 Thank you very much Hans that for that introduction by the way I have this Turkish brand energy drink inside of me So I'm kind of tweaking a little bit between that and the jet lag and my normal New York way of talking I hope I don't speak too quickly or have the concept of how quickly I am speaking I'm also the author of Dear Reader the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il and today I'll be speaking as quickly as I can about North Korea because we have a lot to cover When I first started this project the thing I wanted to change was how North Korea is regarded so often as a bit of a carnival And for the people in this room who understand totalitarian regimes they realize perfectly well that the carnival atmosphere is exactly the last thing you're thinking of You're thinking of you know atrocity death and constant oppression I'm Rand once wrote that I'm gonna paraphrase it because I always get it incorrect errors of this magnitude I never made innocently and it has been a very long decades long process for the Kim regime to Turn North Korea into the worst country on earth by several objective criteria. This was not done accidentally This was done very intentionally And carefully and they've dug themselves into a corner very well that will take a lot of work to extricate from so As many of you know North Korea has the world's worst record when it comes to the press There were a couple years where Eritrea kind of caught up with them But now they've regained that first prize and as a result of this for many years the North Korean population was unaware of History because there was no information allowed from the outside world by law So let me explain a little bit of North Korean history and what they're taught as North Korean history Briefly, you know North Korea Korea was conquered by Japan before in the late 1800s early 1900s The Japanese built infrastructure in their colony infrastructure that's used to this day But according to and these were the people who teamed up with Hitler Let's not forget so the Japanese of the early 1900s are not the Japanese of today Although according to North Korea that certainly is not true because as they put it the Sons of Samurai do not easily give up their dreams of world domination According to them, you know, there were every so often there were uprisings and rebellions But according to North Korean mythology, but for a leader the masses without a leader. There's no point So you need to have a leader to have a revolution They're much more explicit about this than textbook Marxists and people from other Countries and that leader of course was the man that they called the great leader right here Kim Il-sung According to North Korean propaganda Korea and they always refer to it as Korea so north and south are lowercase n and lowercase s Korea was the first government on earth Korean was the first language spoken on earth. Korea's worst civilization originated and they Recently found bones that they claimed that that proved this advanced we false and Korea is the for only country on earth That is racially homogenous This is something they say look, we're the only ones Maintaining racial purity every other country is some sort of admixture whether to conquer us conquest or intermarriage And this is a big criticism they have of South Korea that they're create keeping the Korean racial bloodline pure Whereas South Korea is depending on the propaganda of the year US occupied territory that's being used to give people AIDS and experiment on so and so forth Come World War one, of course The Japanese, you know ran Korea they tried to eliminate Korean as a spoken language They encouraged the Korean populace to take Japanese names so on and so forth with World War one, obviously Japanese were defeated But according to North Koreans, it wasn't the Americans who defeated the Japanese It was Kim Il-sung and his guerrilla army. They don't refer to it as World War two World War two They refer to it as the Pacific War and this was his great accomplishment that this You know man with his rag tag bad Band of comrades got to drive out the evil Japanese and liberate Korea for you know after decades of Evil oppression by law and it's very funny when I was doing research for my book They will by law. They have to use slurs when they refer to the Japanese or to Americans So you read a you know history and I'll talk about oh in 1932 the wicked Jap devils Blah blah blah blah and it's very very jarring you know to read this because otherwise the tone is perfectly You know erudite and in fact I was on Fox once and I referred to how they talk about the Jap bastards And I got bleeped and was never asked back to that show even though I was just quoting from the literature After World War two as we know one of the things that they complain about with some fairness is that Korea was not a Combatant in World War two and the only two nations who were severed in half were Germany and Korea So what what happened is you know Russia had their field of influence the United States have their field of influence the United States Wanted Seoul the capital of Korea and basically they just drew a line at 30th parallel directly north of Seoul the Americans got the southern half the The Russians got the northern half and again Korea's like look We were indivisible for millennia and now Korea is rent in two for reasons that are completely foreign to us Come the US installed and as we do to this day We installed a strongman who would be partial to our interest in the south named Sigmund Ri who was not particularly loved or a member of the South Korean population again according to the North Korean