The most alarming aspect of North Korea’s latest nuclear test, and the larger standoff with the U.S., is how little is known about how North Korea truly functions. For 65 years it’s been sealed off from the rest of the world to a degree hard to comprehend, especially at a time when people in Buenos Aires need just one click to share cat videos shot in Kuala Lumpur. Few outsiders have had intimate contact with North Korean society, and even fewer are in a position to talk about it.
One of the extremely rare exceptions is the novelist and journalist Suki Kim. Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to the U.S. at age thirteen, spent much of 2011 teaching English to children of North Korea’s elite at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.
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Kim had visited North Korea several times before and had written about her experiences for Harper’s Magazine and the New York Review of Books. Incredibly, however, neither Kim’s North Korean minders nor the Christian missionaries who founded and run PUST realized that she was there undercover to engage in some of history’s riskiest investigative journalism.
Although all of PUST’s staff was kept under constant surveillance, Kim kept notes and documents on hidden USB sticks and her camera’s SIM card. If her notes had been discovered, she almost certainly would have been accused of espionage and faced imprisonment in the country’s terrifying labor camps. In fact, of the three Americans currently detained in North Korea, two were teachers at PUST. Moreover, the Pentagon has in fact used a Christian NGO as a front for genuine spying on North Korea.
But Kim was never caught, and she returned to the U.S. to write her extraordinary 2014 book, “Without You, There Is No Us.” The title comes from the lyrics of an old North Korean song; the “you” is Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father.
Kim’s book is particularly important for anyone who wants to understand what happens next with North Korea. Her experience made her extremely pessimistic about every aspect of the country, including the regime’s willingness to ever renounce its nuclear weapons program. North Korea functions, she believes, as a true cult, with all of the country’s pre-cult existence now passed out of human memory.
Most ominously, her students, all young men in their late teens or early twenties, were firmly embedded in the cult. With the Kim family autocracy now on its third generation, you’d expect the people who actually run North Korea to have abandoned whatever ideology they started with, and have degenerated into standard human corruption. But PUST’s enrollees, their children, did not go skiing in Gstaad on school breaks; they didn’t even appear to be able to travel anywhere in North Korea. Instead they studied the North Korea ideology of “Juche,” or worked on collective farms.
Unsurprisingly, then, Kim’s students were shockingly ignorant of the outside world. They didn’t recognize pictures of the Taj Mahal or Egyptian pyramids. One had heard that everyone on earth spoke Korean because it was recognized as the world’s most superior language. Another believed that the Korean dish naengmyeon was seen as the best food on earth. And all Kim’s pupils were soaked in a culture of lying, telling her preposterous falsehoods so often that she writes, “I could not help but think that they – my beloved students – were insane.” Nonetheless, they were still recognizably human and charmingly innocent, and for their part came to adore their teachers.
Overall, “Without You, There Is No Us” is simply excruciatingly sad. All of Korea has been the plaything of Japan, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China, and like most Korean families, Kim’s has close relatives who ended up in North Korea when the country was separated and have never been seen again. Korea is now, Kim says, irrevocably ruptured:
It occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land … behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.
The Intercept spoke recently to Kim about her time in North Korea and the insight it gives her on the current crisis.
JON SCHWARZ: I found your book just overwhelmingly sorrowful. As an American, I can’t imagine being somewhere that’s been brutalized by not just one powerful country, but two or three or four. Then the government of North Korea, and to a lesser degree the government of South Korea, used that suffering to consolidate their own power. And then maybe saddest of all was to see these young men, your students, who were clearly still people, but inside a terrible system and on a path to doing terrible things to everybody else in North Korea.
SUKI KIM: Right, because there’s no other way of being in that country. We don’t have any other country like that. People so easily compare North Korea to Cuba or East Germany or even China. But none of them have been like North Korea – this amount of isolation, this amount of control. It encompasses every aspect of dictatorship-slash-cult.
What I was thinking about when I was living there is it’s almost too late to undo this. The young men I was living with had never known any other way.
