 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris, and I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Michael Malis, author, columnist, and media personality. He is the author of many books, including Dear Reader, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Michael. And Kato Institute alum. And, yes, in turn from... Days of Yor. The Days of Yor. Dear Reader is a very unique book to say the least, to give listeners a flavor. I chose this passage. This is in Kim Jong-il's voice. By the end of upper middle school, I ended up taking honors in every subject, every school term, and year. And I won first prize in every study contest. In one typical foreign language study contest, I used so many political, economic, and cultural terms that even the teacher had to consult a dictionary while marking my paper. It gives you a general flavor of how it's written. So the first question is, why did you decide to write this book in this way? Well, I think those two passages... That passage you read, actually, two passages verbatim I copied and pasted. Why I wanted to write North... Dear Reader in the first person, it's in Kim Jong-il's voice, is for a couple reasons. First of all, Kim Jong-il was born during World War II, and he died in 2011. So as he tells his story, he is inevitably telling the entire history of North Korea. I wanted this to be a book so that when people read it, by the time they're done, they know everything they need to know to understand North Korea and the North Korean situation. And he, in a sense, is like their forest gump. Wherever anything happens there, he somehow has insinuated himself in their history. And I think it was important to put in the first person because so much of our analysis of North Korea is based on, let's say, Hitler or Stalin or Saddam Hussein or trying to look at him from an American perspective. North Korea has to be looked at on North Korean terms, as they would certainly have it, in order to understand this country because so many people in the press say, oh, they're crazy. Well, crazy is just a confession that you don't understand someone else's thinking. These people are very logical, very coherent. When you go there, as I did, and you read their literature, you see exactly why they're doing what they're doing, and very evil. So that's my big takeaway, and that's the reason I wrote in that sense. You mentioned when Trevor read the passage that that passage was copy-pasted. So where did that passage originally appear? So when I was putting together the materials for Dear Reader, I read 60, 6-0 books, and many of them were books I got from North Korea, North Korean books when I was there. So when I read through all of them and anything that had a particularly unusual syntax or an extreme claim, as you just read, it would have been in one of those many books. And the titles are all very similar. Kim Jong-il, The Great Man, Volumes 1 through 3, Kim Jong-il, The Teacher of Journalists, Kim Jong-il, Leader of Youth Movement, you know, on and on and on, as you can imagine. Did you get those in English? Oh, yes. The North Korean conceit is that everyone on earth is obsessed with North Korea, the great leader Kim Il-sung, and the Juche idea. So their books are translated into English, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, German, French, and maybe a few others. That's pretty crazy. Now, when you read these books, the way I'm thinking about it is the only analogy I can make, and that's one of the things reading this book makes you do, is it kind of makes you think about propaganda. And the only analogy I can make is George Washington and The Cherry Tree and throwing the silver dollar over the Potomac and all these stories that we grew up with in children's books. Is that a good analogy, would you say? That's a great analogy. Another example is, you know, Kim Jong-il has three children, Kim Jong-un, at least three. Kim Jong-un being the youngest of the three sons. And many North Korean never even thought of him, you know, being married or having kids. And the way to think about that is, well, we have Uncle Sam, right? And Uncle Sam must have nieces or nephews, yet no one stops to think who those nieces or nephews are and who his siblings are, right? You don't think of Uncle Sam as a real person. Obviously, Kim Jong-il is real, but him and the other leaders occupy this bizarre space between reality and kind of supernaturalism for the North Korean people. And especially because discussion of the leaders is so sacrosanct, it's not something that people even stop to think about. If someone told you that they found your book very funny, how would you react to that? Well, that was the point. When all the books about North Korea are either too dark and depressing, understandably, or they were too scholarly and intense, and I'm like, someone has to popularize this subject. It has to be the kind of book you can read in the beach and or bathroom so that you can get the poison, but you're still having the candy coating outside. Because at the end of the day, it's a very, very, and I hate that expression, sorry. It's a very important subject. It's something that people are extremely interested in, and there's a sense of helplessness towards the nation and towards the situation. So I wanted to at least make it entertaining insofar as I could. And from the response of God, I seem to have succeeded in order to get people to be able to get through it without wanting to, you know, throw themselves out a window. I mean, there's this book called Nothing to Envy by Barbara Deming, where the story she tells, I read it one day, you just want to cry. It's just devastating. People have no understanding of just how dark the North Korean situation really is. These 60 books that you mentioned reading, are these the kind of books that you said they get translated and sent all over the world, but are they? Not sent. No, no, no, that's the thing. So they're translated. And when I said that 60, I'm including all the Western books as well. Oh, okay. But when they're translated, they just sit there in the bookstore gathering dust. Okay. Yeah. But are they are the people of North Korea reading these books? Many of them, yes, but it's funny because, you know, some of the stories about