propaganda It was not sold but Pyongyang, which was the historical capital of North Korean Pyongyang became the capital the USSR installed Kim Il-sung who was not a particularly good Korean speaker and had we did not have much cachet in The Korean population at all he declared himself and his government the government of all the Korean Peninsula Sigmund Ri declared government the government of all Korean Peninsula and now you had dueling government over one nation and Things came to a head with the when Sigmund Kim Il-sung got permission from Stalin to launch the Korean War However According to their propaganda and according to a book that is published in North Korea the US imperialist started the Korean War and It's been described as akin to finding out that FDR hit the Japanese at Pearl Harbor when refugees learned that in fact it was Kim Il-sung Who launched the Korean War now the Korean War as I'm sure most these people in this room know was a horribly brutal exercise you had the North With Russia in their back and and later the Russians and the Chinese and the South you had South Koreans with the US and the UN The the war went back, you know, then at one point the North with their first invasion had 95% of the Korean populate Peninsula under their control then we came back then things eventually came to a stalemate But as a consequence of this stalemate much of the Korean Peninsula saw death and destruction an enormous scale This is very much still a part of their national Mythology because their argument is the US imperialist. That's me Have been waiting to make Korea a beach head for their plan for world domination since at least the 1860s And in fact in the 1860s the US was the first Western country to visit Korea we sent USS General Sherman there and the Koreans which were always been very xenophobic Killed everyone on board the USS General Sherman and sunk it to the bottom of the Taedong River That still runs through Pyongyang to this day that part is true The fact that the people who do this were the direct ancestors of the great leader Kim Il-sung that part's not really true But they do very much want to have this sort of lineage and and this sort of bloodline is very very key to their thinking With the end of the Korean War and the stalemate as everyone I'm sure knows There was an armistice Steins technically the north and the south are still at war With the death of Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev in in 56 Khrushchev gave his secret speech where he denounced Stalinism and the cult of personality and one by one all the nations in the second world in the Soviet sphere Followed suit, but for North Korea. So Kim Il-sung thought this was absolutely the wrong way to go What he did is he left he passed the law and this is only discovered, you know In the last let's say 20 years He passed the law that if anyone was visiting any embassy like they had to kind of sign in somewhere he left the country and While he left he figured out who was talking to the foreigners and then they had of this big plenium plenum for the for the party and He sat his allies next to People he were suspicious of so when they started to get up and try to denounce some sort of personality cult The others literally got up and out shouted them and very quickly though Those who would have been in the middle followed suit because they could see which way the wind was blowing The people who were somewhat distilled Kim Il-sung were sent to the countryside not necessarily always the concentration camp Sometimes they were just sent to be farmers which they'll quite a punishment if you come from the ruling elite now you have to be a dirt farmer for the rest of your life and Very very quickly. He started to increase his control over the whole country He made it illegal to kind of study abroad banned foreign publications Even things like marks were banned because now we don't we don't need marks. We have the great leader Kim Il-sung He closed the borders and and basically The term herma kingdom is often used vis-a-vis North Korea It's you it's he was basically trying to hermetically seal the nation as much as Possible and he did a very very good job of it And he was also inspiring Chao Chescu from Romania who was widely regarded as the worst of the communist dictators went to North Korea I was like, hey and Befriend Kim Il-sung was like I like what this guy's doing and he followed suit in many many ways in Romania Which much to the detriment of course to the North Korean excuse me to the Romanian population So very quickly you had the concentration camps. You had you know typical communist control is very it's described as Stalinist But it went into another even darker direction Because things like under Stalin we had the show trials, right? You there was some pretense of law that does not really exist in North Korea to this day The great leader Kim Il-sung said class enemies must be exterminated to three generations So what that means stay in North Korea if someone commits a crime three generations of your family are punished for it This is a very effective method of social control and it's not like there's a trial There's a knock at the door the whole family is you know Exiled to the countryside or to the concentration camps and you don't know who got you sent there So, you know these camps that to this day have 100 to 300,000 people. You can see the camps on Google Earth You're sent. You don't know who the the one who sent you there. You don't know your crime is and bizarrely These camps are not always a death sentence because sometimes families are sent for a finite period of time They basically have to