The whole thing begins with the division of Korea in 1945. People think it began with the Korean War, but the Korean War only happened because of the 1945 division [of Korea by the U.S. and Soviet Union at the end of World War II]. What we’re seeing is Korea stuck in between.
JS: Essentially no Americans know what happened between 1945 and the start of the Korean War. And few Americans know what happened during the war. [Syngman Rhee, the U.S.-installed ultra-right wing South Korean dictator, massacred tens of thousands of South Koreans before North Korea invaded in 1950. Rhee’s government executed another 100,000 South Koreans in the war’s early months. Then the barbaric U.S. air war against North Korea killed perhaps one-fifth of its population.]
SK: This “mystery of North Korea” that people talk about all the time – people should be asking why Korea is divided and why there are American soldiers in South Korea. These questions are not being asked at all. Once you look at how this whole thing began it makes some sense why North Korea uses this hatred of the United States as a tool to justify and uphold the Great Leader myth. Great Leader has always been the savior and the rescuer who was protecting them from the imperialist American attack. That story is why North Korea has built their whole foundation not only on the Juche philosophy but hatred of the United States.
JS: Based on your experience, how do you perceive the nuclear issue with North Korea?
SK: Nothing will change because it’s an unworkable problem. It’s very dishonest to think this can be solved. North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons. Never.
The only way North Korea can be dealt with is if this regime is not the way it is. No agreements are ever honored because North Korea just doesn’t do that. It’s a land of lies. So why keep making agreements with someone who’s never going to honor those agreements?
And ultimately what all the countries surrounding North Korea want is a regime change. What they’re doing is pretending to have an agreement saying they do not want a regime change, but pursuing regime change anyway.
Despite it all you have to constantly do engagement efforts, throwing information in there. That’s the only option. There’s no other way North Korea will change. Nothing will ever change without the outside pouring some resources in there.
JS: What is the motivation of the people who actually call the shots in North Korea to hold onto the nuclear weapons?
SK: They don’t have anything else. There’s literally nothing else they can rely on. The fact they’re a nuclear power is the only reason anyone would be negotiating with them at this point. It’s their survival.
Regime change is what they fear. That’s what the whole country is built on.
JS: Even with a different kind of regime, it’s hard to argue that it would be rational for them to give up their nuclear weapons, after seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.
SK: This is a very simple equation. There is no reason for them to give up nuclear weapons. Nothing will make them give them up.
JS: I’ve always believed that North Korea would never engage in a nuclear first strike just out of self-preservation. But your description of your students did honestly give me pause. It made me think the risk of miscalculation on their part is higher than I realized.
SK: It was paradoxical. They could be very smart, yet could be completely deluded about everything. I don’t see why that would be different in the people who run the country. The ones that foreigners get to meet, like diplomats, are sophisticated and can talk to you on your level. But at the same time they also have this other side where they have really been raised to think differently, their reality is skewed. North Korea is the center of the universe, the rest of the world kind of doesn’t exist. They’ve been living this way for 70 years, in a complete cult.
My students did not know what the internet was, in 2011. Computer majors, from the best schools in Pyongyang. The system really is that brutal, for everyone.
JS: Even their powerful parents seemed to have very little ability to make any decisions involving their children. They couldn’t have their children come home, they couldn’t come out and visit.
SK: You would expect that exceptions were always being made [for children of elites] but that just wasn’t true. They couldn’t call home. There was no way of communicating with their parents at all. There are literally no exceptions made. There is no power or agency.
I also found it shocking that they had not been anywhere within their own country. You would think that of all these elite kids that at least some would have seen the famous mountains [of North Korea]. None of them had.
That absoluteness is why North Korea is the way it is.
JS: What would you recommend if you could create the North Korea policy for the U.S. and other countries?
SK: It’s a problem that no one has been able to solve.
It’s not a system that they can moderate. The Great Leader can’t be moderated. You can’t be a little bit less god. The Great Leader system has to break.
But it’s impossible to imagine. I find it to be a completely bleak problem. People have been deprived of any tools that they need, education, information, sharing tools.
