North Koreans: What They Think and How They Think - By Junha Cho

North Koreans: What They Think and How They Think

        The love and devotion North Koreans have for their country and leader are obviously a product of thorough brainwashing, or so people think. Most people think that North Koreans are mindless zombies with a mass-produced instinct to praise their country (instead of biting people). They also think that this is a result of years of ideology indoctrination which forcefully made North Koreans believe their country as an ideal one and all outside forces as evil; and isolation from the outside world along with severe surveillance, which exterminated all other thoughts but those that are taught in the indoctrination.

        However, I would like to ask: has anyone bothered to care just why North Koreans think the things they think in the way they do? Gaining an understanding of their perspective is indeed crucial in knowing and understanding North Koreans, even though one would not agree with it. Most people think they are completely brainwashed and cannot be rehabilitated. But no matter how exhaustive the North Korean government is, North Koreans are human beings capable of being rational. In order to persuade, manipulate, or even brainwash them so thoroughly, some sort of logic to support their ideas are definitely needed. So what is their logic?

        First, about North Korea’s poverty. We non-North Koreans tend to conclude that since North Korea is at extreme poverty now, it must have been destitute for forever. However, only two decades have passed since South Korea's economy surpassed that of the North. Before 1991, North Korea was arguably a well-off country where most people did not have trouble in being fed. But after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, a great famine called "the Arduous March" that occurred from 1994 and 1998 to make matters worse. A considerable number of people were wiped out due to the famine. Nevertheless, North Korea had a period of economic stability for about 40 years, giving North Koreans the "good old times" to reflect on and mitigate their dissatisfaction towards their current situation. Such "good old times" inevitably leads to how North Koreans view Kim Il-sung, their former leader.

North Korea was left destitute like South Korea after the Korean War had ended. Many had died or were injured in war, the basic infrastructure was destroyed and the lands were devastated. People were as impoverished as can be. But thanks to their great leader Kim Il-Sung, they became a fairly wealthy country, and definitely a wealthier one than South Korea, in a considerably short period of time. Although such economical development was due to the aid of China and the Soviet Union, the North Koreans still accredit Kim Il-sung to earning the aids. In addition, since North Korea offers free education to its people, the illiteracy rate of North Korea is tallied to be 0%. Although Kim Il-Sung had done many wrong things (perhaps even more than good ones), I would call that an noteworthy achievement. And even if Kim was not such an able leader, the sentiments and longings for such time of relative prosperity must have made many people have positive feelings toward him. The respect and love the North Koreans pay to Kim is not entirely mindless or forced. And another fact: South Koreans had to pay boundless respect to their presidents as well, at least until the 1980s. They had portraits of their president at school and at home, and saluted to it just as North Koreans do. When milk was supplied at school, the teacher would explain that his Excellency, the president, had generously done them a kindness, giving them milk for their health. People feel the North Koreans' blind respect to their leaders to be very distant and bizarre, but we overlook the fact that many people of many countries in the past and today have done or do so as well.

             The hostility North Koreans have towards South Korea or the U.S. is also another things many people consider eerie or mindless, but we must know that the North Koreans still consider themselves engaged in war. This is true to a certain extent, for the treaty signed between the two Koreas was a cease-fire agreement, not an agreement of a cessation of the war. The North Koreans fear that the U.S. will invade them, which is also understandable in part seeing that the U.S. actually had a war with Vietnam and Iraq after they fought North Korea in the Korean War. Such fear instilled by the government is a rational reason for the scared people to develop nuclear weapons, whether it disrupts world peace or not. Besides, the North Koreans will think, the U.S. has countless numbers of deadly weapons, who are they to forbid us to guard ourselves?

             Until now, I have put myself in a North Koreans’ shoes and tried to reason their perspective and opinion. Although it is understandable that they have such thoughts, the thoughts are obviously unreasonable. North Korea is abjectly poor now – six million people, out of a population of 24 million, are “urgently required international foodassistance to avoid famine.” In such dire situations, developing nuclear weapons should not be the government’s top priority over its people. The belligerent attitude it is showing to the international community is in no means helping. Sanctions became tougher, and countries who sent North Korea food stopped doing so. The most serious problem is, in my opinion, that there is no freedom of speech in the country. Everybody must think and recite the same ideology, with the individual obliterated without even a protest, since the government uses terror and violence to control what thoughts its people can have and cannot. The North Korean government today is exactly like the one Hannah Arendt had mentioned in her book The Origin of Totalitarianism:”Totalitarian government (…) destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space[of freedom].”