the great leader Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, were that he could, you know, make a raft out of leaves and turn wood into bullets. And he can be in two places at once, things like that. And when I was reading the books, I didn't find those references. And I spoke to a North Korean refugee and she goes, the stuff that's too crazy, they know not to put in there. So then do the North Koreans, when they're reading passages like the one that Trevor quoted, do they buy it? I mean, do they, so we hear the story of these stories about the founders and there's a little bit maybe of incredulousness. Is there any, is it just straight credulity on the part of the North Koreans? Do they think he can do all these things for real? Well, it's exactly the parallel here. It's, I mean, it's, you have, how do people look at our leaders and our politicians? Are they, you know, great, amazing? And I mean, obviously we have an upper bound because we have a somewhat free press. In North Korea, they're not just reading these books, they're taught them in courses. I mean, when the great leader Kim Il-sung walked as a child from Korea to Manchuria and he fought beasts along the way, they have to memorize every stop he made on this imaginary journey of learning. So these are courses for them. It's not, you know, something that they read in their spare time necessarily, although I'm sure they do. And the level of credulity, you know, it corresponds to, you know, just like in any other country, the level of credulity. People, I met a refugee and I asked her about this and there's a famous story. And this is in my book where Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-un is in kindergarten and the teacher says one plus one is two. And he says, no, that's wrong. And she's like, what do you mean? And he goes, if I have one drop of water and I add another drop of water, I have one bigger drop there for communism. And this refugee was in class and she thought to herself, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But she knew enough to keep her mouth shut because when you get in trouble in North Korea, your whole family was in trouble. So from a very early age, you're taught to keep quiet. What kind of mindset did you put yourself in when writing this? I kept because I found myself changing to this weird mindset where I was either laughing or started to very much understand better. Again, you succeeded, I think, in your goal. But it was a sort of written version of method acting when you're just trying to figure out how he would interpret some of these these instances that you didn't actually have, maybe a direct source on. Well, that's the whole thing. I had no question what he thought about everything because Kim Jong-il in North Korea talks about things from gymnastics to, you know, magic tricks. You know, that's mentioned in the book, the Mona Lisa art politics war. There's a lot of how he thinks about everything. But yeah, in terms of crafting his voice, it was excruciatingly hard because I had to make him coherent in Western terms. I had to make him someone you could empathize with, not sympathize with, someone who you can relate to. And at the same time, this is a someone with millions, literally millions of bodies at his feet, you know, who who allowed so many people to starve during the nineties to maintain his hold on power. So there is a very much a bit of sympathy for the devil going on here. Certainly in this country, most of us don't are at least aware to some extent of these kinds of embellishments, call them of the North Korean leaders and the way that they present themselves. But and we also have a pretty decent sense that it's a dark place. But is there is there are there substantial things that we get wrong in our thinking about North Korea or the way that we approach the country? Oh, I mean, I can't even begin. I mean, this is why the book's 400 pages. And let me give a good example. Ayn Rand spoke before the House on American Activities Committee during the 1950s, and she had escaped the Soviet Union in 1926 when things were really, really bad. And of course, they only got worse. And some congressman just got up and said, well, didn't get up. He asked her, he goes, I mean, I don't understand. Don't these people go on picnics? Don't they visit their mother-in-law? And she goes, look, you don't understand. And it's almost impossible to explain it to you. And it's frankly, it's a good thing you don't understand. You can't imagine what it's like to live in a country where human life means nothing, less than nothing. And you know it. And from all day, you're living in terror, and not you're waiting for the knock on the door. You're trying to live a human life in the most inhumane conditions possible. So that's, I mean, they're not living in constant terror in the sense of constantly elevated adrenaline. But there's always a constant awareness that something bad could happen to you at any time. It is insidious. I think that I had a couple of very long conversations with Yonbi Park, who I imagine you've met before, yes. And it's interesting. She's a defector from North Korea. And it's interesting because the question that you want to ask, which is, I think America's the most common one is something like, did the people really believe this? Or did you really believe this? Or how many people are silently holding thoughts that are against them saying, oh, that's just crap kind of thing. And she said that that's the wrong way of even thinking about the mindset. Because when you're going along with the sort of standards and customs and morals so much and you ask someone, well, do you really believe that you should obey table manners when you sit at a table? I don't know. I guess I'm kind of doing it because I'm supposed to, but do I really believe that? I'm not so sure. And she also told me in a very harrowing sense that she believed that Kim Jong-il could read her mind. And that's one reason why you would not even entertain such kind of thoughts. Well, this is also kind of the whole Freudian idea that religion is something that is our conscious kind of manifested via culture. So if you, since North Koreans are always by law spying on one another and reporting on one another, it's a lot easier psychologically