Holy Smoke: escaping the atheist hell of North Korea

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

For 75 years, the most anti-Christian regime in modern history has thrown its citizens into prison camps if they are suspected of the slightest dissent. Ten per cent of people live in modern slavery; perhaps 200,000 are behind bars. I'm talking about North Korea, of course – a regime even more abhorrent than Stalinist Russia, but which attracts suspiciously little attention from Western governments and churches unless they feel threatened by its nuclear arsenal.

My guest in this episode of Holy Smoke is Timothy Cho, a Christian human rights activist who escaped from North Korea. Even as a child, he was sentenced to forced labour for the crime of watching a James Bond film. In school he was subjected to hysterical anti-Christian propaganda, but found his faith when he was thrown into a Chinese jail. (North Korean refugees are routinely rounded up by Beijing, which then returns them to the Kim family's giant prison camp.)

Listen to his extraordinary testimony, and then ask yourself: why are Western governments so relaxed about the human rights abuses of this diabolical regime?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.
0:08.3	I'm Damien Thompson.
0:14.9	The world's most tyrannical regime has managed to survive for 75 years without most people in the West giving it a second thought.
0:25.6	It has the world's worst human rights record.
0:28.6	10% of its population live in conditions of modern slavery.
0:32.6	Some 200,000 of its citizens are imprisoned in labour camps, and they include anyone who professes faith in Christ,
0:41.2	because it is, by a considerable margin,
0:44.6	the world's most anti-Christian society.
0:48.2	I'm talking, of course, about North Korea.
0:51.0	Since 1948, three generations of the Kim family have presided over a totalitarian
0:57.1	dictatorship that, for sheer brutality and effectiveness, surpasses even Stalin's Russia. Yet this
1:05.2	abhorrent imprisonment, effectively, of a population of 25 million people is of little interest to most politicians in the West,
1:13.6	unless they feel threatened by North Korea's nuclear arsenal, in which case they pay attention.
1:18.6	It's also a remarkably little interest to most Christian leaders, who, perhaps because it is a socialist state,
1:25.6	feel that maybe they should soft-pedal their criticisms.
1:29.8	In Britain, I can think of only one politician, my personal political hero,
1:34.6	the Catholic crossbench peer Lord Alton of Liverpool,
1:38.2	who unrelentingly draws attention to North Korea's horrifying abuses of human rights and truly disgusting levels
1:47.0	of religious persecution. I find it hard to imagine what life might be like in North Korea,
1:53.0	and I've actually been to South Korea in the mid-1990s to write about what at the time was
1:59.0	the world's largest Christian church, the Oedo Full Gospel
2:02.9	Church in Seoul. But now I've had the opportunity to talk to somebody who has escaped from North Korea,
	...

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