Relationship between North Korea Citizen and Government - Essay Example

It also avoided dissent and unrest from its citizenry by blocking “corrupt ideas” coming from the outside world particularly the West and promotes the idea that they “have nothing to envy in this world”. The Kim regime’s methodology for a time worked well because even if North Korea plunged into desperation with the famine of 1990s, with hunger that turned “vagabond children stealing fruit and hunting frogs; middle-aged women haggling over cheap Chinese-made goods in black markets; college-educated women wading half-naked across the Tumen River to sell themselves into arranged marriages with Chinese farmers; family patriarchs wasting away as the food rations ran out, often going raving mad before a quiet, hideous death from starvation” (Demick, 2009), North Koreans still believed that their government is serving them well. II. Example One of Regime’s Methods The first method employed by the North Korean government to control its people is to physically isolate the country from the rest of the world.

It is a deliberate scheme to create a vacuum in the minds of the North Korean people so that it would become receptive to whatever the government will say. . In plain language, the Kim regime kept its citizenry ignorant about the world so that it will be easier to brain wash them. To illustrate the magnitude of how bent the ruling regime of North Korea in insulating its population from the influences of the outside world, it went as far as refusing humanitarian foreign aid when a great famine struck the country in the 1990s.

As a result, many starved and died from hunger. Food rations became short and there was not even enough electricity that the country looks like a black hole at night when viewed from a satellite above because it was the only unlit region in Asia. This famine caused deaths by hundreds of thousands yet the people continued to believe that their government and Kim Jong Il is doing something good to them. The isolation that the North Korean government perpetuated was not only limited to the physical disconnection of its population from the outside world but also reinforced it with fear that anything outside its borders is evil.

The West, “particularly United States” is being portrayed both as evil and enemy to ensure the psychological disconnect of its population from the west (particularly USA) and the rest of the world. Mi-Ran, one of the interviewed deserters narrated that during her youth “the radio and television played many times that South Koreans were miserable under the thumb of the pro- American puppet leader Park Chung- hee and, later, his successor, Chun Doohwan”; that their version of communism is “better than that of China because there are a lot of people going hungry in China”.

Hearing this over and over again, Mi-Ran even believed that she was lucky to have been born in North Korea under the benevolence of their Great Leader.   III. Example