From Korea with love Pt 1

Her name may or may not have once been Myung-hee.
Although she and her son have a life here in Japan with a completely different name, she grew up in North Korea and severed in the military. Having such a history made her choice even harder because if caught she wouldn't face prison but death. She crossed the border illegally into China and made the long slow journey to Thailand through Laos on many local short journey trains because the transport police regularly inspected travelers on the long distance trains. She journeyed from there to South Korea and from there to here. She was once an enemy of my nation and now happily living here in much better conditions than she could ever have attained staying there. Only by place of birth was she once an enemy of my nation and now we see how human she and those many others are under the uniform of brainwashed regimentation and beneath that dark foreign politic.

I noticed this following idea on Ikjeld and was amused enough to reproduce the basics of it here.
The KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY of DPRK has its server in here in Japan funnily enough! They don't have to be professional journalists to write for this site and a simple browsing of it (its a link!) will demonstrate this fact. If you browse through the dates you will notice exactly 'how' they report their view of the news, especially about the nation states that they don't like such as Japan, South Korea and the USA.

Here are the instructions to write news articles for that site!

We build our walls and fences to keep out the barbarians and those who would do us harm. The hopeless ambitions of leaders to build barriers and maintain our internal safety and to keep the threats at bay continually prove futile. Most were designed to keep unwanted people out but in recent decades we have seen them built to keep people in.
Looking back across the history of walls and fences it seems that all have eventually failed and yet still there are those who spend so much money on erecting new ones. The futility of such gestures can only be prompted by desperation and tragedy. It seems to me that physical walls are built after mental ones have already been well established and this is the real problem. We have hatred and hostility rising from the flames of fear and insult and injuries both real and imagined. Then comes the acknowledgment of racism, religious intolerance and territorial disputes that serve to make the barriers a desired thing and once these people are separated then they only come together to fight! These walls create distance that promotes ignorance and it becomes so much harder to reach any kind of mutual understandings as we can all witness in the current and various 'peace process' deals at locations around the world.

When individuals get to know each other such as Myung-hee and I have then it becomes almost impossible to hate based on the generalities of race, religion and history. To hate you need an abstraction because once we give those outsiders a face and a home and we share moments of life together and eat together then all abstractions fade away.
To help ourselves progress we need to take down those walls that exist in our head. Ignorance holds us all back. While I can applaud Myung-hee at her bravery to change her life through great risk as I sit and eat with her and her three year old I can only feel sorry for the human condition that fills us with fear of strangers and how for so many people it much easier to remain in ignorance and hate than it is to learn, to tolerate and enjoy differences and to meet others face to face without wanting to kill them.