I elected to watch a documentary that was all
about North Korea for my blog post this Monday evening. The documentary
wasn't particularly persuasive, however, it was a very revealing testimony of
one of, if not the most secretive and isolated nations in the world. In
fact, I would argue that the main argument of the documentary is that North
Korea is the most awful nation on Earth. This argument is supported
throughout the film that centrally follows the journey of an eye doctor who
performs cataract surgery on a couple hundred patients. The society is
quickly revealed to be oddly uniform and most interestingly everything and
everyone is fully submitted to Kim Jong Il as “Great Leader” and for all
practical purposes God. I found this
particularly interesting due to my great interest in religious beliefs and
worship in general. This theme was most
clearly advertised during the scene of the documentary in which all the
cataract patient’s bandages were lifted from their eyes. The first movement every single patient made
was towards the posted images of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, and, in an act of
worship they bowed down to him and threw up there hands in praise of their gracious blessings. Another interesting part of the documentary
was the story about a young man who tried to escape from one of many concentration
camps within North Korea, meant to punish political dissidents. The young man had grown up an animal, treated
so badly that he was under the assumption one was either born a concentration
camp guard or a concentration camp prisoner. The only reason he ended up making an effort
to escape the camp was due to news from another prisoner that had at one time
lived in China. The Chinese man
explained to him that there was such a thing as not being hungry and that alone was enough to propel the young man to pursue a life outside his concentration camp. Bottom line, the biggest human rights travesty going on in the world right now is occuring in North Korea. There may be very little we can actually do to alleviate the injustice that occurs there, however, I think everyone should at least be aware of what's going on.
No comments:
Post a Comment