to believe that someone can read your mind because then you can maintain the facade with a straight face. So if anything, I would think that's a trick her brain very healthily did on her. And Yeon-mi lived in Pyongyang, which is the capital city, which is by far, I would say the most cynical, most informed about the outside world. I talked to my guide at length. And so whereas when you live in the countryside, you have no electricity, you have no real information except word of mouth. So it's going to be a very different dynamic there. So talk about going to North Korea. Just the land there, their holders, their minders all the time. You've never been? It's the new... Right under Cancun. It was my next, I mean, I actually feel bad because I would like to go, but I also feel bad that it's some sort of despicable poverty tour. I mean, not even poverty to despair tourism, to see something that is absolutely inhuman and take pictures of it makes me feel kind of dirty. If I was doing something like writing a book, maybe, but just to be like, oh, I really want to see this, it seems kind of dirty. It will screw up your head for the rest of your life. And it did it to me. And my friend went after I went at my suggestion, and I thought maybe I could go back and then I was looking at his photos and I'm like, I could never do this again. I can't tell you how much it messes with your mind for the very specific reason that every single person I met or saw there is still there. It's been five years and you think about whoever's listening, what you've been doing for the five years and they're all still there and they're all still trapped. And that is something that I can't just feel psychologically comfortable with. It's really disturbing. So that's one thing. It's not a poverty tour because they're trying to show you what's nice and the people are friendly and fun. Like it's hard to explain this, but you can have normal conversations with them. It's not, you know, like, here's an example. If you visited someone in a prison, you know, they're not, yeah, maybe the first week they're gonna be all messed up, but if you visit someone who's been in prison for a long time, you can easily imagine having a fun, normal conversation with them, right? So it's kind of like that, but then you realize this person is in prison. This person's family is in prison and they will always be in prison. So that's really the subtext that makes it so nefarious. And especially seeing the children there, it's just awful. Did they set up like a, it's a small world almost on rails kind of tour for you? They can't. That's the other myth, like, when you go to North Korea, every place has a, every wall has a crack, every floor has a stain, everywhere I went, even on the plane, there was a fly, which is like a biblical symbol of, you know, evil. You know, if you have an elevator bank with four buttons, one is gonna be mismatched. You know, at night, Pyongyang, the capital city, half of it doesn't have electricity. So, you know, you go to their central park and there's this big marble fountain. The water's not running and it's covered in mildew. So you can't escape the air of kind of decay and decadence. It's just, but, you know, they took us to a fake school and you know it's fake because when you go to any school, there's lots of noise and the only noise were the people directly in front of us. And, you know, you see the kids and they put on a little show for you and, you know, till the day I die, you know, when people ask me like, what's the worst thing about North Korea that I saw is these are the kids of the elite, right? And they're all, some of the boys are dressed up in little military uniforms. The girls are in little dresses, they're adorable. And those chestcolds, I could hear them coughing in my mind's ear right now. These are the best of the best and they can't get medicine. So imagine what it's like living in the countryside and the only reason they can't get medicine is because the government won't let them. So it's absolutely horrific. How authentic were the people that you met? You said it was easy to talk to them, but did you get much of a sense of like, their authentic views on this stuff or were they really self-managed, self-controlled pitching the regime's propaganda? No one at any time pitched the regime's propaganda even the guides other than when we went to like the DMZ. What I did, being an obnoxious New Yorker is I got in every single person's face and waved at them because I knew that reaction would be immediate and emotional and sincere. No one's that quick of an improv actor, certainly not when you have hundreds of people that you're interacting with. And the reactions were exactly what you think. The teenage girls giggled, the grandmas doded over their grandkids. You know, when I told them the grandkids are cute and the teenage boys in their tracksuit roll their eyes and look the other way. So the reaction was absolutely what you'd expect. They're not, I mean, if you visit in America, how often, well, maybe it'd be different in New York because people won't shut up about the president, but in most parts of the country, when you're touring the country, no one's gonna be running their mouth about politics and about war. Yeah, that's a good point. In terms of the North Korean worldview, which again is one of the many informative things about the book, right now we've been talking about them a lot, of course, because of Trump and all that stuff. But for most of the time, I don't think Americans spend a very much time thinking about North Korea. But it seems that North Korea spends a lot of time thinking about America, or at least it's number one enemy, the American imperialist. I mean, Japan would be up there, but I think Japan is probably seen as a puppet government of the United States. But are they a puppet of the United States? No, they're the original villains. Okay, well yeah, because they occupied them for so long, but this has been going on for a very long time. I did not know about the General Sherman incident from 1866. Which is true. Yes, so what happened in that situation? So it's everything that they said, I went and looked at Western sources to be like, all right, what are they talking about? Because again, I wanted