Yeonmi Park, a North Korean woman who fled to China at age 15 to escape the state, has spoken out about the West's treatment of the image of Kim Jong-un. Park, who now resides in South Korea, hopes to remind people that North Korea is not a joke to those who live there and that Kim Jong-un is a representation of the horrors occurring in the nation.
North Korea is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers' Party with extravagant celebrations in Pyongyang; Kim Jong-un recently said that North Korea is powerful and can pose a great threat to the United States, a notion that many Westerners found laughable. As Park says, although it is easy to disregard North Korea due to their relatively ineffectual role in international relations, it is one of the most egregious examples of human rights violations in the world today. Park recalls many times in her childhood when her family was forced to eat bugs to stay alive when there was no more food, and one of her earliest memories is watching her mother be raped in front of her. The citizens of North Korea live in fear and poverty and do not have the luxury of viewing Kim Jong-un in the mocking way that the rest of the world has come to.
North Korea is a good example of some of the concepts we have been talking about in class recently, especially those relating to power and globalization. Unfortunately, North Korea's alliances with powerful states makes it very hard to intervene in any way on behalf of its citizens, and its refusal to participate in global economics and politics leaves the state virtually incapable of change on the inside.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/11/kim-jong-un-north-korea-yeonmi-park
Samantha Johnson
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