You’ll Never Meet a North Korean

One day, while sitting and contemplating, a strange thought came to me.

We all have some concept of the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea, right? Whether we say they’re a horrible dictatorship, a nuclear threat, a cult country… or just “those strange people over there,” we rightly see the government as something we don’t want to aspire to.

Because it is pretty much all those things. Except maybe, as one could argue, a threat to the North America.

You’ve heard of the fact that they have nukes, and parade them through the streets… but we don’t think about it much because we know they don’t have the technical capability to launch a wide-scale attack over here.

Plus, as most of us should surmise, it would be suicidal. They can threaten us, but they couldn’t stand up to any amount of direct combat with Western superpowers.

Alone in the World:

That puts them in a unique position to the rest of the planet. That’s why it’s called the “hermit kingdom,” after all. A hermit being someone who stays away (or stands apart) from others.

When I mentioned before that we all have some concept of this… well that’s not really true.

You see, there are still thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of ignorant people out there who will ask someone “are you from North or South Korea?” It even happened on reality TV at least once!

You might think, how could anyone possibly… possibly! But — even in Western cultures, where history is mandatory in schools — they do. Or rather, don’t. Don’t know that “the two Koreas” are one of the most opposite pair of cultures in the world.

So, my strange thought was… “I’ll never meet a North Korean.”

If you think about it in the simplest, smallest terms (one person to another), that’s entirely true. If not somehow shocking as well.

Not only will I not, but likely no one I know will. And probably no one anyone of those people knows will, either!

Technically, anyone who who knows Dennis Rodman knows someone. Yes, I’m not making that up!

Some of you probably remember the crazy headlines that former NBA star Dennis Rodman visited Pyongyang (the capitol city) in 2013 and developed a friendship with Kim Jong Un. That wasn’t a fever dream, it’s true. And I’m not gonna comment further about it.

Plus, it goes without saying anyone who’s met the current U.S. President knows someone who knows the North Korean royal family.

But we’re not talking about that, are we?

The Citizens:

Who has met a regular North Korean? Again, given the geopolitical situation… almost no one.

You either have to meet one of very rare escapees, or be one of the rarer people permitted to go to country and travel outside the palace grounds.

There are many documentaries about living in or escaping from North Korea that can bring you more perspective.

So, it’s one of those facts that, again, sound unbelievable. But North Koreans aren’t the only isolated people out there. In fact, it’s quite common. Ironically.

Other examples:

There’s Mount Athanos, an island (actually island/penninsula) in Greece where the most conservative sect of Orthodox men (and yes, only men) have lived for centuries. It’s known as an “autonomous region” that’s constantly at odds with the broader, liberal Greek government.

So those are both cultural examples, but there can also be people isolated by geography. Far-flung regions of Tibet and Mongolia are the classic examples of this, or frozen tundras like Siberia.

But there are literally hundreds of places like that around the world.

For instance, Tuvalu is a tiny multi-island nation in the South Pacific that’s extremely hard to get to. Someone dubbed it “the least visited country on Earth.”

They do have an economic ace-in-the-hole, however, that has kept their culture… well, afloat.

Have you noticed that some websites devoted to television shows or studios end in .tv? It makes sense, right. TV stands for television.

Believe it or not… there’s more to it than that. If you think about it, there’s “.org” for organization, but most others are different countries. Canada has “.ca,” Brazil has “.br,” and the United Kingdom has “.uk.”

So anyway… “.tv” actually stands for Tuvalu! They rent out the all the domains to those “TV” websites. So they have more to do with the wider world than most people will ever know.

But then there are the super fascinating cases of societies that fit both categories simultaneously.

Tribal isolationists:

There are still “uncontacted tribes” on this Earth. That’s not a myth, but most of them know of our existence (the international order) in some small way.

So they were geographically isolated throughout their history, and now still don’t want anything to do with anyone else.

The one we know the most about (which isn’t saying much) are the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island.

If you haven’t discovered this down a YouTube rabbit-hole, the short story is this island in the Indian Ocean (part of the Andaman Islands) has been shrouded in mystery for centuries.

European colonists tried to land on it many times over decades, only to be chased away by arrows and spears. Or, famously for one ship’s occupants landing on a further-away shore, slaughtered meticulously.

The history of further contact is long and involved. Most notably though, a British government administrator named Maurice Vidal Portman lead an expedition where they did make it inland. They discovered crude paths and a small village.

He captured 2 elderly people and 4 children and attempted to bring them back to Europe. But they all got sick, and the adults died. The children were delivered back to the island with “quantities of presents.”

God only knows the type of horror this engendered about the outside world from then on.

As of 1956, the Indian government has made travel to the island, or anywhere within 3 miles, illegal. The one and only peaceful contact occurred in 1991 as members Anthropological Survey of India were permitted to wade near the beach with coconuts.

This saga unfortunately doesn’t end as well. At least not so far. A young missionary famously gained illegal access to the island in 2018 in an effort to convert the tribe. It should have been no surprise to anyone when his bloody body was left on the shore.

The Sentinelese, as they’ve become known, aren’t the only ones. There’s at least one tribe in the deep rainforest of Brazil as well.

Recent areal photos prove it:

So, what more could we find out in the years to come? Well, a ton.

But we might not ever know the things we’re most curious about: language, family, social structure, or beliefs.

But is it our place to know these things? As burning as our curiosity might be, I don’t think it is. Being an enlightened society shouldn’t just be about bringing our way of life to those who want it. It should be about respecting other’s intentions and wishes.

One thing we’ve known from the beginning, or at least should have, is they don’t want anything from us. They don’t want to be “saved” from their land or “made more comfortable.” So the best way to honor them would be to respect that.