Banners in the street and the broadcasts at home in North Korea repeat the same message. That is not merely propaganda. It was an education that defines reality itself. File Photo by Korea Central News Agency/EPA
July 24 (UPI) -- Why don't North Koreans resist? Since I began working on North Korean human rights, this is the question I have been asked most often. But I now want to ask a more fundamental one: Why have we grown so accustomed to it?
It is not only dictatorship that confines North Koreans. Our own indifference -- the moment we begin consuming their suffering as one more recurring news item -- becomes a second barrier. Dictatorship makes people fall silent. Familiarity makes people stop acting.
I lived in North Korea for 23. People there are not born rejecting freedom. They simply live in a world where freedom does not exist as an option. Many interpret North Koreans' compliance as loyalty. But in the North Korea I knew, compliance was not loyalty. It was survival. Dictatorship is not sustained by guns alone. It is strongest when it convinces people that it is simply the way things are.
People believe the first world they encounter is the normal one. We do not wake up each morning asking why white is white. For North Koreans, dictatorship is that kind of presence.