to have everything in this book and kind of have a coherent narrative. And their claim is that, and what's funny is when you're reading these books, they'll be written in like a newspaper voice, you know, like a journalist's kind of tone. So it'll be matter of fact, an affirmative, but since by law, they have to use slurs to refer to Americans or Japanese. It'll say like, in 1945, the Yank Devils, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're like, wait a minute. It's very, or the Jap bastards, they just use that over and over. And it's very kind of weird the first time I encounter this. So according to them, the US imperialists, who are us, we have been waiting for a very long time to conquer Korea, which is one divisible nation, and use that as our beach head to conquer all of Asia. And they give several reasons why this is Korea, it has to be Korea. And they talk about how in the 1860s, this is true. We sent USS General Sherman to Korea and in Pyongyang, they killed everyone on board and sank it to the bottom of the Taedong River. So their whole point is we've been waiting since the 1860s. We tried again during the Korean War, which we started according to them. And we've just been biding our time ever since to come back and finish the job that we started in the Korean War. Can you tell us about the, kind of generally this government and its governing philosophy? Like, so the Juche, like what is that and how does that play into all this? The Juche idea, which is the governing philosophy of North Korea, and it's always called the Juche idea, not the Juche philosophy, I don't know why they're so, one translator, you know, mentioned that they always told him say Juche idea, not Juche philosophy, and he never got a clear answer as to why. Although recently I did see a reference to Juche philosophy on one of their websites. The Juche idea in one sentence means, man is the master of everything and controls everything. In practice, what it means is, what the Kim family likes is good, and what they don't like is bad. So their whole idea is that everything has to be from Koreans for Koreans. Korea was the first government on earth. Korea was the first language spoken on earth. It is the only racially pure country on earth. And this is their kind of worldview. Archeol, there's a part where you talk about that they discover that humans originated in Korea. Correct. And also, so basically there was this Tangon who was this mythical king of Korea back, you know, thousands of years BC, and they found him exactly where Kim Jong-il, his bones, exactly where Kim Jong-il said they would be, which proves that Korea was the first country, and also proves that Pyongyang was the eternal capital, not Seoul, and it would be, finding his bones would be the equivalent of us saying we found like Hercules' bones. This is what that figure represents. He was never really regarded to have been a, or King Arthur is maybe a better example. Like maybe there was someone who this myth was based on, but the idea that this is exactly who it is is not, does not cut ice. Does the regime believe all of this? Like, did Kim Jong-il believe this stuff about himself? Do they, okay. No, not at all. I guess that's encouraging, because one thing, I mean, how deceived are the upper echelons versus the lower? The reason Kim Jong-il took over, as opposed to his uncle, this was a big power struggle behind the scenes, is he made up this whole mythology about his father, the great leader Kim Il-sung. And they kind of competed with each other to see who could glorify Kim Il-sung more. Kim Jong-il did a better job of it. His uncle became ambassador, I believe, to Poland, and effectively got deported from the country, so that's two birds with one stone. So, but this was Kim Jong-il's doing. What about the view of the Korean War? You mentioned that they think we started it, but you talk about some things that, I read a book about the Korean War 10 years ago, and I was sitting here going, wait, that doesn't sound, I mean, of course, I know that you were putting it in the voice of Kim Jong-il, but I was the sing-chon massacre, for example. I was like, I heard some things about that, but yeah, so first of all, we started it correct in their view, and then we did a bunch of horrible things. There's a book in North Korea called The U.S. Imperialist Started the Korean War. I wonder what the premise of this book is, right? So that is their claim that we started it, and it's been described as a kin for refugees who learn the truth. It's been described as a kin to us finding out that FDR bombed the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Like this is so essential to their worldview that it's just mind-boggling to them to think otherwise. So yeah, there's a story of the sing-chon massacre, which is in the book where basically, the U.S. imperialist soldiers locked up a bunch of women and children and burned them alive, and you can go see where they were burned alive, and there's things scrawled on the wall that they display to this day, which obviously is very contemporary, the scrawlings. However, it is indisputably true that when you had Russia and China and North Korea in the North, and you had the U.S., the U.N., and South Korea in the South, and Korea was stuck in the middle, it was absolutely devastating to the entire country. So this very much plays into their history and to their current consciousness. The way you describe it in the book, as the U.S. imperialists were forced to abandon sing-chon, they committed one final atrocity. The troops gathered all the mothers of the village with their children. Quote, it is too happy for the families to be together, Lieutenant Harrison proclaimed. Tear the kids off at once and lock them in separately. Let the mothers die in their anxiety about their children, and let the children die while crying for their mothers. Ha, ha, ha, ha. And this is something they actually believe. So yes, I could see that they would not be very friendly to Americans. Well, would that rub off? I mean, you said everyone was friendly to you. Well, here's the story. When I was at the DMZ, I was obviously at the North side, there's a museum there, and they claim that, when they claim they won the Korean War, and we were so embarrassed that