but in terms of politics.”

“He's a political orphan.”

Precious little is known about Kim Jong Un, who inherited the leadership of North Korea after his father’s death in 2011.

Since that time, Jang said, Kim Jong Un has had to rely on his father’s “old-boys network” to get anything done.

But because that group does not respect the younger Kim, who was educated in Switzerland, the way it did his father, Kim Jong Un has become nothing more than the symbolic head of North Korea.

Defector: I saw Kim Jong Il as 'divine'

Meeting Kim

“Until the day I met Kim Jung Il,” Jang says, “I truly considered him divine, as someone more holy, like a sage – someone to be revered, someone who was better than us, who was sacrificing his own life for the people.”

So effective was the regime propaganda machine, he told Amanpour, that he did not even believe that Kim the elder used the toilet.

But Jang, a poet, caught the dictator’s eye, and was invited for a private audience with him.

“The man I saw standing in front of me was a man, he was a human being. He was not a holy man; he was not a saint; he was not a god. He was a man just like me, who did use the toilet.”

In propaganda, Kim had used “perfectly composed, flowery language,” Jang said, and was deeply reverential of “the people.”

“But when I met him, he just spoke in slang like in a kind of commanding colloquial, working-class slang, even to his most senior men.”

“And that was shocking to me.”

He even, Jang told Amanpour, wore shoes to boost his height.

Defector lifts curtain on North Korea

Shattering the myth

Once a North Korean has been admitted into the dictator’s inner circle, Jang said – “after having spent more than twenty minutes with him behind closed doors, at his personal request” – the leader’s “divinity” gets transferred onto that person.

“You become immune from all prosecution, all harm. You’re protected by his divinity.”

From that highest perch of North Korean society, Jang could clearly see for the first time all the lies he had been told.

The truth became even starker when he went back to visit his hometown of Sairwon, in the southwest of the country.

“That was when I really witnessed the devastating effects of the famine. That's where I saw the corpses in the station area just piling up and being taken away.”

As many as 3.5 million people are estimated to have died during North Korea's severe famine of the 1990s, according to the South Korean NGO Good Friends Center for Peace, Human Rights, and Refugees. (Official North Korean numbers estimate that 220,000 people died.)

It is also, he told Amanpour, where he saw a public execution.

“It is not classified as a punishment in response to a crime. It's considered a method of moral education, of building up society's standards of morality. So that's why these executions happen in public places, such as market squares, where people watch it.”

“It becomes a theater.”

A decade ago Jang decided to flee the country. Not even his family knew he was planning to leave.

Had he told them, he told Amanpour, their innocence would have been compromised, and they would have been vulnerable to the wrath of the state security service.

Cracking the regime

The most closed country on earth continues to fascinate the world, and among the most discussed questions is if, and how, the brutal regime could fall.

“Currently, there are two classes in North Korea locked in battle with each other,” Jang said.

“One I will call the loyal class. This is the class that is invested, that has a stake in this continuation of the status quo, of oppression and surveillance and control.”

“The other class are the market classes,” he said. “Their livelihoods are not sustained by the system, but actually oppressed by it.”

Earlier this year, a PBS Frontline documentary featured stunning footage of ordinary North Koreans using free enterprise and challenging regime security officers.

North Koreans, the documentary showed, are increasingly exposed to the outside world, through smuggled DVDs and USB sticks containing Western and South Korean movies and TV shows.

“In the past, there was only one thing to belong to, one thing that sustained you, one thing that kept your family going…loyalty to the cult of Kim.”

“But now people have realized finally, after the famine, that it is not loyalty that feeds them. It is money. It is work. It is owning something. It's individual property that feeds one.”

“So loyalty to Kim Il Sung” – Kim Jong Un’s grandfather – “has been trumped by, let's say, the portrait of Washington on a U.S. dollar note.”

Change in North Korea will not come, Jang said, by negotiating with the regime. It will come through knowledge.

“Truth will set North Korea free. The people will set North Korea free. The erosion of control will set North Korea free, not engagement with the regime.”


Filed under: Christiane Amanpour • Latest Episode • North Korea

[Rebel]

Good article - truth and knowledge are both essential components which could lead to freedom will never be opened to us because they don't want us to be free, they want us to control our minds and hearts so we remain blind folded and we continue to exist as their subjects and they our rulers.

[Bohra spring]

The below quote reaffirms the reformist strategy that engagement is discretionary and this site with whatever warts is to bring more dividends in the long run

Abdes or conservatives may deem or misunderstand the open frank discussions as blasphemy or apostasy , however we should not get discouraged

Every debate in most cases is being lost on logical or factual basis and conservatives fall back on faith reasoning

“Truth will set North Korea free. The people will set North Korea free. The erosion of control will set North Korea free, not engagement with the regime.”

[husain_angry]

Very good read,
Also first of all we have to stop fighting with our on mind while ignoring there commands.
Next comes our family and society.

As religion should not try to grab you but it should set you free.

May allah bring peace to our mind and the world.

