How democracy dies: Lessons from a North Korean defector

‘The key to staying alive is to shut down your mind. For when you think, it eventually leaks out of your mouth, and our words will destroy us!’

This chilling survival lesson was taught to Justin Seo by his late father in North Korea, a place where silence and compliance are the keys vital to staying alive and out of the prison camps.

I had the privilege of interviewing Justin recently for my podcast, Faith Under Fire, and my burden for North Korea — an enormous prison state — was rekindled. After decades of studying the country and hearing countless testimonies from defectors, I was struck again by the plight of millions living in a brutal dictatorship incomprehensible to most Westerners.

In North Korea, the soul’s yearning for freedom is crushed at every turn. The country, ruled for three generations by the Kim family, has become one of the most closed-off and oppressive regimes on the planet. To survive in such a place, where thinking is dangerous and speaking can mean death, is to endure an existence that most of us can’t even begin to fathom.

North Korea isn’t just an authoritarian state. It’s a giant gulag. The country operates not for the benefit of its people but for the security and enrichment of the Kim family and a select elite. The rest of the population — millions of ordinary citizens — live as slaves in this grotesque political theater, where the government controls everything, even the thoughts of its people.

This isn't hyperbole. Justin told me, “The moment you think something wrong about the government, is the moment your life is in danger.”

One slip and you will spend the rest of your life in a prison camp, some of which are as large as Washington D.C., vast open-air hells where political prisoners are worked to death, starved, or summarily executed.

It’s hard for us in the West to grasp the reality of such a place. In North Korea, multiple generations of families disappear into the prison camps and are erased from history for the thought crime of one individual.

What makes this all the more tragic is that Korea, before the rise of the Kim dynasty, was a country alive with faith and hope. In the early 1900s, Pyongyang was known as the “Jerusalem of the East” due to the incredibly rapid growth of Christianity.

Thousands of churches dotted the landscape, and the Bible was a source of spiritual and intellectual nourishment for many Koreans. But when the Kims took power, they sought to obliterate that legacy.

Based on my own research, I believe that the Kim regime has been responsible for the deaths of up to one million Christians, either through execution or by slowly starving them to death in concentration camps.

A perverse mirror of Christianity

Since human beings are intrinsically religious creatures, the North Korean state has crafted a religious system that mirrors the Christian faith, making the Kims not just rulers but deities.

In Christianity, there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In North Korea, there is the Great Leader (Kim Il-sung), the Dear Leader (Kim Jong-il), and the current ruler, Kim Jong-un. Weekly gatherings resemble church services, with citizens required to sing songs in praise of the state and its leaders — hymns to their so-called “kingdom of heaven.” There is a form of confession too, where citizens must admit their shortcomings, not to God, but to the state. And like the Bible, North Korea has its holy text: the Juche Idea, a set of teachings that dictate every aspect of life, demanding total allegiance to the regime.

The emperor’s clothes

Living in North Korea today is to inhabit the twisted fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Everyone is forced to pretend that the nation is a paradise, a utopia, led by the messianic figure — Kim Jong-un. And yet, as Justin told me, “In my village, everyone knew it was a lie. We all knew it but we couldn’t speak of it openly. We couldn’t even let ourselves think it, for fear that we would slip up and say something out loud.”

Escape

Eventually, Justin escaped North Korea and made it to the United States. On arrival, he was of course amazed by the wealth of our nation. I asked him for his reaction on going into a Walmart, but he said it didn’t take a Walmart to overwhelm him. He spent his whole day in a simple Dollar Store and found it mind-bending, examining almost all the items in the store, one by one.

The wealth of the U.S. was astounding but something far more subtle touched him on his arrival here. It was the freedom he experienced. “The ability to think, to speak and act on what I was thinking — this was the most wonderful thing I'd ever experienced,” he said.

Freedom, what we take for granted, was for Justin a revelation, a moment of pure intoxication. For the first time in his life, he could open his mouth and speak without fear of the consequences.

The fragility of freedom

In reflecting on Justin's story, it's impossible not to see the larger lesson it teaches us about freedom — how fragile, precious, and rare it truly is. When we look at all of history, we see that almost all humans have lived under political systems where power and wealth were concentrated in the hands of a king, dictator, or oligarchy while the masses lived as serfs or slaves.

Today, this is still the reality for billions around the world, and in every country, there are forces waiting to destroy liberty and concentrate power in the hands of a select few.

If you need a reminder of what lurks in the shadows of all political systems, look no further than China, Russia, Turkey, or the narco-state of Mexico. The method of tyrants is always the same: leaders come waving flags of reform, denouncing the establishment, promising utopia, or offering security at the cost of freedom.

Once they gain power, they use the organs of the state to attack and imprison their political enemies. They control the press, and use propaganda to control the masses, who — always oblivious to their own peril — act as willing accomplices in their own enslavement.

This is why democracy is such a rare and fragile flower. It demands constant vigilance, and we must never grow complacent. The Founding Fathers understood this well. They warned that freedom must be defended, cherished, and never taken for granted.

Justin’s father told him, “Don’t think,” because thinking could get him killed. But as Westerners, we need to remind ourselves of a different lesson — that freedom is like oxygen. We don’t notice it until someone else’s fingers are wrapped around our throat.

The coming jubilee

This truth also holds the key to the eventual downfall of the North Korean regime.

Systems like the one Kim Jong-un oversees are incredibly fragile. They are held together only by bullet, blade, and rope because they stand in direct opposition to the unquenchable yearning of the human spirit for freedom.

For now, bullets, blades, and ropes keep North Korea’s people imprisoned. But freedom is coming. It may come next year, or maybe in 10 or 20 years but it will come.

Because while we may take freedom for granted, millions of people around the globe will tell you that freedom is like oxygen — and you can’t live long without it.