[Military] intervention is not going to work because it’s a nuclear power. I guess it has to happen in pouring information into North Korea in whatever capacity.
But then the population are abused victims of a cult ideology. Even if the Great Leader is gone, another form of dictatorship will take its place.
Every path is a catastrophe. This is why even defectors, when they flee, usually turn into devout fundamentalist Christians. I’d love to offer up solutions but everything leads to a dead end.
One thing that gave me a small bit of hope is the fact that Kim Jong-un is more reckless than the previous leader [his father Kim Jong-il]. To get your uncle and brother killed within a few years of rising to power, that doesn’t really bode well for a guy who’s only there because of his family name. His own bloodline is the only thing keeping him in that position. You shouldn’t be killing your own family members, that’s self-sabotage.
JS: Looking at history, it seems to me that normally what you’d expect is that eventually the royal family will get too nuts, the grandson will be too crazy, and the military and whatever economic powers there are are going to decide, well, we don’t need this guy anymore. So we’re going to get rid of this guy and then the military will run things. But that’s seems impossible in North Korea: You must have this family in charge, the military couldn’t say, oh by the way, the country’s now being run by some general.
SK: They already built the brand, Great Leader is the most powerful brand. That’s why the assassination of [Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother and the original heir to the Kim dynasty] Kim Jong-nam was really a stupid thing to do. Basically that assassination proved that this royal bloodline can be murdered. And that leaves the room open for that possibility. Because there are other bloodline figures for them to put in his place. He’s not the only one. So to kill [Jong-nam] set the precedent that this can happen.
JS: One small thing I found particularly appalling was the buddy system with your students, where everyone had a buddy and spent all their time with their buddy and seemed like the closest of friends – and then your buddy was switched and you never spent time with your old buddy again.
SK: The buddy system is just to keep up the system of surveillance. It doesn’t matter that these are 19-year-old boys making friends. That’s how much humanity is not acknowledged or respected whatsoever. There’s a North Korean song which compares each citizen to a bullet in this great weapon for the Great Leader. And that’s the way they live.
JS: I was also struck by your description of the degeneration of language in North Korea. [Kim writes that “Each time I visited the DPRK, I was shocked anew by their bastardization of the Korean language. Curses had taken root not only in their conversation and speeches but in their written language. They were everywhere – in poems, newspapers, in official Workers’ Party speeches, even in the lyrics of songs … It was like finding the words fuck and shit in a presidential speech or on the front page of the New York Times.”]
SK: Yes, I think the language does reflect the society. Of course, the whole system is built around the risk of an impending war. So that violence has changed the Korean language. Plus these guys are thugs, Kim Jong-un and all the rest of them, that’s their taste and it’s become the taste of the country.
JS: Authoritarians universally seem to have terrible taste.
SK: It’s interesting to be analyzing North Korea in this period of time in America because there are a lot of similarities. Look at Trump’s non-stop tweeting about “fake news” and how great he is. That’s very familiar, that’s what North Korea does. It’s just endless propaganda. All these buildings with all these slogans shouting at you all the time, constantly talking about how the enemies are lying all the time.
Those catchy one liners, how many words are there in a tweet? It’s very similar to those [North Korean] slogans.
This country right now, where you’re no longer able to tell what’s true or what’s a lie, starting from the top, that’s North Korea’s biggest problem. America should really look at that, there’s a lesson.
JS: Well, I felt bad after I read your book and I feel even worse now.
SK: To be honest, I wonder if tragedies have a time limit – not to fix them, but to make them less horrifying. And I feel like it’s just too late. If you wipe out humanity to this level, and have three generations of it … when you see the humanity of North Koreans is when the horror becomes that much greater. You see how humanity can be so distorted, and manipulated, and violated.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This interview was an interesting combination of deep insight and rank stupidity.
