North Korea is a most miserable nation.

Friday, 4/28/17

As a young priest, from age 26 to 37, I was a missionary, pastor of a parish in South Korea where the people were just recovering from the war.

Anyway, a friend I met with after Mass yesterday suggested that my lengthy experience over there might equipp me to say something worth while about our present troubles with North Korea.

However, I found my parishioners over there to be more like the best of Americans than they are like the Korean people imprisoned in the police state of North Korea.

In my first year in South Korea I noticed the ways the people were different from Americans, but through the next nine years I noticed only how the people over there were the same as the best of Amercans.

Recently I bought a book on North Korea from Amazon, and it gave a hideous picture of that country. Everywhere you go you would see pictures of The state’s founder, son, and grandson: of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il. And the present Kim Jong Un.

Base on their loyalty to the state, the people are grouped into ten levels of citizens. The top level is made up of Western style people, who are well shooled and well dressed. They appear in the newsreels. The bottom level are people raised like animals whom others can kill without punishment.

The book I read followed the career of a third-level citizen, son of an officer, who fled north to China when his father met disgrace.

The book also followed the story of a tenth-level man, born in Prisoner Camp I4. He was raised to a reversed scale of morality that had him clapping at seeing his mother hanged, that had him joining in killing a girl his age when she appeared to be disloyal to the nation’s founders.