A North Korean defector said he was “shocked” by the kindness he encountered when he first visited the United States because his home country portrays U.S. citizens as “people who torture and kill.”
“The U.S. is not just bad,” Kim Geum-Hyuk, who now lives in Seoul, South Korea, said in an interview with the YouTube channel DIMPLE. “America is a complete enemy for North Korea. They taught us to fight Americans until the end. I also was one of the victims of brainwash education so I had hostility toward America.”
According to Kim, who currently works as a peace ambassador for One Young World and is studying political science and diplomacy at Korea University, North Korea portrays Americans as “street dogs,” “wolves,” and “people who torture and kill.” But after arriving in California, Kim said he realised his home country’s depiction of U.S. citizens was “totally wrong.”
“What I was taught in North Korea was an image of the coldness and wickedness of Americans,” he said. “They were an image of scary people to me, but it was different from the image that North Koreans think (…)I believed they were full of hostility, but they were just so nice,” Kim added, expressing his surprise.
Because he had never seen photos of the U.S., he was shocked at the beauty of the country. Kim said visiting the Grand Canyon was like going to Mars and that the size of Texas was bigger than he ever imagined.
A recently-discovered propaganda video revealed how the North Korean government seeks to silence Christianity by painting believers as “religious fanatics” and “spies” bent on undermining the stability of the hermit kingdom. The video, obtained by The Voice of the Martyrs, was allegedly used to teach state security agents how to identify and silence those who promote religion inside the country.
North Korea has for the last eighteen years ranked as the worst persecutor of Christians in the world on Open Doors USA’s World Watch List. In the hermit country, those who profess Christ or are caught communicating with missionaries face severe repercussions like torture and imprisonment.