by our humiliating defeat at this tiny country, our first defeat ever, that we left behind some of our documents, and those documents are on display, right? The Americans and the U.N. had to flee in shame. And while I was at this little museum, which had no electricity, there was a Russian tour group, and there was a North Korean guy who spoke Russian, and I was born in the Soviet Union. Russian was my first language, and I chatted them up, and the Russian, middle-aged Russian dude goes, very jokingly, you apologize to this woman for what your country did to her. And I said, oh, I'm so sorry. She's like, okay, don't you ever let it happen again? So it was clear that this was all a farce, and that it's, you know, that this is just something you have to smile and nod and ape while you're doing your job, but that there's absolutely no animosity from her toward me whatsoever. At the same time, you go to the countryside, where people were hardest hit by the famine, and when they were told, you don't have food because the Americans are sanctioning us and putting on an embargo, and people are starving entire villages. Yeah, they're gonna have a different opinion about Mr. America. Did you ever feel in danger while you were there? It was safer there than here. It was safer there than here, because I was a vassal of a guest of the government, and I was bringing them US dollars, and since human life means nothing and money means something, there was no possibility anything would happen to me. But Aaron mentioned the Otto Warmbier situation. Was that surprising to you? It was surprising that he'd be that, well, this was surprising. So before I went, I did a lot of research online about people on their trips, and there was this blog post I read from years ago, I don't remember what blog, about there's a hidden floor in the museum, in the hotel that you stay at. He stayed at the same hotel as me, he might have even stayed in the same room as me because you're segregated by nationality in the hotel. And you go to this secret room, there's only one way to do it, he went there and he was trying to steal a poster or whatnot. The thing is, if you trespass at the White House, that secret service isn't gonna just wag their finger at you, it's gonna be bad. And when you are defying the North Korean government, which kills, again, millions of its own citizens in the 90s, has hundreds of thousands in concentration camps to this day, that is a very, very silly thing to do. And at the same time, they will look for any excuse to have a hostage. And as soon as things started going bad with him, they got him on that plane to the United States as quickly as possible, because when you have a hostage, you want the ransom in exchange, you don't want that dead body in your hands. This I Don't Want to Be Your Spark some very negative consequences for them, because China, who wants to be a world leader, cannot and will not defend having a college get killed while he's a tourist. So you believe the thing about the poster? I absolutely do. Because it is the secret room. That's very interesting. Secret floor, secret floor, yeah. Secret floor, yeah. There's another thing that a lot of people don't know about that I'm, again, most North Koreans I'm sure know about, which is the USS Pueblo incident. What happened in that? USS Pueblo was a ship that they captured. It is still, it's the only US ship that's not in our possession. It's still there on display in Pyongyang. You know, they were, that's the other thing. When you hear like a lot of these conservators going there, like, oh my God, the things North Korea is saying, they've never done before, this is outrageous. It's like, they captured our ship and held the entire crew captive for a year and tortured them. So I mean, these people have been doing very wicked evil things for a very long time, brazenly. And in that case, they got away with it. And they were, they used the, there's a pat, they used the Hawaii, there's all these. Oh, are you gonna, don't spoil the stories. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. The USS Pueblo was so crazy. But the truth, you know, that's what, my favorite thing about the story is like, so this was a year long process having these guys captive and there were mind games played by the Americans and the North Koreans. And what ended up happening is so bizarre and yet it's all true that you read it and you think, okay, this is just North Koreans making it up and they're not. The entire narrative is bonkers from start to finish. Well, give us a little bit of a hint. I know I want people to read the book, but I mean, the whole thing with some of the crazy things that Kim Jong-un talked about, well, you have it in your book where they're, the weirdest part to me was when Kim, someone is talking to Kim Jong-un. He says, and he's saying, we're treating them the best. We always treat everyone the best. Of course, we treat Americans, you know, just like everyone else. So we're showing the world, but they smell and they keep talking about it. So let me tell this story. So a lot of times what they'll do, this part was not true. This is the one part that wasn't true. A lot of times what North Korea will do, just like here, they will take past historic events and novelize them, right? So there's this novel about North Korea, about the Pueblo incident where it's claimed that the US imperialists who they had captured were insisting on having gay sex with each other. And we're claiming that because Kim, the government wasn't letting them do it, this was a deprivation of their human rights. And also that they smelled so badly that even like power cleaning them wasn't helping the situation. Did you visit the Pueblo? No, no, that was one of the things I didn't visit on my trip. How does Kim Jong-un compare to his father? Well, when Kim Jong-il took over, and I read this in their literature and I thought this is a joke and it was actually the truth, when Kim Jong-il took over for his father, the great leader in 1994, his campaign slogan was, do not expect any change from me. I am the same as my father, perhaps the first honest politician in history. So the very premise of Kim Jong-un taking over, he has his haircut, just like the great leader had in the 40s. The premise is this is