sign a nondisclosure agreement and then after a certain amount of time after they've worked there Sins away. They're allowed back to the North Korean population in the 60s Kim Il-sung's son Kim Jong-il that later who became known very famous is a dear leader He was head of the propaganda and agitation department and the goal of the propaganda agitation department Of course is to teach the North Koreans the correct way of looking at life and history and he and his uncle competed for the successorship which is completely against of course Marcus ideology and He's decided that you know all movies have to be about the great leader Kim Il-sung's exploits and all books have to be about him And he has to be at the the revolution and the monotony of this kind of literature and Cinema is I'm sure not lost in people in this room, but it has to be what they called the Juche idea This is Kim great leader Kim Il-sung's revolutionary philosophy. The Juche idea means You know by us and for us, you know, it has to be from Koreans and for Koreans That's what the theory is in practice. It just means that which I like So there is an octet triumphant in Pyongyang, which looks exactly like the one in Paris But it's a foot. It's a meter taller and therefore better But it's not at all inspired the one in Paris. It's actually inspired by medieval Korean gate And they have the tower Juche idea, which looks exactly like the Washington Monument with the flame on top But it wasn't inspired by all it was actually inspired by some medieval Korean You know, what have you so this is their claim that anything in this country has to be from this country Which to this day leads the horrible consequences because then you're not gonna have much medicine You're not gonna have you know prophylactics or the very things that are kind of often counter Intuitive so the two of them Kim Jong-il and his uncle had this big rivalry to see who could glorify The great leader Kim Il-sung even even more they built a gigantic statue for him in Pyongyang Which is I think like six stories. It's something insane everyone who goes to visit you have to go there You have to bow before it. It was played in gold There's this big idea that the Chinese and the North Koreans agree on everything and the Chinese said to them You know, this was in the early 70s. We're communists Maybe a giant gold plated icon is not really what we're about and they said correct. So they changed it to bronze Other things that that Kim Jong-il implemented is why I have this shirt Everyone by law North Korea has to wear a badge of one of the two leaders whenever they leave the home even the children When you're in the airport in Beijing and you see the stewardesses and the people work in the them It's a very surreal moment Everyone by law in their house has one wall with just the photos of the two leaders and the glass is at an Angle that's slanted and you have to keep it dusted and they come in and inspect it every so often So there's this extreme sense of religious iconography if you read their press. There'll be stories which is far beyond things even for fundamental Christians. There are these stories where There's a fire in your house and someone saves the pictures on the wall But they themselves die in the process and this is regardless heroic I can't think of anyone from any religion being like well, there's a Bible, but my house is on fire You know, there any Christian would say leave the Bible just go and save yourself. So it's it's very very weird In that regard this is the only country where you can't really use the stamps Because the stamps have the leaders and you can't kind of have anything marked on them So it's it's a unique in that sense for Stamp collecting other things that they did they borrowed from the Japanese excuse me the Chinese there The idea of struggle sections although they call them the sessions on revolutionary life or criticism and self criticism So by law everyone in North Korea once a week has to get together with their group, whatever it is their classroom or their Neighborhood or something like that and it would be like this and I would have to get up and say what I did wrong that week And then I have to point out what I saw other people doing wrong So I saw Hans being late for class and he cheated on his homework and then Hans would say well You know this now they collaborate so Hans would be like hey say I was late and you'll say okay I stole a pencil okay good. We got it because you have to have something to say So you have an entire nation of people who are publicly spying on each other and declaring their spying So the idea that people are going to collude and have some sort of revolution has been rendered pretty much utterly impossible with and Let me tell some highlights of North Korean history in 1968. They captured USS Pueblo with the crew that was on board They kept the men you know fairly well at first and then they were taking a photo of them for Time magazine and the men sat and took for the pictures with their middle finger outstretched And they asked the North Koreans asked them. What does that middle finger mean? They said oh, it's a Hawaiian good luck charm And then they wrote a letter, you know that saying they were treating well and they said we P A E N P on it's pronounced in English So it's like we P on Kim Il Sung we P on North Korea It looks fine reading and if you're dictionary when the North Koreans figured out the trick the men were subject to the most Unbelievable torture imaginable so back and forth the argument came at 68 between The North Koreans say admit you're spying on us and apologize the Americans refused to do