Home of the brave

Right now, he lives in Seoul

“I still think of freedom as roasted chicken.”

—Shin Dong-hyuk

For a look inside the hermit kingdom also known as North Korea, we’d suggest a book, Escape from Camp 14, a biography of a young man named Shin Dong-hyuk. He was born in a prison camp a few miles outside Pyongyang, and only knew what was inside. His parents were prisoners. Therefore he’d be a prisoner, too. For life. It’s the North Korean way.

The only meat he had access to was from the rats he killed on his own. Prisoners in that prison of a nation have to supplement their diets somehow.

Unlike people in the rest of North Korea, the prisoners inside its gulags are not subject to the constant personality cult of the Kim dynasty. Maybe the Great and Noble Leaders don’t want their faces shown inside the prison camps.

When another prisoner began to talk to Mr. Shin about the outside world—food! freedom! more food!—Mr. Shin negotiated an electric fence and walked to China, and freedom. They say he’s the only person born in one of the gulags to escape.

It took bravery to leave behind the violent guards who forced him to watch his mother’s execution. It took bravery to chance being shot, or worse. He’d already been tortured enough to understand what awaited him if he failed.

But there’s another kind of bravery, too. It comes when you’re a top official in the government of North Korea, you’ve been through the cult of personality all of your life, your family is interconnected with the regime, you live the good life—with plenty of food in London, England—but still you risk all to, essentially, escape the Kim grasp.

Today the world is hearing from Thae Yong Ho.

Thae Yong Ho was living in London as deputy ambassador to the UK, getting his monthly pay from the Kim regime. He is now the most high-profile defector from North Korea in at least two decades, and these days he’s living in South Korea.

He’s making the news just now because he’s giving interviews. As a defector, he was already a marked man. But now that he’s talking with the Western press, he’s enraging officials in Pyongyang. The pudgy little dictator running the show there killed his half-brother a few weeks ago. The spooks in Pyongyang have a long reach, and Mr. Thae knows it better than anybody.

Yet, still he speaks.

In an interview with NBC, Thae Yong Ho says Kim Jong Un is desperate to get a nuke on the end of a working ICBM. After what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, the regime thinks the only guarantee to holding onto power comes with the real threat of a nuclear war.

“If Kim Jong Un has nuclear weapons and ICBMs, he can do anything,” Mr. Thae said. “So I think the world should be ready to deal with this kind of person.”

He added: “Kim Jong Un is a man who can do anything beyond the normal imagination” and that “the final and the real solution to the North Korean nuclear issue is to eliminate Kim Jong Un from the post.”

That must go over swell in Pyongyang.

But the brave Mr. Thae keeps talking. And the West keeps listening, which is smart. After all, this man knows what he’s talking about. And what he faces. Kim Jong Un not only purges his regime from time to time, but also kills off family members who are seen as not sufficiently loyal. He wouldn’t seem to have much mercy for a defector.

Mr. Thae says he defected when his sons started asking questions. Why was there no Internet in North Korea? Why was there no legal system guaranteeing rights as in the UK? Why were folks executed without trial in the gulags? And why were their British friends telling them all these horrible things about North Korea?

Thae Yong Ho was able to defect with his wife and their kids. But he leaves family members back in North Korea. That is, if they’re still alive.

“When a defection of my level happens,” Mr. Thae notes, “the North Korean regime usually sends the family members of high officials, defectors, to remote areas or labor camps and, to some extent, even to political prison camps as well.”

But even with the rhetoric ratcheting up between Pyongyang and Washington, D.C., Thae Yong Ho still tells the Western press that he’s hopeful. More and more people in North Korea are getting information, and seeing how their cousins live in South Korea, and whispering about what their own government is telling them.

“I’m absolutely sure that once North Korean people are educated enough, then they may stand up,” he says. “I think that is very important. And once the people do not believe in what the leadership is saying, then there is a great possibility for possible uprising: what happened in Soviet Union, what happened in communist system in Eastern Europe.”

Of all the things Mr. Thae is telling the Western press, that last bit may ring longest in certain ears listening from Pyongyang.