A Glimpse into North Korea

North Korea is not a country I know much about, nor, I suppose, did I have much interest in it, until a friend at church lent us a book she had read. It is Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick, an American journalist, published in 2010. It is a fascinating and terrifying insight into this most secretive and oppressed of countries and, being very well written, is a rattling good read of the 'can't put down' variety.

'Nothing to Envy' is one of the slogans of the opinion formers of the Democratic Republic of North Korea, a chant the people are to repeat as part of their indoctrination. A good ideal in itself, one a Christian could identify with, in the mouths of North Koreans it is bitterly ironic.

Demick was a journalist in Seoul and tells her story through the lives of six defectors from the North in the nineties and noughties: a woman doctor, a young tearaway, a young woman and her student boyfriend, a housewife and a rebellious daughter. Their lives and their families' are brought to life, the author having checked and confirmed her facts as far as possible to ensure authenticity. The result is a harrowing account of struggle and then starvation and then widespread death during the famine years of the last two decades, as the crazy communist delusions of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il (and now Kim Jong-Un) ground the people into the dust.

What strikes one most is how so many remained loyal to the regime, even when things were evidently falling apart. But then most knew nothing else, they believed the propaganda about the evil world of capitalism around them (and 'against' them), and even if they wanted to do something they could not. Only fairly late in the book are we introduced to the idea of defection into China and then to South Korea. One of the strengths of the book is that it does not pretend that once in the south, all was well. These defectors often struggled to adjust, and struggled with the guilt of having left family and loved ones behind.

Here is a country where people hardly know how to use a phone, and communication even within the country let alone with the outside world is not encouraged by the tyrants who rule them. Fiction could not be stranger - it is 1984 and Animal Farm brought to life.

From a Christian perspective (and of course it is a crime punishable by death to own a Bible in North Korea), it is intriguing to see how religious motifs are prominent in the ideology of the regime - devotion amounting to worship of the 'Father' (Kim Il Sung) and a chanting of propaganda in the way we might learn Scripture verses - though hopefully not as mindlessly.

'...having exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man...' (Rom 1:23).

And how cruel these other gods are...

Moreover, how Revelation 13 and the two beasts come to life when you see a religiously totalitarian country like North Korea in operation.