[Bohra spring]

Brainwashed youth of North Korea
AUGUST 24, 2015 7:19PM

One million North Korean millenials have vowed to defend their country as tensions with the South boil over, at least according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
We’re used to antagonistic rhetoric and displays of strength from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but the strangest aspect of the latest confrontation is the visible enthusiasm of the country’s teens.
This positivity abounded in the capital, Pyongyang, yesterday, with truckloads of young soldiers singing martial songs driving around the city and large crowds materialising for impromptu rehearsals of activities planned for the ruling Workers Party’s 70th anniversary in October.
By evening, people had gathered around televisions in public places — not to learn the outcome of crisis talks with the South, but to watch the debut of Boy General, a popular cartoon revamped for the first time in five years at the order of Kim Jong-un.
It may seem like unusual teenage behaviour, but experts say it’s no surprise. It’s what they’ve been trained for since birth.
Brainwashed youth of North Korea
A young girl reads a public copy of the state-run daily newspaper at a subway station in the capital Pyongyang.
COMING OF AGE
Citizens in North Korea live in a bubble sealed off from the rest of the world, where they have no choice but to adhere to the status quo. They are expected to show the unerring devotion to their leader that was demonstrated when Kim Jong-il’s subjects took to the streets wailing and tearing their hair after his death, in scenes that baffled the world.
Young people growing up under the totalitarian regime have little freedom of movement, means of communication or economic independence. Foreign film and literature are banned and they are taught a revised version of history in school, learning songs of worship that praise the ruling Kim family.
“The young generation don’t know much about life outside,” Dr Leonid Petrov “They’re curious about what’s going on but constantly brainwashed that the world is hostile.”
Kim Jong-un has made a great show of being a progressive young leader, introducing new freedoms including letting people eat fast food, allowing them to own mobile phones and permitting women to wear pants and jewellery and ride bicycles. But the regime continues to exercise control over these changes.
“Life in North Korea is pretty artificial,” said Dr Petrov. “There’s access to fashionable clothes in Pyongyang, where people can see, but in rural areas, even if you have a mobile phone there’s no electricity, or access to the web. People eat a little better now but life is pretty difficult.”
For most young people, there’s little time to think about politics before they begin their mandatory service in the Korean People’s Army at 17. It can last as long as a decade for men, while women serve for around seven years.
Kim Jong-un is creating a crisis to shore up support from young people.
Kim Jong-un is creating a crisis to shore up support from young people. Source: AFP
IN-BETWEENERS
With young people not leaving the military until their mid-20s, many commentators see the slightly older generation of “in-betweeners” as the state’s best hope for rebellion.
Middle-aged people, known as jangmadang, have little interest in a revolution after surviving the Great Famine of the 1990s, focusing on becoming pioneers in a more capitalist market, explains Professor Kim Sung-kyung, from the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, South Korea.
The youngest members of society are increasingly influenced by trends from the outside world, she told the NK News, such as fashionable clothes and eating pizza — but these advances are “superficial” and carefully managed by the government.
Prof Sung-kyung says the real subversion comes from those in their late 20s taking the opportunity to “punch holes in the regime in their everyday lives” through “secretive experiences they can share each other, without being caught by the government”.
As young people start to share ideas, smuggling videos and USBs in from South Korea, there is an opportunity for freedom: which is exactly what the state is so working hard to suppress.
NO BASIC RIGHTS
It’s when citizens dissent that the harshest side of Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship is revealed.
Park Ji-hyun left North Korea with Chinese traffickers during the famine, forced to leave her dying father behind. After six years, she was reported to the authorities and sent back. Classified as a defector, she was sent to a labour camp and worked to the bone, clearing mountainsides with her bare hands. “You could say the whole of North Korea is one big prison,” she told Amnesty International.
Eventually she was discharged with tetanus in her leg and, homeless and sick, managed to make a second escape. Her story shows how hard it really is.
It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans, including young children, are enslaved in prison camps, and arbitrary arrests and public executions are commonplace, according to Human Rights Watch. The organisation says it’s this, along with the lack of political opposition, independent labour unions, free media or civil society that constitute the real challenge to youth empowerment.
“It’s very easy to manipulate people when they’re locked in a country without information,” said Dr Petrov. “They blame the outside world’s blockades for lack of food and so on.
“North Korea has been mobilising people sicne the Korean Way in the 1950s. Creating a crisis is part of the game. It’s a country frozen in time and needs mobilsation for something to change. People are prepared to go to extreme lengths.”
Korea
North Korean youths regularly assemble in shows of devotion. Source: AAP
POWER OF PROPAGANDA
When we hear stories about defectors or progressive material slipping into this repressive society, it’s tempting to think it’s only a matter of time until the regime is overthrown.
The young people who swore allegiance this weekend somewhat dispel that notion.
Propaganda is key. Defector Jang Jin-sung, formerly one of Kim Jong-il’s poets, said he fully believed the rhetoric he helped to spread. That was, until he obtained special permission to visit to his hometown and saw corpses piled on the pavement, realising for the first time that the famine rumours were true.
The propaganda is psychological and emotional, he told The Guardian. People are not willing to risk the lives of their families by speaking out, and they are so isolated they have “no concept of basic human rights” anyway. Jang himself had to flee execution.
“If anyone thinks North Korea is opening up, they are completely mistaken,” he said.
While the state recently started allowing some tourism, such industries are controlled by the elite. “If there was any hint of real change,” added Jang, “ ... the whole thing would collapse.”
The current atmosphere illustrates that. The stand-off began with explosion of landmines south of the heavily fortified border, which Seoul said had been planted by the North.
The South responded by blasting a barrage of world news, pop music and criticism of Kim Jong-un’s oppressive government from loudspeakers along the border. The North denied involvement in the mines and demanded it cease this “psychological warfare” or face attack.
By Saturday, the DPRK had mobilised more than 70 submarines and undersea vehicles, according to Seoul’s Defence Ministry, and artillery fire has been exchanged.
It’s unclear what will come of the talks. Analysts in Seoul say the North fears the broadcasts could demoralise its frontline troops and inspire them to defect.
This forceful response shows it knows only too well the power of propaganda, and is determined not to let its young people hear it.