by Sienna Bentley
Global
ignorance and paving the path for peace
North
Korean citizens do not have freedom of speech like the people I interviewed,
like everyone you know. They know not of the luxuries of the West, or even
anything outside of their country itself. Rice is a luxury in a country still
reeling from the famine of the 1990s. To speak openly in North Korea and in
other countries dealing with oppressive regimes would likely cost the citizens
a great deal. It can be hard for people here to accept their own ignorance. I
wanted to emphasise the events that happen elsewhere that others may not be
aware of, through the process of showing them how beautiful life can be,
subsequently yet soberly reminding us that there are others out there whose
lives aren’t as positive, through no fault of their own. I began with the
question, ‘what’s the worst thing about the world?’, and finished on some of
our favourite aspects to hone in on the fact that there will always be
positives and negatives in life, and that it is down to us to try and improve
the quality of life for others as well as ourselves. It is intriguing to see
different answers from different people, and it reminded me as an artist that
if everyone put their heads together and started loving each other, we can
achieve anything we want.
Institutional
media promoting a specific political agenda infiltrates the lives of millions
worldwide whether or not it is noticed, accepted or encouraged. People tend to
believe almost everything they hear, read and watch on the news and this
propagandising is everywhere with little alternative. Every magazine or
newspaper, radio, news channel and commercial will contain some element of
propaganda and it could even be argued that the mainstream media is the real
purveyor of ‘fake news’, in order to generate more views, more confusion and
control our thoughts by creating false narratives; we see and hear both true
and false stories which make us fear each other and ourselves. While the media
regularly reports on disastrous events around the world that the wider
population should be made aware of like terrorism, the Syrian refugee crisis or
the Yemen famine, scaremongering and making the majority believe that the world
is beyond salvation keeps them under control. In fact, the world is definitely
salvageable, with there being enough food in the world for every person to be
full; the world produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago. It
begs the question why those with significant platforms do not raise this into
question and demand that something be done for those who are living in poverty
or starving all across the globe.
Humanity
is so preoccupied by and obsessed with the media that has such a huge impact on
us and that projects such negativity into the world that we do fear each other,
when in reality as stated in the film, “if we treated each other with kindness
[…] the chain reaction would be huge and the whole world would change.” The
media in the US for example is so negativity-dominated that it’s no wonder gun
control is such a controversial issue, with around half of the total number of
households in the country owning a firearm. Of course, national disarmament is
particularly difficult to achieve; it would be an incredibly arduous process,
trying to make just under 63 million households dispose of all their firearms.
Not only this, but amending the Constitution is also a considerable challenge,
needing two thirds of Congress and three quarters of all states to agree to
ratify the 2nd Amendment. But arguably it is the media that drives American
citizens to believe they need to own a gun to protect themselves in the first
place. Americans are 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than people in
other developed countries. In a 1999 ABC News/Washington Post poll, 26% of respondents
specified protection as being the primary reason for owning a gun and by 2013
that percentage had increased to 48%. More recently, the 2015 National Firearms
Survey (NFS) saw 63% of respondents indicating “protection against people” as a
primary reason for owning a firearm. More than two thirds of killings in the
United States are firearm homicides and the constant reporting of these in the
media is perhaps what prompts more people to own a gun for protection purposes.
It can
appear that the only stories reported in the media are the awful events and
that the media rarely concentrates on the good news, inevitably having a
drastic impact on its audience who consumes many forms of online media daily.
According to a new report by ZenithOptimedia, “on average, people spend more
than 490 minutes of their day with some sort of media”, so naturally it is
going to affect them at least slightly, often leading to thoughts of
hopelessness that the world has any chance of thriving on a global level. While
a lot of what the media reports on the news is in fact true, informing the
western world of disasters on the other side such as the Yemen famine, the
six-plus year conflict in Syria or the atrocities of North Korea, people rarely
feel as though they can do anything about it, because perhaps they feel their
voice is insignificant, or perhaps because surely it is too far away for it to
have any real effect on them? But change starts with the individual. If one
lives their whole life in fear of change, in fear of the people around them and
in fear of what other people think of them, the world will get little to
nowhere with improving, and humanity will remain the same. But if there is
something you care about, fight for it. America has been at war 92% of its
history and in reality, what has that achieved?
