19 Quotes by Blaine Harden

It is difficult to overstate the importance of rice in North Korean culture. It signifies wealth, evokes the closeness of family and sanctifies a proper meal.

Like Nazi concentration camps, labour camps in North Korea use confinement, hunger and fear to create a kind of Skinner box: a closed, closely regulated chamber in which guards assert absolute control over prisoners. Yet while Auschwitz existed for only three years, Camp 14 is a fifty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing longitudinal experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against each other from birth.

As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, no pop idol, no Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video. “Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,” Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp survivors to Washington, told me. “North Koreans have no one like that.

His professional expertise – before defecting to South Korea in 2003 – was managing a state-run global insurance fraud. It collected hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest insurance companies on falsified claims for industrial accidents and natural disasters inside North Korea. And it funneled most of the money to the Dear Leader.

As contemporaries, Shin and Kim Jong Eun personify the antipodes of privilege and privation in North Korea, a nominally classless society where, in fact, breeding and bloodlines decide everything.

Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampantin the camp, especially in the winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhea and dementia.

Kim Jong Il grumbled publicly, saying, ‘Frankly the state has no money, but individuals have two years’ budget worth.’2.

People are not so interested,’ Kim Sang-hun, director of the Database Center, told the Christian Science Monitor after his organization published the book. ‘The indifference of South Korean society to the issue of North Korean rights is so awful.

Aveva sentito parlare del concetto di perdono in una chiesa sudcoreana, ma ne era rimasto perplesso: chiedere perdono nel Campo 14 significa solo implorare di non essere punito.