Challenges in North Korea

I am not a soccer fan, but I am pleasantly surprised to find out that North Korea has a team competing in the World Cup. I don’t know anything about the North Korean team (or how they were able to get to play in the World Cup). They must have the support of their oppressive regime, and they must be a privileged lot in an otherwise repressed society where slavishness and poverty are a way of life.

Still and all, sports is supposedly an apolitical thing where physical prowess determines the outcome of a competition. The North Korean team probably made it to the World Cup on the basis of merit. And their achievements should not be cast aside just because they are beholden (maybe) to a tyrannical regime.

And I am thinking beyond sports. I hope that every game the North Koreans play, or for that matter, every game that is played during the tournament, is being aired on TV and radio stations in North Korea. That will be a treat to the people, their narrow window through which they could get a glimpse of the outside world.

This Washington Post op-ed piece, “Screams from North Korea,” portrays a picture of a people who have no idea of a better life outside of their country. Their minds, according to the author, have been nurtured by a tyranny, conditioned for loyalty, and fed on lies. How does a mind shaped by all these change? How does one convince North Koreans of a kind of life different from theirs when they don’t even know of the alternatives out there?

Their only sources of outside information are defectors who provide stories of freedom and opportunities that they have found in their new life. One said that from leaflet drops, he got to view images of people wearing all sorts of different clothes (enough to “spark a revolution of the mind”). Smuggled radios and cellphones from China have become important tools for disseminating information from outside. Defectors are “seeding doubts that might someday become dissent.” Like those imprisoned in Plato’s cave but got to see the outside world, these enlightened defectors are doing everything they can to tell those who are left behind that there are other realities out there, far better than the one they live in.

Closed societies like Burma and North Korea need our help. Deeply-entrenched tyrannical regimes should be removed by force. But there’s also that people-to-people “civil society” obligations that the lucky ones like us, who were able to leave Plato’s cave, owe to those who are still living in the darkness of ignorance. In this 21st century of individual rights and liberties, of free-market enterprise and prosperity, of accessible technological tools and the information revolution, no groups of people anywhere in the world should wallow in ignorance, slavishness, and poverty.

As to the North Korean soccer team, I‘ll be rooting for them, hoping that at the end of the tournament, they, too, will defect so that they can tell the world their story.