The totally controlled cult nature of NK puts it above and beyond the 20th century totalitarianisms in how deeply it has dominated the thoughts and personal lives of its people for generations. The elites being unable to bypass the usual rules for access to their children is deeply cultic. The Kim dynasty truly are cult prophets – God-Kings in the Bronze Age sense.
At the same time, Ms. Kim being unable to grasp the basic “kill the pretenders” dynamics of dynastic politics is laughable – Game of Thrones and every series like it offers easy lessons on this daily. And comparing the modern social media PR of Trump to the 70 year long totalistic propaganda of NK is pathetic.
Well said DJohn1. It seemed she was just as interested in promoting a Liberal/hate TRUMP and Christians as she was in exposing how North Korea works. Comparing Trump to the leader of North Korea is ludicrous! What a joke.
The Intercept is 100% liberal:
“Look at Trump’s non-stop tweeting about “fake news” and how great he is. That’s very familiar, that’s what North Korea does. It’s just endless propaganda.”
Except, Fake News from CNN, NY Times, NPR, etc. is NOT propaganda – it is truth, it IS fake news.
Yes–I also found this to be a head-scratcher to have endured the Authoritarian, cult-like totalitarianism of North Korea and then to come to America and not realize that the Corporate Media/Wall Street/ Politico Establishment is the American equivalent on just a touch milder level, that is perplexing ( unless The Intercept took liberties to “paraphrase” and “reword” a few of her comments.)
“The fact they’re a nuclear power is the only reason anyone would be negotiating with them at this point.”
Not so. China is the only reason anyone would be negotiating with N. Korea. And negotiation is useless, as N. Korea would lie and not keep any agreement not to further Nuclear weapons.
I’m more concerned about that Cat 4 hurricane moving towards us then I am the Korean counties.I still remember sitting without electricity for 11 days following Hurricane Hogo in 1989 . Miserable as Hell. Indent Service will tell you.Want you Indent ?
Agreed–we lost power 7 days which was a loss of a lot of frozen meats and boring evenings once the sun set. Irma-possibly a “category six” is just getting stronger and stronger and shows no sign of veering away northward.
PS: I know many here would love to see DC washed away, but if a Hurricane of this size every directly hit the Chesapeake Bay it would make the damage of Andrew, Katrina and Harvey combined seem small. DC is below sea level ( hence the swamp references), Alexandria, Arlington, Annapolis, Baltimore and towns and cities all along the Potomac and from Virginia to Delaware would be submerged.
A direct hurricane hit in the Bay would be the kind of event that could set the chaos ball rolling, the proverbial straw that finally breaks the back of our fragile civility……..
All the more to hope.
Liberals, i.e. pampered women paid to moralize at everyone else, cannot tolerate a country that is determined not to come under their sway. Better everyone be sacrificed to fag-hag capitalism than anyone to nationalism. Feminists are the new neocons, and everyone is feeling it.
Every path is a catastrophe. This is why even defectors, when they flee, usually turn into devout fundamentalist Christians. I’d love to offer up solutions but everything leads to a dead end.
Now that is a catastrophe. Oh the humanity!!
For a long time I have believed NK to be a cult. Maybe a death cult. If we liberated NK – what the hell would these people do? – brainwashed to such an extent that they are ‘broken’ human beings, probably not much good for anything.
China maintains this deformed society. I’ve heard you can now tell Northerners from South Koreans because 70 years of Ultra Stalinist economics and Hitlerian militarism have left North Koreans a shrunken people, visibly smaller than those from the South.
While there may be no ‘good’ options, letting this regime keep on developing its nuclear capacity is the worst. Time to end this regime by any means available.
That was the same in the 80s between East German and West Germans. East German kids were smaller, weighed 20 or 30 pounds less (in a bad way) and were incredibly pale with a posture that made them look 5 years younger.
Yeah. You first. My children don’t owe a goddamn thing to those peninsular half-wits. No one in their generation signed these stupid treaties.
amen
There is no difference between Kim and Joel Olsteen.
Awe come on’ Stucky.
I think Olsteen has had more people murdered, even relatives, for getting on his bad side than Kim has.
That makes him worse.
