In late July, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout that specializes in regime-change propaganda, hosted a set of conferences where panelists alleged that North Korea had executed a 22-year-old man for watching South Korean soap operas.

The allegations had earlier been reported in the New York Post and other media outlets, which cited a 2024 human rights report put out by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification.

The accuracy of the allegations, ironically, was put into serious doubt by NED Director Damon Wilson, who cited a survey reported on by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification which found that 80% of North Koreans now living in South Korea had watched South Korean soap operas when they lived in North Korea.

Swiss businessman Felix Abt, who lived in North Korea for ten years, titled a recent blog post “North Koreans being hanged for viewing South Korean dramas—only in Western media!”

Bruce Cumings, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago who has authored more than a half-dozen books on the Korean conflict, stated in an exclusive interview that “the NED only publishes the worst news it can find on North Korea, and that has been true since its inception.”

Cumings noted that “North Koreans have been quite widely watching South Korean soap operas and K-pop concerts for years, going back at least to the late 1990s when thumb drives could easily be passed around. My impression is that the North cracked down on this more in the last few years, but…that could be because the right wing is in power in the South, circulating these stories.”

According to Cumings, “nasty stories about the human rights situation in the North are much more common when you have a right-wing president in Seoul, as we do now, and they nearly disappeared when a progressive president like Kim Dae Jung or Moon Jae-in is in power. It’s interesting that the U.S. also seems to go along with whatever the South Koreans are putting out at any given time.”

One of the nasty stories is that North Koreans have been persecuted for getting Western-style haircuts and for dressing in supposedly “decadent” Western fashions.

Cumings said that, “in North Korean barbershops (at least one that I visited), they have photos of 13 hairstyles for men, you walk in and say I’ll have a number 5, etc. Some of these are quite Western looking, and generally workers go around in workers’ garb and bureaucrats wear Western suits. It wouldn’t surprise me if they punish people for having green hair or something like that, but it’s a much more relaxed sartorial scene than you might think. Women in particular come out in all their finest silk Korean dresses on Sundays, with lots of make-up, fine hairdos. When you are among them, you might as well be in South Korea.”

A further dubious allegation promoted at the NED event is that North Koreans have been executed for having a Bible.

Dermot Hudson, chairman of the British Group for the Study of the Juche Idea, told me that this latter claim “is patently false. Firstly, freedom of religion is guaranteed under the constitution of the DPRK. Secondly, Christian churches exist in the DPRK; Protestant, Catholic and Russian Orthodox.”

Regarding the alleged K-pop execution, Hudson, who has visited North Korea over a dozen times, said he was “struck by the contradiction of the allegation. 80 percent of North Koreans watch South Korean TV, but apparently someone was executed for watching a South Korea TV show. Wouldn’t then the 80 percent have been executed if they had all violated the law?”

Weaponizing Human Rights

North Korea is in the NED’s crosshairs because it is a defiant socialist country that survived a U.S. imperialist invasion in 1950 and has thwarted U.S. efforts to establish a military beachhead in a unified Korea from which it could attack Communist China.

Damon Wilson characterized North Korea as an “open-air prison” and one of the “most closed, isolated, and repressive countries in the world,” and said that it was “one of the top priorities for the endowment.”

Wilson claimed that, in addition to the 22-year-old who was executed for watching South Korean soap operas, two North Korean teenagers were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for watching South Korean videos on the internet.

According to Wilson, “something is fundamentally wrong with the North Korean regime,” which has “become brittle” as “younger generations want change.”

Wilson’s remarks came as he introduced a roundtable hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a hawkish think tank, which ran 24 war simulations in which the U.S./Taiwan/Japan defeated China after it had theoretically carried out an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.

With Wilson, the roundtable was introduced by Victor Cha, George W. Bush’s top adviser on Asian affairs, and Cho Hyun-dong, South Korea’s ambassador to the U.S., who claimed that the recent defection of high-ranking North Korean officials “shows that the structure of the North Korean regime is collapsing.”

U.S. and South Korean officials have been predicting North Korea’s imminent downfall since the end of the Korean War some 70+ years ago.

Bruce Cumings’ book, North Korea: Another Country, shows that the fallacy of these latter predictions stems from an inability to understand the reasons behind the Kim dynasty’s popularity.

