North Korea: A Revolution to Come

North Korea is going to have a revolution, it is just a matter of when. Revolution is what happens when people feel oppressed; look at the Haitian, American, French, Philippine, Iranian and Indian Revolutions, just to name a few examples. Oppression is one of the causes of a revolution. People don't revolt when they feel they have all the rights that they truly need. By the mere nature of North Korea's government system of a one-man dictatorship in control of a communist state, the people of North Korea are oppressed.

In North Korea, freedom of the press is severely restricted and the listening or disseminating of ideas seen possibly against the government is punishable by two years in "labor training camps" or five years of "correction labor". Likewise, government officials regularly examine citizens' homes to make sure citizens are staying obedient to the government. The government thus not only impedes on the right to speak freely, but the right to live in one own's home freely.

To make matters worse, North Korea has a series of secret political prisons that holds at least 200,000 inmates, or around .82% of the country's 24,457,492 population (America has approximately .75% of its population in jail*). The North Korean government doesn't admit it has these secret prisons and in North Korea there is no pretext of due process. If one is suspected of disloyalty, listens to unauthorized broadcasting, or merely does a job poorly they are put in these jails. Some are hauled away simply because they are related to someone who did a crime. In these jails people are: tortured, for example with a cattle prod; forced to watch the executions of relatives and other inmates; and are treated as slave labor. There is so little to eat that if someone dies, it is not seen as a bad thing "because if you bring a dead body and bury it, you would be given another bowl of food" said Jeong Kyoung-il, a former Yodok inmate. If the North Korean people found out about this, what would happen? Most likely, they would be enraged beyond indignation and rebel against their government. The better question is how would they find out?

Finding enough to eat is not just an issue inside these prisons, the entire country has frequent crop failures due not only to the weather and geography, but also by the use of collective farming and a persistent lack of tractors and fuel. For these reasons, North Korea depends on foreign humanitarian aid to keep away famine. However, North Korea over the past six years has on and off allowed and disallowed humanitarian aid and tried to select which countries could and couldn't send it aid. When a country already can't feed itself and the government won't allow humanitarian aid, the people suffer. When the women in the French Revolution couldn't feed their families, they marched on Versatile and forced the king to live in Paris and help deal with the poverty. Likewise, one of the reasons people rose up against the Iranian shah Fazlollah Zahedi in the Iranian Revolution was because a large amount of the people were poor and hungry while Zahedi spent money on fancy, luxurious parties. Not enough food, like too much oppression, is another reason people revolt against their government. If the North Korea was nothing else, it would at least be rich in oppression and lack of food.

The thing is, the minute one brick falls out of place, the fort comes tumbling down, but how does one set up the ammunition to take out the brick? A possibility would be sending a message through an unauthorized broadcast, but then there would be the issue of getting people to break the law in order to listen to it. However, since 99% of North Koreans are literate a message could conceivably be sent that way. One would need to be able to break the fear factor, considering how harshly people are punished, but it could quite possibly set off a ripple effect. If a large amount of pamphlets were anonymously sent out, the government wouldn't be able to stop everyone from reading it.


A thought for the road:
Would a revolution in North Korea even be a good thing though?


* Approximately 2.35 million Americans in 2010 with a 313,232,044 population.


Sources:

CIA World Factbook: North Korea ; America
Amnesty USA: North Korea; North Korea Report