Original subtitles

There is no freedom of religion.

There is no freedom of thought, there is no freedom of press.

There is only one paper, one radio station,

there is one TV station.

North Korea may be the only country in the world

that completely bans outside broadcasts.

And spying on one another

is very much a part of life in North Korea.

You cannot move from a place to place without getting a permit.

I would call the entire country of North Korea really a prison.

And it's strangest country in the world.

It is the only communist, Confucian,

hereditary dynasty in the world.

And Kim Jong-Un has been very busy

getting rid of any potential threat.

Within one year, he got rid

of his number-two man in North Korea,

his uncle who helped him garner power.

He dragged him out and publicly killed him.

Then he assassinated his half-brother

in a major international airport using banned WMD.

Then he got rid of about 400 top officials.

We're now onto maybe 90th Defense Minister, I lost count.

Senior officials have been executed

by the use of anti-aircraft guns.

If you shoot a human using artillery

which is designed to take down planes,

you can imagine the effect on the body.

The only reason to do that is for the fear

that that will put into the people

that are gathered and made to watch.

Do you remember how old you were

when you first saw a public execution?

Victims saw intimidation,

murder, enslavement, and torture,

people whose loved ones disappeared

without trace.

People who have been deliberately starved.

Forced abortions, sterilization, rape,

I mean, torture of the defectors who get caught and returned.

The Chinese government has a hard-line policy of,

if they find North Korean refugees,

arresting them and, uh, detaining them

and then forcibly sending them back to North Korea

where they will face investigation, torture,

and a range of harsh punishments.

Sometimes people will die through torture

and there's no recourse for North Korean citizens,

for their families to complain about that.

United Nations came out

with a 400-page report couple of years ago that says

"North Korea's Human Rights violations

is unparalleled in contemporary history."

The only parallel they could come up with is Nazi Germany.

Ah...

In 1910, the expanding Japanese empire

colonized what was then a unified Korea.

It was a very brutal colonization.

Over the next 35 years,

the Korean culture and the Korean language

were nearly eradicated.

At the end of World War II, when Japan surrendered,

they lost the empire that they had been building.

Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world.

Part of the settlement deal was that Korea was split.

The 38th parallel

divided the United States Army's area

from that of the Soviet forces.

The idea was that Korea

would shortly come back together

and then have control over their own country.

In the meanwhile, the South held a public election,

and U.S.-educated Syngman Rhee became the first president

of what would become South Korea.

But in the North, Stalin decided to look

for a Soviet sympathizer

as a temporary leader

in what would become North Korea.

And this is where Kim Il-Sung comes in.

Kim Il-Sung had been born in Korea in 1912,

two years after the Japanese occupied the country.

His parents were very involved in anti-Japanese activities,

and when he was just eight years old,

his family moved to Manchuria.

Kim Il-Sung joined the Communist Party in China,

and he eventually actually fought with the Soviet Union

throughout World War II.

Stalin heard about Kim Il-Sung because of his reputation

as a leader of several anti-Japanese guerrilla groups.

When Stalin brought him to Pyongyang,

Kim Il-Sung didn't even speak good Korean.

In fact, his speeches had to be translated into Korean

and then rehearsed by him

because he had basically spoken Chinese

since he was eight years old.

Kim Il-Sung had the dream

of re-unifying the Koreas under Communism.

Expanding upon his guerilla contacts,

he put together an army and eventually got the support

of both Stalin and Mao.

On Sunday, June 25th,

Communist forces attacked

the Republic of Korea.

The attack was so sudden and forceful

that, very quickly, almost all of South Korea was taken.

In fact, there was only a tiny pocket

at the bottom of the country

that had not been claimed by the North.

An act of aggression such as this

must be met with a worldwide defense.

And a UN force containing soldiers

from 21 different countries entered the war.

What ensued was a brutal three-year war.

Nearly five million people died,

half of whom were civilians.

South Korea lost a million civilians

just on their own.

The United States dropped a third

as many bombs on North Korea

as it did in all of World War II.

And in the end, nothing was achieved.

In July of 1953, an armistice was signed

and a ceasefire was put in place.

But technically speaking, the war never ended,

and the ramifications of that are still with us today.

For a while, the North Korean economy

was more successful than China's,

maybe even better than South Korea.

And people pointed, saying, "Oh, look,

Communism really works."

But everything was artificially propped up

by the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc,

and when that collapsed,

North Korea went into a free fall.

In 1994, after Kim Il-Sung died,

Kim Jong-Il made weapons of mass destruction his priority.

This policy prioritized nuclear weapons over everything else,

including the people of North Korea.

Kim Jong-Un needs something to protect himself

from being overthrown.

You know, they saw Iraq, they saw Libya,

they saw that Gaddafi gave up his weapons

and was very ignominiously murdered by his own people

with the support of the West.

Those scenes have to be terrifying

to the North Koreans.

I see these nuclear weapons and missiles

as a symptom of how isolated and threatening

and threatened the North Korean government feels.

The North Korean people are really the pawns

in this political game that their regime is playing.

- Mm.

Ah...

Mm.

In a way, the scariest parts of North Korea

are some of what they wanna show you at these mass games.

And there's 100,000 people

wearing the same kind of clothes and marching in unison.

And you see these children who are five, six years old

with their mass games, cards spelling out

propaganda messages in perfect unison.

You've gotta think, you know, "How do you get your five-year-old to do that?"

You see how much repression there is.

- Oh...

North Korea has basically plagiarized

the Christian Bible and you can see

a lot of parallels to the Old Testament.

Kim Il-Sung is God,

and Kim Jong-Il is the Son of God.

They claim that he was born not in a manger

but in a log cabin on Mount Paektu,

which is at the Chinese-North Korean border.

It's said his birth was heralded

by a beautiful star, and a double rainbow.

They wanted to keep this powerful imagery for themselves,

so the Bible is banned.

Mm.

[tense music playing

- Yeah.

- Mm...

- Mm.

Ooh!