Founded by Kim Il Sung, that dynasty led the defense of North Korea from U.S.-South Korean aggression in the Korean War and mobilized the people to rebuild the country after it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. It has also, over the years, promoted industrialization and subsidized housing and provided free health care and education while advancing labor rights.^[1]

Question of Prison Camps

One of the speakers at the NED conference, Michael Kirby, authored a 2014 UN report that accused the Kim regime of operating an “all-encompassing indoctrination machine” that took root among North Koreans from childhood, “inciting nationalist hatred” against state enemies (South Korea/the U.S./Japan), and attempting to “control all aspects of people’s social life.”

The report further pointed to the existence of political prisons located in remote areas, allegedly verified by satellite, where hundreds of thousands of people have died since the Korean War.

Kirby’s report provides no political context or means of understanding the North Korean regime’s guiding ideology and paints a black-and-white picture between North and South Korea that is used to justify copious U.S. arms supplies to South Korea and regime change operations.

Regarding the prison camps, Cumings says that he has “no doubt” they are indeed “hell holes. There’s plenty of evidence over the decades about that, beginning with an unimpeachable account by a Latin American, Ali Lameda [a poet and member of the Venezuelan communist party], who was incarcerated twice in the 1970s and managed to get back home and talk to Amnesty International, resulting in a very interesting pamphlet of about 75 pages.”

Oddly, Cumings says that some of the inmates at the labor camps have gone on to attend Kim Il Sung University or even reappeared in the Kim regime’s leadership. In one case he could recall, a writer who had been lauding and quoting Kim Il Sung in the party journal in the late 1940s, meaning that he was quite high up, was purged at some point during the Korean War and then reappeared in the leadership in the early 1960s.^[2]

Defectors—Should We Believe Them?

The NED event featured testimony and videos from North Korean defectors who claimed they had been persecuted for falling afoul of the regime, subjected to forced labor or, in the case of one woman, raped after she had been forcibly repatriated.

The defector allegations may be fully or partially true; however, defectors are known to be paid by the South Korean government to make up or embellish stories about North Korea as part of a propaganda war.

Dermot Hudson told me that he recognized one of the defectors from the NED event, Thae Yong-Ho, whom he said had been under investigation by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK-North Korea) after being accused of embezzlement, selling state secrets and child rape.

According to Hudson, defectors are primarily “dishonest individuals who left the DPRK often to evade punishment for serious crimes, including murder and rape, and are handsomely paid by the South Korean authorities (and probably the CIA) to lie about the DPRK. It should be remembered that those who left the DPRK, in some cases, decades ago, are cut off from the DPRK and would have no way of knowing what is happening in the DPRK.”

Hudson underscored that fake execution stories are among the lies told by the defectors. “The death penalty in the DPRK only exists for very grave and serious crimes, not for watching South Korean TV or videos, and is used as a last resort.”

Hudson said that he noticed that, “in many of the reports of so-called executions in the DPRK, the details are vague; no name is given, etc. Isn’t it curious that South Korea and the U.S. claim that there are public executions in the DPRK, but there are no reports of them in the DPRK and no DPRK TV coverage of these public executions?”

This lack of reporting would “defeat the object of the exercise by keeping the executions secret. The last execution in the DPRK was in December 2013 when Jang Song-thaek [former Minister of State Security] was executed for embezzlement and state treason.” Because it offered a warning to others, “news of the denunciation of Jang at the Politburo of the WPK [Korean Workers’ Party] was carried in the media as was the subsequent trial and execution.”

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1. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: The New Press, 2004). The false predictions by Western intellectuals about North Korea’s imminent collapse were reminiscent of the Soviet Union. A study by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920) found that the media had predicted the downfall of the Bolshevik regime dozens of times, though the regime lasted for 70 more years. Cited in Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). ↑

2. Cumings wrote to me that, “during the famine in the late 1990s when thousands of people fled the North, many stories came out about the labor camps and how draconian they were. The story that received the most attention was The Aquariums of Pyongyang….What was odd about the book was not the usual atrocities of the labor camps, but the author went into the labor camp with some of his family as I recall, came out a few years later, and went to Kim Il Sung University. Hardly any reviewers that I saw commented on this, but it would roughly be like spending a few years in Rikers Island and then coming out and enrolling at Harvard. But it is believable to me, because ever since the foundation of the regime, high officials have been purged and sent to labor camps and then years later reappear in the leadership–not always of course, but the very fact that this happens at all is significant.” ↑

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