Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Disturbing video snuck out of North Korea

Frequent One Free Korea commenter and occasional Monster Island visitor Theresa sent me a link to this The Shanghaiist post which contained the following video (put together by the guerrilla journalists at Rimjin-gang) snuck out of North Korea:



Seeing the emaciated and dazed twenty-three-year-old woman is just heart-wrenching. But the pugnacious youngish ajumma in the next scene gives hope that there are more like her who are willing to stand up to authority (and that there are authorities like the guy in the picture who don't automatically fight back when challenged).

I direct you to One Free Korea, where Joshua also put up a post on this video, with some very good commentary. A sample:
These are the expendable people of North Korea, the ones who don’t have a place in the propaganda parades, the ones who don’t get to eat the food aid that the regime either refuses or steals from them. I’d be surprised if that woman were still alive today.

One day, these people are going to hold their oppressors accountable. The more I see, the more convinced I become that we should teach them how, and then arm them. North Korea needs a revolution, and no peaceful revolution can possibly succeed in such a place. When governments become destroyers of humanity, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them. I see no other way.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if that were sooner rather than later?

2 comments:

  1. you're right. i didn't think about the order of the footage. first, despair, but then...hope.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This in itself could explain the North's current hand that's being played out. More to control the people at home and get more money/food/fertilizer than anything else I've seen or heard.

    ReplyDelete

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