A North Korean defector living in South Korea was detained on Tuesday after ramming a stolen bus into a barricade on a bridge near the heavily militarized border, in an apparent attempt to get back to the North, Yonhap news agency reported.
The incident took place at around 1:30 a.m. (16:30 GMT on Monday) at the Tongil Bridge in Paju, northwest of the capital Seoul, after the man ignored warnings from soldiers guarding the bridge and attempted to drive through, Yonhap said, citing city police.
Paju police referred queries on the incident to provincial police authorities. The northern Gyeonggi police agency could not be reached for comment.
The man aged in his 30s who had defected more than a decade ago told police that he was trying to return to North Korea after struggling to settle in the South, the report said.
In South Korea? Nothing. But when you’ve been effectively institutionalized your entire life, adapting to a significantly freer society can be difficult or impossible.
But is it really more free? SK is a effectively a corporate state. The chaebols are state sanctioned monopolies. The whole set up of SK is just a different flavor of authoritarianism than the North. If you can’t get hired into one of the 5 or however many megacorps you are essentially sidelined from success, and if you do win the lottery to wage slave all day, the reward is arguably more torturous than pleasurable.
None of us know the specific but it’s easy enough to understand that some people just don’t like some flavors and prefer ones we might not.
“Freedom” in the West has been reduced from earning (or maintaining) self sufficiency and as-much-as-possible independence (thus necessitating state restraint, rational persuasive argument on ideas to earn the people’s consent to be governed) for a man’s entire family to being paid just enough money, for more hours of work, to keep one person just fed enough, just healthy enough, just clothed enough and mobile enough, to be a productive employee. The only freedom - outside of maintaining good worker drone - is in media. Whatever media the collected wealth decides it will propagate - because it is obviously filtered and screened - to reflect ideals the ruling class sees as beneficial towards their ends.
I don’t consider choosing the color of the shirt I’m wearing or whether I’m going to have chicken tenders or dino nuggets for dinner - again - and whatever valid fluff piece of pop is coming across the radio to be a freedom compelling enough to die over. And having read the works of the Enlightenment philosophers who the founding fathers basically plagiarized for the constitution, I’m pretty fucking absolutely positive no one in the 1770’s would’ve thought that either.
It’s all social engineering. Which makes it all abhorrent. Korea, all of Korea, is an authoritarian hellscape. Both flavors taste like shit.
Yeah, I bet he tried to run back because he was too free.
This is a well known issue with refugees of hyper-authoritarian places. NK refugees discuss this a lot. Like the other person said, this is a well known phenomenon with freed prisoners, too. Basically you spent so much time conforming to a very, very, specific way of living, that you are stuck in that mind frame. Without a lot of therapy you are likely to be unable to adjust. Just like people who have been in abusive households their whole lives, yet return to them, because they can’t function, when they are in a freer circumstance.
This well understood issue.
Basically, yeah. Like I said, integration into society is difficult if you’ve been institutionalized. Going from a highly controlled and regimented life to one where you have to do everything yourself is difficult. I’m not surprised that some people reject it. We see the same thing when people get out of long prison terms.