Chapter One - North Korea

CHAPTER ONE

North Korea

THE KINGDOM OF Lies

There’s no internet.
There’s no Spotify.
There’s no Netflix, no memes, no texting a girl to ask if she’s mad at you. Because she doesn’t have a phone, and if you say the wrong thing, you can both get taken away.

Welcome to North Korea:
The world’s last open-air prison.

Not a metaphor.
Not an exaggeration to the people trapped inside.
A literal, inherited dictatorship where the supreme leader is your god, your father, your jailer, and your judge. And where denying that makes you disappear.

North Korea was never supposed to exist.
It’s a Cold War accident that fossilized.

After World War II, the Soviets and Americans split Korea like they were dividing a pizza. North and South, communist and capitalist. The South got U.S. backing. The North got a Soviet puppet named Kim Il-Sung, a guerrilla fighter who turned his inherited regime into a dynastic cult that’s now on its third Kim.

This isn’t just dictatorship. It’s dynastic theology.
The Kims aren’t leaders. They’re infallible blood gods.

The country’s official ideology, Juche, claims self-reliance, but it’s a front. In reality, it’s paranoid isolation. They shut the borders, rewrote history, and built a society where the only reality that exists is the one the state allows you to see.

You can’t think for yourself, because that’s treason.
You can’t leave the country, because that’s treason.
You can’t question anything, because everyone around you is watching.

There are no outside books.
There are no foreign movies.
There is no Google, no Wikipedia, no Instagram.
There is only the Party, and it says the Kims are behind everything from miracle inventions to sacred rainbows.

And if you think that’s a joke?
Try saying that out loud. See what happens.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, rot in political prison camps.
Torture, starvation, forced labor.
Three generations sometimes jailed together.
And the “crime” might be watching a South Korean drama, trying to escape, talking back, or just being related to someone who did.

Entire families disappear in the night.

And yet, the country smiles for tourists.
Marches in uniform.
Worships massive bronze statues like it’s the divine right of photoshopped gods.

In North Korea, laughter is suspicious.
It means you’re not fully in line.
It means you’ve glimpsed something outside the script.

This isn’t just a regime that punishes rebellion.
It punishes humanness.

When you can’t sing, joke, leave, speak, dance, post, read, or hope… you’re not living.
You’re roleplaying obedience for survival.

And still, people escape.
They crawl through barbed wire, minefields, winter mountains, and entire Chinese provinces just for a shot at life.

Because sometimes, even in hell, the soul knows it’s in a cage.