I decided to do my passion blog about politics in various regions around the globe. In our current global political climate, it is essential that all citizens understand what’s going on with our planet. So, I thought I would start off with a pretty topical subject: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The rest of us knows it as North Korea. It a nation located in East Asia, making up the Northern part of the Korean Peninsula. North Korea is known for many things, pretty much all of them bad. Considering the rising tensions and frankly terrifying developments of late, it is clear North Korea has the potential to threaten the rest of the world.

Let us start off with the fundamentals of North Korea’s government. Soon after World War II, Korea (undivided at the time) was occupied by both American and Soviet Union soldiers. Despite the Allied Powers’s intention to construct a functional government, America and the Soviets bickered so much they just had to institute two different nations: the more democratic South Korea, and the more Communist North Korea. This is also when guerrilla leader Kim Il-sung assumed power as the the North’s Supreme Leader, his son and grandson later becoming North Korea’s successive rulers. Currently, the Supreme leader is Kim Jong-Un.

While North Korea is globally accepted as a totalitarian or dictatorship state, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea prefers to consider their government a ‘Juche.’ According to North Korea’s official website (I was also surprised to discover this website existed), a Juche a government in which the “masters of the revolution and construction are the masses of the people and that they are also the motive force of the revolution and construction.” Essentially, North Korea’s regime asserts that their nation achieves prosperity by protecting political independence from “the pressure of imperialists and dominationsts” as well as prioritizing the “Jushe character.”

In reality, North Korea couldn’t be farther from a nation that allows its citizens to be “masters.” Kim Jong-Un maintains control of the country through brutally oppression. The government controls every aspect of the peoples’ lives, even their apparel and hair styles. People are extremely limited in their ability to leave or enter North Korea, and are stringently prevented from accessing media and information from the outside world. Violation of these mandates could not only result in the public execution of the violator, but in some cases their whole families. Additionally, the government is either unable or unwilling to provide even relatively bearable living conditions for an enormous amount of its population. The CIA has found that “6 million North Koreans are in need of food and 33% of children are chronically malnourished.” A United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights reported that the “gravity, scale and nature of these [human’s rights] violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

Over the past couple months, the threat North Korea poses has increased exponentially as a result of their focus in developing nuclear weapons (inciting President Trump to dub Kim Jong-Un as the ‘Rocket Man’). The nation has been very clear with their intentions for these weapons: to endanger their enemies, namely Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The success of their recent tests are beyond alarming, North Korean now have the range to hit as far as the United State’s western coast. Without a doubt, North Korea is one of the biggest dangers facing our world today.

 

 

“North Korea.” Human Rights Watch, 2 May 2017, www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/north-korea. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017.

Holodny, Elena. “17 Mindblowing Facts About North Korea.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 23 July 2014, www.businessinsider.com/mind-blowing-facts-about-north-korea-2014-7#6-million-north-koreans-are-in-need-of-food-and-33-of-children-are-chronically-malnourished-14. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017.

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, www.korea-dpr.com/index.html. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017.