this They said admit you're spying on us and apologize the Americans used to do this and When I was doing the research for the book so many of the stories that I'd read Seemed so bizarre and then I did the homework. I'm like no it's even crazier than you think so then some American genius And I'm not being sarcastic had the idea goes. Hey, what if We apologize in writing But as we're signing the document we say the documents a lie and the North Koreans go. Yeah, that's fine So literally at the ceremony to free the Americans in 1968 the Americans said You know this statement is that variants with the facts and anything that is that variants with the facts is not true I only say this to free our soldiers and he signed it the guys were sent home and the Pyongyang The Pueblo and that letter are still in display in North Korea It's the only American ship that is not under American control and it's supposedly moored Exactly where the USS General Sherman was shot down in was burned to the ground in the 18 60s in the middle in the late 70s There were there's the DMZ which famously divides the two Koreas. I despite being called the demilitarized zone is the most heavily militarized border on earth and there was this big tree and The Americans came to chop it down because it was blocking their view of North Korea They didn't ask for permission the North Koreans took the axe and chopped up the American soldiers that bloody axe is still on display In North Korea I saw with my own eyes and the Americans with typical American Americanism launched Operation Paul Bunyan after the legendary Lumberjack and they brought all these ships and helicopters and they didn't they they took that tree and they reduced it to a stump Not entirely so that the North Koreans can see the force of the American arms In the early 80s Kim Jong-il was officially declared as the successor to the great leader Kim Il-sung which Through the communist world into a tailspin the idea of some kind of hereditary Successorship was just complete anathema to them and what I found which was fascinating is every criticism of North Korea North Korea has a response to Sometimes those responses are horrific and in a very darkly humorous way For example when the UN recently attacked them for their concentration camps and human rights abuses their literal responses We don't use the term concentration camps. So therefore we don't have any And in the same way that they have Juche architecture and Juche sports They say well what our definition of human rights is national sovereignty So when you criticize our nation you're violating our human rights Now how are you going to respond to a country that does not negotiate in good faith? That's the question that the world's been grappling with for many decades And the question was how are you going to have someone hand over the leadership to their son? Well, their argument goes look Stalin gave way to Khrushchev and he ruined the whole revolution So only someone who is a as much of a successor as the predecessor can carry the revolution through to the generations until the very end In the 80s Seoul with you know North Korea and South Korea were still not member states of the UN China was blocking South Korea being allowed into the UN at one point Seoul was granted the summer Olympics and Kim Jong-il got on the phone. He goes. Hey, wouldn't it be great if we shared the Olympics? You know, this would be a great sign of Korean unity, you know national Reunification is something we both want and Seoul said well, you don't have the facilities number one Number two is the UN the Olympic Committee granted us to us not to both of us And they granted to a city not to a country and Kim Jong-il said come on and they go We can't do this. We're not interested. He goes come on he goes. Okay so what did Kim Jong-il do so he got two spies and they boarded a plane in Europe and they put a bomb safely in their overhead compartment and they got off in Bahrain at the layover and that plane blew up And killed many many people on board Which is why the North Koreans were on the state-sponsored terrorism list until fairly recently And as a result of this, you know, this was their attempt to kind of ruin the South Korean Olympics And as a consequence he launched his own Communist Olympics the People's Festival of Freedom and so and so forth and that was kind of the acme of the North Korean Experiment after that you had the collapse of the Soviet Union And with the collapse of the Soviet Union Soviet Union would subsidize North Korea and China would as well Kim Il-sung was great at playing them against each other. I'm trying to oh, I'm running out of time. Wow. Okay. We're not gonna okay What they would do is the Russians would send the North Koreans oil and the North Koreans would send the Russians like crappy socks And they would call the friendship prices and they say it's a wash as a as after the US Sarfell There was nothing the North Koreans had that the Russians wanted or that any other country wanted and it was an exact inversion of Henry had Leonard Reed's eye pencil because what happened was without oil you couldn't run the factories without the factories You couldn't produce fertilizer without fertilizer. You can't grow crops in an extremely mountainous country The North Koreans launched a campaign called let's eat two meals a day instead of three because having three meals a day is unhealthy So this is a good thing that there wasn't much food the great leader Kim Il-sung died and Kim Jong-il took over and Perhaps being the most honest politician on earth his campaign slogan actually was do not expect any change from me But there