Anon, they missed the irony, I hope.
Robert (QSLV)
Kim has nukes and an army and china. Osteen is a two bit shyster.
Liar, Kim is fatter!
Will we or won’t we ‘nuke’ N.Korea? We won’t…because we don’t have to. Nuclear weapons are the equivalent of last year’s shoes…they are obsolete; the results of which are uncontrollable contamination potential to the south and Russia and China. Our troupes (30,000) are stationed in the south along with the most densely populated city on the globe…Seoul. Trump won’t turn millions into ‘blowing cinders’ because he doesn’t want to and doesn’t have to.
Are we expected to believe that the U.S. has not advanced from the nuclear option over the past seventy-two years? We have, and the President has confirmed as much when he recently said the ‘world had not seen’ how we will retaliate. Well, the world has already seen the use and results of nuclear weapons. Was he referring to something else?
We will retaliate and my bet is soon. The retaliation will take the form of EMPs. We’ve had EMPs in our arsenal for the past thirty years plus. The Russians have had EMPs for the past sixty. North Korea can and will be literally ‘turned off’ without the loss of life and with complete accuracy. This, I believe, is what President Trump is referring to in his comment, “never seen before”.
I can already hear you screaming, “how the F would you know that?” Well, I’ve done my homework: check out…
There’s a YUGE difference in shutting down the Nork grid versus a developed nation’s. It would do very little to an already impoverished populace…and the systems of import to Un are likely hardened/Faradayed.
EMP’s won’t work on NK – they don’t have any fucking electricity.
Dutchman is correct. North vs. South Korea at night:
[img[/img]
That picture simply proves 3 things about North Koreans:
— they go to bed early
— they turn off all the lights
— they care about the Earf
South Korea is like one gigantic Motel 6 where they leave the lights on.
Neutron Bomb. No physical damage. Just dead bodies.
Could someone please explain to me why my children are on the hook for an alliance struck 64 fucking years ago? Was Jefferson not right in asserting that every 20 years we need a new Convention, hence resetting the generational clock? How selfish are the supporters of this cause? It’s not even quixotic anymore considering Russia and China would mete out serious pain on us for any rank foolishness.
The game that Trump is playing here is fairly simple:
raise hackles, tell frightened customers to buy US death tech.
This was his opening shot in the ME, lob a few cruise missiles into Syria,
then get SA to sign a huge contract for US arms.
I predict the same path for the South Koreans,
they will buy some nuclear deterrents, and the MIC will be happy.
I would also point out that the old bogey man (ISIL), created during the Obama years, has effectively been destroyed, by Trump, within the first 6 months of his Admin.
Indeed, the fact that nobody is acknowledging this, means that ISIL was a creation of team Obama.
Trump is happy to play ball against Russia and China, who are the primary trading partners with North Korea.
At the end of the day, it is always the same ultimate enemies of the empire:
Russia or China.
Without an enemy, the MIC has no goals, and would shrink in funding.
And, don’t think for one minute that the people in our own government, such as John McCain don’t salivate all over themselves secretly about the control that the Kim’s have over that country. The ONLY thing keeping us from being N Korea, is that there are enough people left here that would not tolerate this, and own guns, that they can’t do it. But watch out, the water has been heating up for decades, and at some point, we are going to boil like the frog, and not notice that WE too are now N Korea.
This house of cards will collapse long before then…just one grain of sand falling in the wrong place on this sand castle will be enough.
Maybe if we had had two terms of Hillary, but even then I think we’d have had a civil war before the guns were given up. And that’s when the intrigues would have begun. My bet would be on Russia supporting the side opposed to DC.
There is no different between Christ and Satan . Right Stucky ?
Some folks believe they were brothers.
Satan gets a bad wrap. Give him a chance in your life and he will work wonders.
Turn or burn! It is appointed once for a man to die, then the judgement. go figure. thanks
8 thumbs down! Haters!
How many confirmed kills does Satan have in the Bible?
A: About 20. Job, his wife and children, and servants. (BTW, all of it instigated and authorized by God!)