continuity, this is going to be the same government that kept you safe from the US imperialists since the 40s. There's not going to be any change. However, there's a lot of change despite what he would like because the barriers of breaking down, refugees are talking to people back home, the government can't provide food for everyone. So these are things that are happening despite the regime's best attempts to the contrary. Now, I've heard before it described that the Juche ideology and the way... Juche idea. The Juche, sorry, idea in the way that they... By the way, this is... Do you think it might be the case that North Korean intelligent people might listen to this podcast? Do they pay attention? Zero possibility. Zero possibility, okay, I don't know. I don't know how much they pay attention to people talking about them. They do, but they are more interested in looking after their own, you know, people like beyond me would be in trouble. But since we're white, we are basically animals to them. Okay, so I hear it sometimes described that there's almost a trinity in North Korea and it's almost a religion and it's a theocracy and the idea that there's some idea that Kim Il-sung has been reincarnated or was reincarnated in Kim Jong-il and that there's some sort of continuance there even to Kim Jong-un, is that true? Well, they do have a trinity because there's the great leader Kim Il-sung who's the father, there's the dear leader Kim Jong-il who's the son. And you know how like in either the Odyssey or the Iliad or I forget which one, they always use epithets, right? So it's like eagle-eyed Athena, I believe. So Kim Jong-il's mother Kim Il-sung's wife is always referred to as anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong-suk and she's very beautiful but she's always portrayed with a gun in her hand. So it's kind of this almost seems like a caricature. So that is their official trinity and they have, here's the other thing that people in the West don't get. They have a constitution just like the Soviet Union had a constitution, but this is for display purposes only. I mean, these constitutions guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of religion, all this other nonsense. What actually governs North Korea, they have the 10 commandments of the great leader Kim Il-sung and the 10th commandment says, and I'm paraphrasing, the revolution shall be continued through the generations until the end, which means in practice, only a direct descendant of Kim Il-sung can be the leader. So maybe it's not the same as reincarnation but it certainly means that someone who is a member of the Mount Paek-2 bloodline, Mount Paek-2 is this mountain at the north of Korea, which is kind of like their Mount Zion, only someone who has that Mount Paek-2 bloodline can be the leader, which is why it was so important for Kim Jong-un to kill his older brother, because that would have been a plan B if someone took him out. Now that there's no real replacement, that strengthens his position. Now in terms of their relationship to South Korea, how do they view South Korea? They view, so when you go to North Korea, you know how in every school in America, you're gonna have a world atlas, right? In North Korea, the atlases are only of Korea and Korea is one, Korea is indivisible. When they write North and South Korea, they will always write lowercase N and lowercase S because the South is a region, not a separate country, a region under U.S. occupation. And in fact, the South recognizes this to some extent too. If you're a North Korean refugee and you step foot on South Korean soil, including the airport or some consulate, you're automatically a South Korean citizen. So they view the South as very much as their brethren, their rivals, but you know, it's kind of, it's two messages like, you know, there was a Korean person on my tour group and some of the people we met were crying, meeting him because of the horrors of national division, which is, there's something to that. They don't explain that the horrors of national division are almost exclusively due to the North not letting people leave ever. But they very much want a unified Korea. Is North Korea sustainable? Are there any cracks in this? I mean, outside of, you know, there could be outside threats and there are certainly things that the Trump administration could do. But as it's going now, is it gonna, can it keep itself propped up? There's a, I always forget whether this is Faulkner or Steinbeck, but there's a quote that goes, how did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. So this is not sustainable. And we were already seeing major cracks at the very least, which if you're taught in school that the government is going to provide food for you and the government is not providing food for you. Listen, I can tell you all day long, great leader Kim Ho-sung is the most wonderful human being who ever walked the face of the earth. If I can't feed my kids, that's secondary. If I have, if I can't be warm in the winter, if I can't have electricity, you know, all this other stuff, at some point it becomes just simple biology and it kind of an animal level of subsistence that's gonna come first before ideology. So this is a major deal that now you have like kind of the black market being a mechanisms capitalism, the toxic yellow winds of capitalism as they call it has in many ways taken the place of the government. The government knew this is going to be a major threat to their control. And at the same time, now they're like a bigger threat to their control is, you know, mass starvation. What sort of information, I know it's hard to get information out of North Korea but we're seeing a lot more books recently, more defectors, it seems like there's more defectors. Do we have any ability to assess whether or not the black market for example is getting bigger because that would seem to be. Oh, it's getting much, much bigger. And in fact, it's kind of like, what happens in these towns is the cop will find you but effectively that's a bribe. So it's kind of like the mafia here where you have, you know, let's say you had a mafia of a neighborhood, right? And you have to pay that mafia don protection money. He will keep your neighborhood safe and your business won't be burnt