Program offers chilling footage of N. Korea(doctor restores people's sight, Kim gets all credit)

Miami Herald ^ | 03/05/07 | GLENN GARVIN

[TigerLikesRooster]

Program offers chilling footage of N. Korea

BY GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

'Explorer: Inside North Korea.' 9-10 tonight. National Geographic Channel.

Forget Ghost Whisperer,Supernatural, and even the goat-testicle-eating contests on Fear Factor. The most frightening thing you'll see on television this year is tonight's episode of National Geographic's Explorer documentary series, Inside North Korea. Nobody should sleep well knowing that we share a planet with the mad, murderous megalomaniac holed up in Pyongyang, watching old Judy Garland movies and fiddling with a nuclear button as his country dies around him.

Even places like Cuba and Iran are like national Freedom of Information Acts compared to North Korea, the most secretive and xenophobic country in the world. Because so few people get out and even fewer get in -- and because until relatively recently it was a geopolitical bit player as far as everybody but its nervous neighbors south of the 38th parallel were concerned -- North Korea operates almost completely beneath the radar of the international media.

But Explorer correspondent Lisa Ling and a camera crew managed to get inside the country last year, disguised as part of a medical team traveling with a Nepalese eye surgeon helping cataract victims.

Their footage, packaged with interviews of North Korean defectors and video shot by human-rights activists and refugee smugglers, paints a profoundly disturbing picture of the country and its bizarre ruler, Kim Jong Il. North Korea seems less a society than a sadomasochistic fantasy, where Kim starves and slaughters his people, and they sob with gratitude for the boot on their throat.

Spending all his money on military playthings (North Korea has the world's fourth-largest army, a growing arsenal of nuclear warheads and, soon, missiles to deliver them), useless propaganda infrastructure (Explorer's cameras record the crew's leisurely drive along a 12-lane Pyongyang highway where there are no other cars) and a mind-boggling collection of monuments to himself (one statue is so tall that an Explorer camaraman must lie at its foot and shoot straight up to capture the entire image, an act of suspected insolence that nearly gets him expelled from the country), Kim is literally letting the rest of his country starve to death.

North Korean children born in the 1990s are so undersized from chronic malnutrition that they're referred to as the Stunted Generation. One defector interviewed by Explorer, a former guard at one of the country's massive work camps (his held 50,000 prisoners), recounts hungry children fighting over a single kernel of corn they found inside a lump of cow dung. Even that anecdote pales beside footage of a row of sluggish, skeletal babies in a nursery, waiting silently for death.

In a model of compact storytelling, Explorer rolls out these horrific tales one after another, occasionally lightening them with a touch of black humor: a park bench where Kim Jong Il once reportedly sat for a few minutes that's been preserved in an airtight glass case; the genuine befuddlement of North Korean officials when asked if the Dear Leader (as Kim likes to be called) has ever, or could ever, make a mistake.

Some of the most disturbing footage, oddly enough, comes from the only real success story recounted in the documentary. Dr. Sanduk Ruit, the Nepalese eye surgeon whose visit provided the Explorer team with cover, achieved spectacular results, restoring sight to more than 1,000 cataract victims. (Because of widespread malnutrition, cataracts are 10 times more common in North Korea than in developed countries.)

But when the patients' bandages are removed and they can see -- in many cases, for the first time in years -- they don't thank the doctor. Instead, they race to a portrait of the Dear Leader mounted on a nearby wall to shriek their gratitude. ''Great general, I will work harder at the salt mines, to get more salt to bring you happiness!'' wails one woman as she drops to her knees before the beaming portrait.

A stunned Ling -- showing a perspicacity that often eludes Western journalists reporting from totalitarian societies -- at first isn't certain what to make of the demented displays of gratitude. ''I wondered which people had genuine faith, and which were acting out of fear,'' she muses, then comes to the chillingly correct conclusion: In North Korea, ``there may not be a difference between true belief and true fear.''

[TigerLikesRooster]

Go to the following links to watch the video excerpts of 1 min 25 sec - 1 min 55 sec long, showing the brainwashed people instilled with fear, extolling Kim Jong-il and his dead father for confering the blessing of regained sight on them.

