North Korea and the Fragility of American Freedom

David Nurenberg, English

I stepped out of the moist, petrol-smelling air of the tarmac at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport and, under the watchful, man-sized eyes of a Kim Il Sung poster, answered the questions of the Korean People’s Army officer at the immigration desk.

“Where in the United States are you from?”

“Boston.”

“What is your occupation?”

“Teacher.”

The stony expression of this soldier, barely older than my students, broke into a hopeful grin.

“Do you teach at MIT?”

“No.”

His face sank in disappointment as he stamped my entry card. “Next!”

Academic snobbery was just the first unexpectedly familiar thing I encountered in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), aka North Korea, a nation I, like most Americans, had been raised to see as incomprehensibly alien. Over the next few weeks, I indeed encountered such unfamiliar phenomena as an utter lack of corporate-branded advertising, a proliferation of giant Kim statues, and laborers shout-singing Communist anthems as they marched in unison to construction sites.

But the conversations in the DPRK school where I spent most of my time would have been easily recognizable at Milton: students stressing about homework and college admissions, teachers complaining that kids disrespect their elders. Most discussions, once people trusted me enough to let me join, were about family, friends, movies, and music. My travel to the DPRK, one of only about 1000 visits from Americans since 1953, confirmed author George Orwell’s theory from 1984 that governments ban travel to “enemy nations” because otherwise a citizen “would discover that [the people there] are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.”

But the trip had an unexpected ancillary lesson for me: day-to-day life in a dictatorship, even in the most autocratic nation on Earth, is deceptively normal and quotidian. It was the beginning of my realization that, if America ever took steps in that direction, an average day might still look and feel the same as ever.

I also taught in Turkmenistan, which vies with Belarus for the dubious honor of the second most closed society in the world. During that time, and my subsequent two return visits, I walked past golden statues of the President-for-Life, memorized the Turkmen months of the year (re-named after members of the President’s family), made my performative obeisance to the President at each morning’s school bell…and then went on to teach Turkmen students who were just as alternatively intelligent, curious, goofy, cynical, bored and creative as any I’ve taught at Milton. I attended both a birthday and a funeral with my host family, and occasionally chaperoned my host siblings to a video game café.

Turkmenistan, like North Korea, is a place where the wrong word spoken, or the whim of a security official, can result in your imprisonment or disappearance. But most people just shove their knowledge of this to the side and live their daily lives. My cultural education (mainly movies like Star Wars and V for Vendetta) prepared me to think totalitarianism looked like hordes of jackbooted soldiers marching in the streets while people cowered in their homes, communicating in whispers. But in North Korea and Turkmenistan, totalitarianism looked like banal everyday interactions, where you’d never know anything was amiss unless you listened for the things people didn’t ever discuss.

I didn’t know then what I know now: in America, too, one can be aware that the police are abducting and imprisoning people without due process, even killing citizens in the streets with impunity, but if it’s happening far enough away, you compartmentalize it. You see your leader’s face start adorning banners, theaters, and money, and you shrug it off.

In the DPRK and Turkmenistan, omnipresent surveillance imposed a certain kind of circumspection that was so habitual it was hard to notice. Living under the constant watch of cameras in today’s America, knowing my government uses facial recognition technology to track protestors, according to reporting by the New York Times, and that my internet usage is an open book to advertisers and law enforcement alike, I have so automatically become extra cautious of my visual and digital “footprint” that I barely registered the change.

The dictatorships I visited provided no clear, defined lines between what was and was not permissible to say, so self-censorship when it came to all matters political was a natural reflex. Or rather, only some matters political – you could, and did, make the political statement of praising the regime as often and as openly as you could. Today, I ponder all the self-censoring teachers do to avoid seeming “too political.” But in Orwellian style, “apoliticality” here sometimes seems to describe a definite political directive. I received zero pushback when I had students examine Bill Clinton’s impeachment or his “Desert Fox” campaign against Iraq, but when George W. Bush launched the second Iraq War, and when Donald Trump was being impeached (twice), I received various “friendly” cautions about “steering clear of politics.” Picking apart Obama’s Affordable Care Act? No one could afford to care. Putting Bush’s USA-PATRIOT Act up for debate? That, apparently, was unpatriotic. Reading Black Lives Matter tweets? Too political. Reading The Fountainhead? Well, that’s just the curriculum. According to reporting by The Intercept, of the 392 education bills introduced across America since 2021 to constrain “politicized” curriculum and instruction, all but fifteen were proposed by Republican lawmakers, designed specifically to limit learning about women’s rights, slavery, ethnic studies, and LGBTQ identity. President Trump claims these laws simply correct a pre-existing trend of “radical leftist indoctrination.” Indeed, at Milton, it is conservative-identifying students who report self-censorship in the State of the Acad, and conservative university professors have long reported feeling stifled on majority liberal campuses, although this phenomenon has lessened since the Trump presidencies, per the Harvard Kennedy School and the Heterodox Academy. Either way, “too political” often seems code for “not the politics we agree with.”