down. You know, it'll be allowed to continue. So that's what's happening on a local level. And that's a very, very healthy thing because the more you have cynicism by the population toward the government. That's a very necessary first step for this facade to collapse. Now in terms of our current relations, I even mean before Trump going back to 9-11, you write as Kim Jong-il, quote, it's difficult for me to convey how much Bush's axis of evil speech poisoned relations between the DPRK and the United States. It was apparent to commentators around the world that this axis of evil was a kill list, nothing more, nothing less. We three were the nations that President Bush and his team of fascists were seeking to invade. Is it the case that 9-11 created and the axis of evil created a sort of irreparable rift if there ever was a togetherness? Was that the beginning of a rift that continues this day? Oh, well, remember immediately before the Bush presidency, Madeleine Albright came to North Korea, raised the glass and this was going to be kind of a first step toward normalizing diplomatic relations, right? Then President Bush comes in and the neocons and he was very clear that, and understandably to some extent that something had to change and this regime was not something that could be allowed to exist in the face of the earth. So his policy and ideology was extremely different from Clinton, neither of them obviously have worked because the North Korean government is still there and as oppressive as ever. But of course, this was a huge amount of souring between the American and North Koreans. However, towards the end of his presidency, President Bush removed them from the state's sponsored terrorism list. So they got something out of that as well. Can you give us some insight into what's going on now? I mean, on the kind of the psychology of the Northern leadership with the constant tests? Oh yeah, so look at it, I'm a country that sides of Pennsylvania with 25 million people and I have against me the US imperialists who are barking mad every single day. I have China starting to back away a little bit. I have the UN that unanimously united against me. That makes me look pretty awesome, huh? So this is their whole world to you that like, look, we're a tiny little country and everyone is trying to break us and we're standing up to them and Kim Jong-un is on TV laughing. Every day he's laughing. So this is, it's, you know, it makes perfect sense on their perspective that they get to defy the rest of the world. What a great demonstration to them of their strength. Do you think that they recognize the potential risks in this? Like at some point there's some line that they might cross that would then bring the hammer down on them? They've been preparing for that line since birth. I don't know what that line is. However, they do know correctly. Once they do have nukes to, you know, and deliverable nukes, that line gets, I mean, then who knows what happens? So their whole philosophy, Kim Jong-il when he took over for the great leader Kim Il-sung, he modified it into what he called the sun gun idea, which means military first, right? Which means that the military is the basis for a prosperous country. So their whole worldview is based on the idea that it is only through militarization that we are able to survive and we'll be able to continue to survive. And it's true. If they didn't have a strong military, this would not have been going on for this long. Now, right before we started recording actually, I got an alert on my phone that Trump announced more sanctions and the UN announced more sanctions against North Korea. This seems to be the only weapon we have in our arsenal. Well, we actually have actual weapons in our arsenal. Yeah, we actually have that, but the ones that we're currently using, what is, are sanctions useful? Do they have a good idea? Do they do anything? What actually, what the more interesting thing I've seen happen in the last 48 hours was all these Chinese banks are saying they're not gonna do business with North Korea. So that is a little bit of the squeeze. However, Kim Jong-un has, you know, has an enormous amount of gasoline in store. He's been plotting this since April anticipating sanctions. And when they had their little press release about this latest bomb, they said it was all made with homegrown ingredients and very few people picked up on what that meant because they thought, oh, this is typical jujube posturing. No, what that means is even if you completely hermetically seal us up from the rest of the world, we're still gonna be able to continue with this weapons program. So what it comes down to is I'm not a hostage negotiator. You guys aren't either. If you have a guy with a gun and, you know, 25 million hostages, what is it gonna take for you him to give up his gun? I mean, it's going to take a lot. And especially in a no trust scenario. Well, in some of those situations, we used to give some dictators, you know, resorts in the Pacific Island somewhere just to try and get them to leave. But I don't think that there's any way that any of the Kim family would want to leave. Not only wouldn't they, when they kidnapped that American reporter, Ling, ex-president Clinton got on a plane and sat down in Pyongyang with Lian, with Podesta and kissed Kim Jong-il's ring there. So he even, they boast about it. They go, why do we need to leave? I can make everyone come here. The Japanese prime minister went there. All sorts of other dignitaries go to North Korea. So it's absolutely great for them. The South Korean president as well. So then are you worried about the current situation? I mean, it's a night, I'm not worried in terms of war per se. I'm worried in the sense that you have 25 million slaves who are living under depraved conditions and have been for decades. I mean, that's where my priority is. Do you think then that there's, I mean, you said that there are cracks are starting to appear. Do you think that a, I guess, slave revolt is impossible? A slave revolt is impossible because North Korea has once a week, what they call sessions on your organizational life or something of that effect. And what that means is everyone in North Korea slotted into a group, whether your school, your neighborhood, it