Religious Persecution in North Korea

By Doug Bandow
12.9.10

North Korea again has demonstrated its recklessness to the world. Pyongyang recently unveiled its uranium enrichment program and bombarded a South Korean island. For a time war clouds circled the Korean peninsula.

But the Kim dynasty in the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea is more than confrontational. The regime is brutally repressive. The North's prison camps are full of political dissidents, would-be refugees, and religious believers.

The DPRK routinely rates among the world's worst religious persecutors. Formally atheistic, the regime has turned politics into a quasi-religion. The communist system is holy like a church, the ruling Kims, both father and son, are secular saints, the self-reliance philosophy of Juche amounts to theology, recorded in books of Kim sayings, and heretics are severely punished. the rest