It is
certainly easy in Western culture to turn a blind eye to things that happen in
countries far away from us, but it is imperative that we try not to do so. The
issues in North and South Korea resonate strongly with me personally, largely
from reading the memoir Escape from Camp 14 and it was this book and further
research into the Korean societies that makes me aspire to a career in human
rights. It is unfathomable to me that humanity is willing to treat others in
the way they do to this day. Korea is a country where no citizen can truly be
themselves; whether that is in the North where they are heavily oppressed or in
the South where they are living in an almost brutally extreme capitalist
society. Today, North Korea run complete control districts within their regime:
no-exit prison labour camps (visible on Google Maps) in which three generations
of a family are sent if one member steps ‘out of line’. The true story of
Escape from Camp 14 describes the life of Shin, the only person to ever escape
and survive one of these camps and his struggles as a prisoner, not to mention
his continuous struggles adapting to life as a free man in the South. Within
only the first couple of chapters a harrowing story of a 6 year old girl is
relayed; a 6 year old girl was clubbed to death by her school teacher for
pocketing a few grains of corn. Still reeling from the 1990s famine that killed
over 3 million North Koreans (around 13% of the total population), children in
these camps eat bark they’ve picked off trees. One of Shin’s personal favourite
pastimes was catching and roasting rats. Rice is a luxury that is almost
unheard of. And despite neighbouring a next-door dictatorship, only 3% of South
Korean voters deemed North Korea a primary concern during the 2007 presidential
election. The book describes South Korea as a “success-obsessed,
status-conscious, education-crazed culture” that “even South Koreans themselves
struggle mightily to fit into” (B. Harden, 2012, p201) and it was revealed that
their primary interest was in making higher salaries, just one indicator that
South Korean citizens are desperate to climb higher and desperate not to fall
behind in such a merciless society, with the highest rates of suicides in
developed countries (p201). With even South Korea seemingly unbothered by the
atrocities committed by their neighbour, it is apparent that the rest of the
world is simply willing to let the ‘problem’ of North Korea lie. In order to
combat a problem there must be widespread awareness and quite frankly not
enough people are aware of the situation in North Korea to the extent that they
should be. Even having discussed media-obsession, the oppression of North
Korean citizens is not something that is actively talked about and therefore
does not resonate with those from the West. For a country that is on the news
regularly, North Korea remains a mystery to much of the rest of the world. When
you think of North Korea, what do you think of? Kim Jong-un and nuclear
warfare? There is so much more going on than that. I suppose it could be argued
that it is the threat of a nuclear deterrent that prevents action against the
human rights violations in the North, however, instead of scaremongering us
into believing that we are going to be nuked in the near distant future
because, as it stands it remains pretty unlikely, educating about their
civilian life and trying to find solutions should be higher on the media’s
agenda since so much of it is consumed on a daily basis. It is difficult to
find out so much about the ins and outs of North Korean society unless you talk
to a defector yourself, because entry is kept so tight and those who are
allowed in are followed by “minders”, who give them ‘tours’ and show them only
what the government wants them to see and if one tries to overstep this
boundary they will likely be imprisoned or detained.
It can
be argued that South Korea acts as a microcosm for the rest of the world, full
of people whose survival is based on climbing higher. Are we ignorant to moral
principles because we live in a society that accepts excessive greed as a
normal condition of human nature? Or do we just not feel educated or informed
enough to take action against atrocities happening just out of our reach?
The
truth is, the idea that governments can legally involve themselves in the ways
in which other countries or states treat their own citizens is a relatively
recent novelty when it comes to international relations, only really developing
over the course of the 20th century and after the second war. It is stated in
the preface to The Lawful Rights of Mankind, “down to the end of the second
world war, it was a matter of universally accepted doctrine in international
affairs that how a state treated its own citizens was a matter entirely for its
own sovereign determination, and not the legitimate concern of anyone outside
its own frontiers.” (P. Sieghart, 1985) This then almost justifies the reason
for global ignorance (but not quite); it has been indoctrinated into human nature
that the affairs of a country different to our own is not our concern, it has
never been particularly natural to the individual to worry for someone they
have never met. However, this is beginning to change, and people are beginning
to take more of an interest in global affairs. People in over 60 countries have
protested Trump with the Women’s March, fighting for women’s rights in a
country that is not their own. Of course, this is not going to necessarily lead
to world peace, but it is a step in the right direction.
But
there is still a long way to go.
In the
meantime, we are so obsessed with the aforementioned media and our phones that
we forget to focus on the good things we do have in our lives, when we are
constantly being bombarded with the negative. As stated before, we spend over 8
hours on some form of media in a day, and with a figure like that it’s no
wonder we have forgotten how beautiful the world can be. People have stopped
noticing the little things that perhaps used to bring them joy. Personally for
me, it makes me really happy when I’m on the bus and I see the driver wave to
other bus drivers upon passing. There are little bits of goodness everywhere
but it is just noticing them that appear to be difficult in recent years, as we
are constantly longing to be somewhere else. One must learn to appreciate what
they have, because you don’t realise what a good thing you had until it’s gone.
Laugh with friends; breathe in the fresh air from the trees. Swim in the
freezing sea and watch the sunset. Try and take it in without taking a
photograph.
Bibliography
Oxfam
Canada “There is enough food to feed the world” Available here:
https://www.oxfam.ca/there-enough-food-feed-world
Preidt,
R. “How U.S. gun deaths compare to other countries” CBS News (February 2016).
Available here:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-u-s-gun-deaths-compare-to-other-countries/
Harden,
B. (2012) Escape from Camp 14
Clapham,
A. (2015) Human Rights: A Very Short
Introduction
Sieghart,
P. (1985) the Lawful Rights of Mankind:
Introduction to the International Legal Code of Human Rights
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