Thoughts on NORTH KOREA

By Cathy H - 9:04 PM

Over the past few weeks I've been reading a book called "Escape from Camp 14" which is about a prisoner recounting the harsh treatment and horrific conditions of political camps that the North Korean government denies existence of. After that, I watched a couple of Vice documentaries about a journalist's tour in Pyongyang and how delusional and dreamlike those people were living in. I find this entire nation extremely intriguing in terms of the government succeeding in totalitarian control despite so much corruptness and freedom of opinions happening in the outside world. In a sense, people there think everyone else lives like them and their is nothing wrong with their rights being sacrificed for collective goodness.

I find it insane imagining millions of North Koreans dying in slave camps everyday and starving to death with lack of infrastructure, electricity basic needs and lack of liberty while the whole propaganda produced by the nation shows a very unified and painted picture of everyone looking up to the leader as a god. The most ludicrous of all is tourists there only visit the richest capital and are not allowed to take pictures of poor people or military guards. I don't know if NK really takes people for ignorant or they think because their own people obey so easily, everyone else believes their propaganda as well. I think with the nuclear missile situation and hostility with all the major countries in the world, its losing all connections it had before when countries used to send them foreign aid. The problem with that is it got sold in private market between the elites anyway instead of distributing the aids to the poor. I feel like the situation is critical there because aside from the capital, everywhere else is RESTRICTED ACCESS. Even with starving Africans, occasional foreign aid can reach their and journalists can travel there to raise awareness for those people. But the people in NK prison camps are virtually nonexistent- yet satellite images show the growing number of camps that was previously filled with black holes.

Sometimes I find it shocking that parts of the world are still living like that yet North Americans enjoy themselves in luxury and totally being consumed with themselves. It's bizarre that such a communist state is going on with virtually 90% of the land being rural farmland and lack of contact with the outside world. Yet in North America we hold protests and demonstrations, as extreme and as strange as we want. When I think about it, it doesnt seem real. I hope for the best of them and they have definitely sparked my interest alot, maybe by the end of this semester I will make a trip to Pyongyang to see what its really like for myself because it seems like a fiction to me. But that will depend on the nuclear situation, I dont understand why we're headed for potential WWIII and destruction, its just a sad reality that history is always repeating itself.

P.S. Here is the documentary I watched!