was change and it was what they called the arduous March because without food people started eating grass Then they started eating bark Then they started eating weeds and it got to the point where they were eating saccharine just to have some food in Their bellies and this twisted part of this regime is those who were faithful were the first ones to starve Because they thought the dear leader is going to take care of us food is right around the corner You had one to two million people starve in North Korea This was very much an intentional genocide Kim Jong-il said having too many people make socialism difficult and he said explicitly If we allow the UN to bring in food then the government's going to be superfluous So as the population of North Korea, you know descended into Hunger you had mass diseases coming back. They even had polio return in the 90s And of course, this was all the fault of the US imperialists What when the UN came they were not allowed to have any Korean speakers on on their staff and they would take them to village a on Monday and They showed them some healthy people and they took them to village B on Tuesday and on Wednesday They went back to village a and when the UN said we were just here Monday They were said no you weren't and the UN eventually left and that's how dark things have gone That's why North Korea and opened themselves up to tourism in exchange to try to get hard currency And I totally misunderestimated how much time I have but let me try to get things through as quickly as possible now North Korea like most of these communist states have a Constitution which is in this case for display purposes only North Korea is actually governed by the 10 commandments of the great leader Kim Il-sung The 10th of which says the revolution shall be continued through the generations until the end what that means in practice is Only a blood descendant of the great leader Kim Il-sung can be leader So very recently when Kim Jong-un took over for his father Kim Jong-il He murdered his elder brother Kim Jong-nam in that Malaysian airport because there now there's no Mike Pence now There's no one to take over. This is an insurance policy And people often ask you know Why can't you have a military coup because there's no precedent for any other So any person to be in charge other than the leader and there is a sense of divinity about the leadership It's not in the same way as there being a God But I guess the a good parallel would be how Americans think Bunkle Sam this kind of mythical figure that travels around and And solves problems when I was doing the research for the book The fables are extremely monotonous I'll tell you a couple of anecdotes There's one meeting and Kim Jong-il is sitting there taking notes and his assistant is telling him things And there's a speaker and the speaker keeps stopping and Kim Jong-il goes Why do you keep stopping and he goes well You're you're talking to your sister and you're taking notes and he says well I could do all these three things at once and they said well from that point on they saw that Kim Jong-il doesn't look at time as a Plane but as a cube and that he has the capacity to shrink time and my friend goes does he mean multi-tasking and yes That is what he means and he's apparently the only person in North Korea who's capable of doing such a thing When they were building their obelisk, you know in that I mentioned earlier the tower the tree idea It was his idea to make it the tallest stone obelisk on earth which no one had ever considered before So in my book, I just have this story of you imagine these architects and they didn't even consider it And they're like let's make it the second tallest and Kim Jong-il is the one who's be like let's make it the tallest They're like what a genius It's just amazing and there's anecdotes of these they open an amusement park and he's so brave Because he wants to make it safe for the elderly and the kids that he rides every ride twice Even though there's a light rain and while all the people who are associated with him his helpers are standing there crying at his bravery So there is a certain madness to it and speaking of how their art works. I asked my mom about this. You know, I was born in the Soviet Union Kim Jong-il hates the Mona Lisa and I asked her why does Kim Jong-il hit the Mona Lisa and took her two seconds and she Goes because of her ambiguous smile and that's exactly right so according to North Korean propaganda art has to be completely unambiguous and completely Clear to all the message which as a consequence is mind-lemonly pedantic and boring and incredibly hard to sit through Which is why so much of North Korean government in current times is losing their hold on power Because it's more when the when the famine hit those guards on the border were hungry themselves So people would go to China you give the border guard a cut You now you're exposed to Chinese information and you come back and it costs nothing to spread information and now There's an understanding in North Korea that they're not the richest country on earth that other countries have it far better And this is a very very big problem for the regime They've allowed black markets as it means which is not capitalism somehow in their logic Which is a means to keeping people fed because the government is utterly incapable of doing so nowadays Let's talk about the you know the contemporary things with there's a lot more to cover obviously But let's talk about more the contemporary things with President Trump and Kim Jong-un You know the North Koreans when Legends about why Kim Jong-il got the leadership position is he was sitting