would be the Kato Institute. Once a week, you all have to get together and get up and say, this is what I saw Trevor doing wrong and Trevor has to get up and say, this is what I did wrong this week. So everyone is always spying on each other at all times by law and reporting on each other to everyone else by law. So the idea that a bunch of people can get together and conspire, certainly on a level to overthrow the government, Pyongyang is the architecture, it's like concentric circles. So you're not even allowed to go into central Pyongyang unless you're very high up in the government. So the idea that you could have some kind of Versailles situation or something is absolutely very, very implausible. Do you think there's very little, it sounds from putting all this together that in terms of them striking first, I mean, they want to have Korea, I don't think they have imperialist ambitions. They don't want to take over, I mean, maybe Japan. They want to take over the South. Yeah, if they got all of Korea, if they just had the entire peninsula, I mean, so that's, you know, that would be bad, of course, but in terms of them attacking first, it doesn't seem like something that they would do. They just want to have enough strength to not be attacked, it seems. According to them, and they say this explicitly, we can't, this is in their words, in their books, they're very open about their stuff. They go, we cannot win a war with the United States. It is like ants and an elephant where the ants can kill the elephant, but they can move it along the direction that the ants want. So they know, and not only do they know, this isn't some theory, they can look at the Korean War and look what that happened to North and South Korea and how bad that was for them. And now we have even more weaponry, we would have even more backup. So they know exactly what this would mean. It would be completely devastating for them. And in fact, many of the members of the administration have said this publicly, they know perfectly well what happens to them if we got engaged in war. It would be crazy for them to strike first. And for everyone who says they're crazy, if they're so crazy, how have they outlasted everybody else except for Cuba? So then are we just stuck? Is there anything that we can do, any hope we can have for alleviating the suffering of these 25 million slaves? I have no idea. And anyone who says they have an answer is lying, in my opinion. All I knew how to do is write a book, tell the story, explain what's going on, and leave it to better and smarter minds to figure out a way out, because I mean, these people are very smart and they've dug their heels in for 60 years and they've been digging them further and further ever since. And almost literally, North Korea has the most subterranean infrastructure of any country on earth. The Metro in Pyongyang is the deepest in the world because it also doubles as a bomb shelter. So these people have been anticipating an invasion for a very long time. And the children have taught this as well. They're taught to spy for, they're taught to look out for U.S. imperialist spies, you know, under their desks and things like that. It's, they've been training the people very well. And unfortunately, it also seems to be the case that if we could, you know, someone had written a piece a while back that the best way to fix North Korea was to, would be to drop a bunch of iPhones over the entire country just so people could interact with the rest of the world. That seems a little bit optimistic and not understanding how total the control is. Also, they don't have, they don't have power. You have your weekly Kato meeting and Trevor, you saw David Bowes get an iPhone from the American imperialists. David, you're going to report on him. And if you don't report, you're in trouble. And then David and his family are taken to the camps, if not executed. It's as simple as that. So if we ever, if this ever collapses in some way, and it really is surreal, your book, which I highly recommend. I've read a lot of these depressing books. As you mentioned, I've read Joan Meade's book. Nothing to envy, those aren't depressing, but they didn't seem to make you get it in the way that your book does. But the other sad thing is that if this ever goes away, this thing that we've never seen anything like in the history of the world, I would say. Correct. I don't know, after that, let's just say the government went away. The people of North Korea are not very much equipped to just merge with South Korea and live their lives in normal. They have been fundamentally altered in a very profound way. I mean, but the fact is you just spoke about Joan Meade and you could have a conversation with her many times and it was a perfectly normal conversation. So yes, there would be a transition period, but it would hardly be, I mean, these people, all they need to do is to be able to work, provide food for their families and have a passport information the outside world. I mean, that's all that's really necessary. They don't have to have some kind of New York style subway system or Facebook accounts immediately. It would be expensive and difficult in the short term. But remember, South Korea has the highest at one point recently, had the highest GDP per capita of all of Asia. So these are smart, entrepreneurial, hardworking people and you have to be in the North because the ones who are loyal to the regime were the first ones to die during the famine as they kept waiting for the food that the government promised would come. And especially now that they're all becoming hustlers in effect to the black market, they'd be able to navigate a liberalized country pretty quick. So what should people realize when they hear commentators talking about North Korea, what they're often getting wrong? The thing that they get wrong the most in my opinion is I saw one article that says, you know, we should reign hellfire North Korea. If you are someone who is advocating blithely, killing 25 million people who are slaves and who are hostages, you need to rethink your priorities. And just because someone calls you a name does not give you the right legally or morally to go in and kill everyone that they know. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.