Meanwhile, da Lawd killed millions (floods, plagues, famines, etc.)
The truth hurts, doesn’t it?
I might have to write an article “Why the Horned One Is So Misunderstood”
Blessings? ?
Stucky- If you are going over to the dark side, here is a useful article about some followers of the “Horned One”. Please stay on the straight and narrow path (I am beginning to sound like BB).
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/09/05/khazarians-then-khazarians-now/
Perhaps the current politically correct thought and solution would be to create another love pledge we all can sign, and send to NK’s Kim and his people. We all could sign our names to the anti hate line, and promise that we will always be friends and loving neighbors to everyone of all races, religions, etc. for all times. My name would certainly be at the top of the list.
I guess no one has figured out that I was spoofing and two liberals gave me a thumbs up. Stucky where are you when I needed you?
I don’t help you because apparently you are in possession of a Big Dick. This makes me both jealous, and angry (because you flaunt it).
Just swing your Big Dick and knock them out.
But little Kim went to school in Switzerland with the kids of western elite. Can someone explain that.
admin: It appears your rss feed stopped working on 9/2. You may need to reboot your server.
The only solution to N. Korea is to, sadly, wipe them from the map.
This cannot be done without China’s knowledge and cooperation.
China doesn’t have a clue what to do with their “bad boy” in NK and until they figure that out we’re all up a stump as to a permanent solution.
I predict several more years of agonizing confusion before someone makes a mistake that set off the nuke’s and we’ll all be in the soup.
muck….
idiocy on parade…
We cannot annihilate N.Korea via ‘nukes’ without unacceptable destruction to S.Korea/Russia/China. So forget it. It ain’t gonna happen. Conventional weapons maybe. But they would leave a big window for N.Korea retaliation, and we have 32,000 US troops in harms way. Yet President Trump will attack and shortly. Get ready for a ‘game-changer’ and in the meantime, buy the market.
Yes, I know I’ll get hammered for the last comment but ‘f’ it, hammer away, and then watch this market rocket away. Trump will win this confrontation and in a matter of days and with minimal collateral damage.
If we gave North Korea 3.1 billon a year to just shut the fuck up, it would still do less damage to us than Israel.
Fat Boy would be a rotting carcass without his missiles; we need to shoot down every one he launches. If our technology needs an upgrade, do it because it is needed on every ship and at every base too. Help the Seoul Koreans build bomb shelters and buy automatic targeting artillery. When Fat Boy has no missile power, his ships, fighters and infrastructure could all have “accidents” and Fat Boy and NK might implode.
Americans are just like North Koreans. They are both living in a cult. Look at the war on drugs. Why is that even tolerated? What type of mass madness does it take to allow this to go on for decades as it has? Look at the diets. This American cult is literally poisoning itself to death. If you were to take all the barrels and bags of toxic chemicals that have been deliberately added to the drinking water in America in just the last year…. well its more than I can imagine. This paradigm where we ingest sooooo much poison through our food, water, and “medicine” and yet spend billions waging war against a frickin herb is flat out insane. Add to this insanity the fact that we spend billions more waging war halfway around the world to protect the poppy and it gets even more insane. Add to all that the fact that people will not even discuss or even acknowledge this reality and it gets even more insane. These people are frickin insane! North Korea might actually be a healthier place for the mind body and soul. The only thing that makes America better is that you can (to some degree) choose not to be in this cult. You still have to deal with the reality of being surrounded by these cultists and the extremely high likelihood that they will drag you down with them.
Kim: Born in South Korea. Came to US at 13. Taught English in NK for most of 2011. I think Dennis Rodman knows more.
The problem with the brainwashed NORK youth is the same as with our current crop of SJWs. Our SJW’s bubbles are largely self-imposed but just as isolating.
What to do with masses of people that absolutely close their minds to reality?
I think of the NORK situation as a “Kobayashi Maru” scenario. It is a no-win, no way to cheat and everybody dies in the end. China is now holding military drills on their border.