down with a great leader Kim Il-sung and all the generals And they said well what happens if the US imperialists invade again and general said we'll do we'll kill and we'll kill We're gonna win and the great leader Kim Il-sung says well What if we don't win and they're stunned because they can't even consider such a possibility and Kim Jong-il says if we lose We will destroy the world and Kim Kim Il-sung says spoken like a real supreme commander. So Kim Jong-il's iteration of Juche was what he called Sun gun which means Military first which includes military eats first and the premise is it's the military that keeps the country Safe and secure and allows for their freedom It says the fourth largest military on earth and his idea was in order to fight the Chinese dragon and the Russian Bear and the American Wolf I have to turn North Korea into a hedgehog and by which he meant an animal with spines missiles Going in every direction. So these claims of denuclearization have to be taken with a huge amount of skepticism Because so much of their ideology for so long has been the US imperialists are going to invade and kill us all at any minute but for our leader and again they have all these Exhibits about how cruel and torturous we were during the Korean War. I don't need to tell anyone in this room How horrific war is to a population this wasn't that long ago And then again in the 90s you had this famine, which was of the Americans fault. So they have a huge enormous suspicion of the Americans with good reason. So it's a very very Dark obviously situation. I'm running out of time What I am pleased with is how President Trump is Realizing if you're dealing with the hostage situation, right? And this is very much hostage situation. You have 25 million hostages There's two types of bank robbers There's the bank robber who runs in the bank and starts shooting up people and there's the bank robber that runs in the bank and starts Shooting up the ceiling now. Obviously you want to deal with the second one This is someone who might be not respect of property rights, but he's not a wanton mass murderer So when North Korea fires their missiles, they're always firing them into the ocean. They're not firing them at Seoul They're not firing them at Tokyo This is very much by design and one of the big arguments that people had for years and then Thankfully has very much changed recently is that North Korea is crazy and North Korea is suicidal Well, if they're suicidal, how are they the last ones left? They're obviously pretty bad at being suicidal when it's just them in Cuba when so many other communist states have fallen away So I'm gonna wrap it up here I know there's a lot more to cover because I'm running out of time, but I'll have time for questions later because this is a Extremely complicated and dark subject, but thankfully things are getting better specifically because of Information specifically because so many people have been refugees and are in contact with people in North Korea Used to be the world's largest consumer of VCRs Then they went to CDs and now they use memory sticks So one of the tricks that the North Korean government used to do is they would turn off the power in someone's house Then go inspect it that way you can't eject a DVD and you could see what the people are watching and God help you if It's something you know religious something like that There are certain movies that they really like like Titanic Titanic sank the day that the great leader Kim Il Sung was born That's true, which is I suppose a victory of communism over evil capitalism They like Jane Eyre It's very odd But it's also fascinating and counterintuitive how what they do know and what they don't for example when I was there I asked my guide if she knew about 9-11 and she rolled her eyes and she's like of course they showed us on television Which in retrospect makes perfect sense But I told her the fable the ace-ups fable of the frog and the scorpion and she didn't know what a scorpion was I'm like, okay It's a language barrier and then I drew it for her and she had no idea she never heard of it because there's no Scorpions in North Korea so they don't teach them about it right whereas I was thinking how many ways I know about scorpions comic books TV shows nature, you know It's it's the zodiac so it's just fascinating when you're there, which is impossible to describe What they know and what they don't and what's allowed through and when you're in North Korea Everywhere you look like here if you look in this room, you've got the clock. You've got the lights You've got this you've got the tables everything is there obviously selected for a purpose and it's you don't know why it's there You know what? I mean It's just some things are very intuitive and obvious and some were like we went to this place in the middle of the Highway for some reason and there was a balcony with corn husks on it ice to this day have no idea what those corn husks were for What they were going to be used for so I Guess I will just wrap it up by saying And again, this is not going to be used to anyone in this room The best comparison of the North Korean leadership is is the Batman villain the Joker and that yes in one very literal sense This person is a clown, but this clown has an enormous amount of bodies behind them And it's important to us when we're dealing with this issue to always remember the continuing plight of the North Korean people Where right now as we speak there's 25 million people wearing this lapel pin Well, they leave their house and are in constant fear for their entire family being taken away at the moment's notice. Thank you