Part of me is flattered that some people think – even though I struggle to get even highly motivated students to master Megablunders, routinely fail to convince them that ChatGPT-ing their essays does them a disservice, and can’t even persuade them to bus their dishes in Forbes – that I have such Svengali-like power to brainwash teenagers into supporting certain political points of view. Nationally representative studies conducted by Brown University’s Annenberg Center, Saint Louis University’s School of Education and the American Historical Association have found no evidence that even teachers who openly express personal political positions in the classroom alter the beliefs of their students.

Nevertheless, a 2024 RAND study found that 65% of American K-12 teachers reported constant self-censorship regarding politics, fearful not only of administrative consequences but of “verbal or physical altercations with upset parents.” One third of district leaders confirmed their educators received threats. Furthermore, these fears existed even in states where censorship bills had failed to pass. In New Hampshire, a “conservative mothers group” even offered $500 bounties to “catch teachers who break a state law prohibiting certain teachings about racism and sexism.” I am aware of no bounty hunters declaring open season on teachers who have their students watch Melania. Graduate student lecturers like Ranjani Srinivasan, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Badar Khan Suri were arrested for writing op-eds or for taking part in campus protests that the President disagreed with. This all somehow feels more extreme than “adjusting for bias.” Nevertheless, American teachers keep teaching, as do teachers in the DPRK – you just adjust to a new, more cautious normal.

One DPRK teacher told me that his country limited expression (and, although he didn’t say this outright, punished dissent) in order to protect its citizens from “harmful and divisive ideas.” Turkmenistan’s president at one point literally banned all books from school curricula except the one he wrote. At the time, I prided myself on coming from a society that valued diversity of ideas and grew from debating them. But truthfully, the US has a long history of book banning; while historically such laws arise in individual communities, Congress is currently debating an unprecedented federally mandated book ban (HR 7661), in the name of “protecting children” from “harmful” (LGBTQ) ideas. Proponents of these bans say they are in fact democratic, letting individual families and students, not teachers and schools, choose what information kids can access.

Of course, this “access” also includes a wealth of internet and AI misinformation. AI magnates like Sam Altman and Peter Thiel have distinct and extremist political agendas, and Google actively monitors and censors Gemini’s responses to questions it deems “political.” If schools teach media literacy, do they empower students to be more discerning consumers of information? Or is the very notion of challenging corporate hegemony over information a political act from which we need to keep students “free?”

I recall when my North Korean colleagues told me theirs was indeed a free society, as well as one without economic inequality. Yet surely at least some had seen their colleagues, or even their family, imprisoned for what they said, or were falsely accused of saying. Surely they could see as well as I that people in rags scavenged through trash cans not far from where welldressed, well-fed citizens strolled by. My colleagues weren’t stupid, and they weren’t precisely lying; they had mastered the art of what Orwell called “doublethink,” simultaneously believing two contradictory ideas, as a survival tactic. I even found myself doing it from time to time when I was there, so I recognize it now when it starts to manifest at home. Our government releases footage that clearly shows ICE agents shooting a nonviolent protestor while simultaneously telling us said protestor was behaving violently and was shot in self-defense. We see video and hear testimony of January 6th rioters assaulting police and wrecking the capitol, then read the White House website declaring that said demonstrators were peaceful and wrongly accused. If I am to include discussion of any of this in my classes, do I have to give equal airtime to both narratives or else be accused of “political bias?” And to do that, must I make some part of myself believe both interpretations are potentially valid? I fear the human mind, in any country on Earth, is flexible enough to carve room for “alternative facts,” to momentarily believe the possibility that 2+2 can equal 5 if that means they keep their job, their freedom, or their life.

My mind is not quite so flexible as to fully equate the autocracies I’ve visited with America. I am 100% sure I will not be jailed or executed for writing this column, although disturbingly only about 85% sure I won’t be fired. I still believe that the American people, unlike those in the DPRK or Turkmenistan, have avenues for changing our system besides outright revolution. But that we allowed the similarities to get this far, with so little pushback, deeply concerns me.

I cannot stop thinking about my most memorable conversation from North Korea, with an elderly soldier who said he had seen combat against Americans during the Korean War. He told me that the conflict between our two nations was “stupid,” because our people had more in common with one another than we thought. At the time, I took this as a hopeful sign. Now, I realize this comparison is a double-edged sword; our human similarity may also include a distressing tolerance for autocracy.