Faith is fear and fear is faith.

http://www.tagstory.com/video/video_post.aspx?media_id=V000029714 (1:55)

http://www.tagstory.com/video/video_post.aspx?media_id=V000029707 (1:53)

http://www.tagstory.com/video/video_post.aspx?media_id=V000029714 (1:25)

[TigerLikesRooster]

Ping!

[cmsgop]

I recorded this last night, will watch

[Jet Jaguar]

I watched a program last evening on National Geographic Channel about this doctor and his film crew. They shed a great light on the goings on in North Korea.

[Tainan]

WOW...amazing...just amazing.

[Logophile]

Chilling indeed.

I do not believe for an instant that those surgery patients really believe that Kim Jong-il restored their sight. But they know that to stay alive and out of a labor camp, they must grovel before the power of the Dear Leader.

I wish there were some way to relieve the suffering of the North Korean people. Unfortunately, anything substantive that might be done by the United States would be roundly condemned by the so-called international community, as well as by our own home-grown leftists. The North Koreans are on their own.

[Uncle Meat]

I watched this last night and have to say I was apalled.I spent two years in Korea.We had Katusas in our unit that got caught going to Seoul on the weekends protesting against the Americans and for unification with their northern "comrads".What really got me was did they really think they'd be better off with the North running their lives?What a hellhole that society is.I'd rather be dead than live a miserable existance like those people do and to kiss that maniac's ass like they do.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #7

Sadly the Katusa's behavior is nothing more than peer pressure and attempt to fit in. Koreans are big on forming group identity. In some way, they are more zealous on maintaining their group identity than on individual identity.

It is sad that it has to revolve around pro-N. Korea sentiment. It is a kind of cult de jour. They do not realize how moronic they have become.

These people need to experience catastrophic psychological crash to relinquish their "evil" group identity. A kind of thing former Nazi supporters felt after WWII.

[SevenofNine]

Tiger Lisa was on Oprah even Oprah was stupid enough to believe her

I could understand Lisa but why intellgent African American woman like Oprah believe Chia Pet lies

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #9

Chia Head is making a true milestone. It would be his enduring legacy.:-)

[bkepley]

--I do not believe for an instant that those surgery patients really believe that Kim Jong-il restored their sight.

I disagree. Propaganda works. It's something people in liberal democracies haven't fully absorbed. Look at the millions of hysterical Russians, thousands trampled underfoot, at Stalin's funeral. To me the reality of how well mass propaganda works in totalitarian societies has always seemed one of our repressed facts.

[SevenofNine]

Yeah try prove to Oprah audience what nice guy


Tiger I have aunt that watch Oprah I was over her crib when I saw that special Trust me Oprah swallow all oh what nice guy MR kim Jong 11 is I am serious

[monkapotamus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6hexBiOdaU

[SevenofNine]

Hey Chia Pet could get Oprah to interview him after seeing YOU TUBE I think you got point MONK thanks LOL!

[gaijin]

Great post!

One of the things I love about Japan is the (comparitively) many exposees and programs they have about the DPRK.

[AmericanInTokyo]

To think we cut a sham of a deal with those bastards, less than two weeks ago!!

[LadyNavyVet]

Thanks for doing your part to spread the truth of this regime. Every time I see this kind of stuff about NK I get nauseated. Thank you, God, that I was born in the USA.

The liberals who denigrate this country and push for socialism are the worst sort of fools.

[Logophile]

I disagree. Propaganda works. It's something people in liberal democracies haven't fully absorbed. Look at the millions of hysterical Russians, thousands trampled underfoot, at Stalin's funeral. To me the reality of how well mass propaganda works in totalitarian societies has always seemed one of our repressed facts.

Perhaps. But when the tyrant's grip loosens, the people are not always so docile and adoring. (Ceausescu is a good example of what can happen.)

Still, I agree with you that propaganda works. Even if the people sense that the regime is lying to them, they can do little about it. They cannot separate fact from fiction, especially in regards to events outside their own country. They will end up believing many things that are not true, and disbelieving things which are true.

It will take generations to undo the damage to North Korea.

[dfwgator]

Look at the millions of hysterical Russians, thousands trampled underfoot, at Stalin's funeral.

That was excellently depicted at the end of the movie, "The Inner Circle."

[AppyPappy]

''I wondered which people had genuine faith, and which were acting out of fear,''

Fear.