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Throughline

The Forgotten War

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.715K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2019

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un are preparing to meet for a second nuclear summit. What has fueled the hostility between these two countries for decades? On this episode, we look back at the tangled history.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We're going to start this episode with the story of a doctor in North Korea.

0:05.6

She was very loyal to the North Korean regime. She wanted to join the party and she really

0:12.5

was a true believer, her father was a true believer, and she was working as a pediatrician

0:19.8

and was in a terrible situation. Personally, she had nothing to eat. She was on the verge of starvation.

0:27.4

The children she was treating in the hospital were starving. People would bring in their kids

0:34.4

who looked like they were in the verge of death.

0:38.2

So very reluctantly, she decided to cross the Tumen River into China and she had no intention

0:47.9

of defecting. She loved her country, but she wanted to go out and get some food and maybe some

0:54.6

money to bring back. She walked across this narrow river into China. It was a time of year when

1:05.1

the river was partially frozen and she fell through the ice and she was wet and she came out to the

1:13.8

Chinese side and she was still dripping wet with water and she walked around and she saw a farmhouse

1:20.5

and the gate was slightly open and she saw in the courtyard a dish with a little bit of rice and

1:28.9

some scraps of meat in it and she was stunned because she had eaten rice in years. She couldn't

1:36.0

remember the last time she had meat and she realized that that food had been left out for the dog

1:43.0

and she said at that moment she was only a few hours out of North Korea. She realized that

1:48.6

dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea and she realized too at that same moment

1:57.5

that everything she had ever been taught was a lie. Her whole life had been a lie.

2:06.6

They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.

2:12.3

Kim Jong-un unleashing an ominous warning. The whole of the US mainland is within our

2:18.0

firing range. It's not a threat but a reality. North Korea has continued pursuit of nuclear weapons

2:24.4

as a path that leads only to more isolation. States like these constitute an axis of evil. South Korea

2:30.8

continues to face a threat of a million troops, most of them, massed, here it's important. The only

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