Help Change North Korean Society From the Ground Up By Breaking the Information Blockade

Kang Chol Hwan is best known for the Aquariums in Pyongyang, in which he tells how he was raised in a political prison camp for an unknown “crime” “committed” by his grandfather.

Perhaps less well known is that Kang started the North Korea Strategy Center in Seoul several years ago, and for years they have been sending in DVDs, USBs, etc. loaded with movies, TV shows, and information about the outside world (eg, a copy of Wikipedia).

The ways in which North Korea attempts to block access to news and information about the outside world have been well documented on this blog and elsewhere, as has the gradual erosion of those controls. NKSC and other groups seek to accelerate that trend by sending in media that informs and that gets North Koreans thinking. Some examples of what they send in:

We send over media such as Hollywood movies, dramas, and documentaries – content that shows the outside world to the North Korean people. Recent examples include The Book Thief (to show freedom of information),The Pursuit of Happyness (free markets), Human Planet foreign culture), 50/50 (welfare), Midnight in Paris (foreign culture), and Tyrant (authoritarianism). [NKSC Indiegogo campaign]

That’s right, NKSC is in the middle of its first Indiegogo fundraising campaign, and they need our financial support and our help to spread the word. I am friends with several present and past staff members at NKSC and can attest to their dedication and tireless hard work. And though they perhaps wouldn’t want me to mention it, I can attest to their self-sacrifice in working at a non-profit organization in Korea such as theirs (put it this way: the wages and, to a lesser extent, the social status accrued by those in the NKHR field in South Korea is not something that most of their fellow countrymen, or many others for that matter, aspire to).

Here’s a short video about NKSC’s media dissemination work.

For more on the topic of how exposure to outside information affects North Koreans, be sure to read A Quiet Opening (PDF), the report that Nat Kretchun and Jane Kim wrote for InterMedia in 2012 (which included research by NKnet).

Visit NKSC’s Indiegogo campaign page and learn more by clicking one of the graphics at the top or bottom of this post.

Whether you’re able to donate to the campaign or not at this time, please share it widely with your friends and relations!

-Thanks, Dan Bielefeld