US soldiers defy North Korean propaganda by teaching defectors English
SEOUL — When Captain John Ellerbe introduced himself to his new students last year, he said, one of them seemed unable to believe her eyes.
“She said she had never seen a US soldier before,” Cpt Ellerbe said of the woman, who was taken aback by his friendly demeanour. “In North Korea, they taught that we were like baby killers and we were basically out to get them.”
The Army captain’s students were defectors from North Korea now living in the South and doing what countless young South Koreans do for a leg up in life: Studying English. And in meeting Cpt Ellerbe and other volunteer tutors from the main US military base in Seoul, they were getting an additional lesson.
“When I heard that I had to learn English from the American soldiers, I was so afraid of and difficult to receive the fact,” a defector, Ms Oh, 23, said in imperfect English during a recent class, reading a short speech she had written. “Because I had learnt that the American is very bad enemy to North people when I lived in North Korea.”
Ms Oh was putting it mildly. (She asked that her full name be withheld to protect relatives still in the North, where the government often punishes defectors’ families.)
From kindergarten onward, North Koreans are steeped in government propaganda, much of it intended to stoke fear and hatred of Americans — especially soldiers from the United States. North Korean troops conduct live-fire drills using mock American soldiers as targets. Defectors from the North, more than 1,000 of whom settle in the South each year, have said that a common school activity is for children to beat effigies of US soldiers with sticks.
Such indoctrination is countered for two hours every Saturday at the English classes in southern Seoul, where Americans like Cpt Ellerbe, along with English-speaking soldiers from the South, tutor 20 or so defectors ranging in age from their teens to their 50s. The programme is supported by the Korea Hana Foundation, an organisation funded by the South Korean government that helps defectors adjust to life here.
“This is a way of strengthening our alliance with South Koreans,” said Colonel Maria Eoff, commander of the Yongsan US Army Garrison in central Seoul, where Cpt Ellerbe and the other American tutors are stationed.
Mr Choi Hyun-joon, who came to South Korea in 2008 and now leads a defectors’ organisation, Unification Future Solidarity, said he had the idea for the classes after he met with US soldiers to discuss his experiences in the Ministry of State Security, the North Korean secret police.
The ministry’s responsibilities included keeping foreign influence, like American movies and English-language publications, from reaching ordinary North Koreans. Now, Mr Choi is doing the opposite. (His organisation provides the office space for the classes.) He said the news that defectors were learning English from American soldiers had reached the North, by way of students talking to relatives and friends back home.
“They just wouldn’t believe it,” Mr Choi said.
North Korea’s government uses the spectre of a constant American threat in its domestic propaganda to justify its authoritarian rule, according to experts on the isolated country. The propaganda draws heavily on memories of the Korean War of 1950-53, when American bombers devastated much of the North, and it accuses US soldiers of grotesque acts of violence against civilians during the conflict.
In 2014, North Korea’s leader, Mr Kim Jong Un, called US soldiers “cannibals” during a visit to the Sinchon Museum of American Atrocities south of Pyongyang, the capital, which depicts what the government claims was the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by US soldiers and their South Korean “running dogs” there. The museum has been renovated to present even more graphic renditions of violence that the North accuses “American imperialist wolves” of committing in late 1950. (Historians say that most of the killings in and around the town of Sinchon were carried out by anti-communist Korean militias and that pro-communist forces also perpetrated atrocities that go unmentioned in the propaganda.)
“As visitors move between scenes, each complemented by screaming sound effects, their senses are assaulted by what I can only describe as a pornography of violence,” a recent visitor to the museum wrote on the website 38North.org. “Women having spikes nailed into their heads; breasts being cut off; children being torn from mothers’ arms; mothers and children burned alive, buried alive and tossed from a bridge; men being blown up by dynamite inside caverns — the horrors are unrelenting in number and variety.”
Decades of such propaganda left defectors like Ms Kim Kwang-ok, 31, a student, unprepared for the congeniality of the US soldiers in civilian garb who have been teaching her English in Seoul.
“But I am embarrassed to admit that when I talk about them in Korean, I still inadvertently call them ‘miguknom’,” Ms Kim said, using the Korean word for “American scoundrels”. “That was the only way we referred to them in the North.”
“In North Korea, when you put yourself in a situation where everyone else criticises you, you jokingly say, ‘I am an American jerk’,” said Mr Park Nam-il, 37, the secretary-general of Unification Future Solidarity.
Ironically, one of the most common desires of defectors who settle in the South is to learn English, the language of their homeland’s sworn enemy. Over seven decades of separation, the two Koreas’ versions of Korean have diverged considerably, with the Southern version acquiring many English words. “Lipstick”, “brakes”, “cafe” and “Americano” are all new to defectors. When they play soccer with South Koreans, linguistic chaos ensues.
In North Korea, schools offer English, Chinese and Russian, as foreign-language options starting in fourth grade. “But there was no desire to learn a foreign language we would never use,” said Madam Chung Kyong-hee, 53.
In a recent class for beginners’ English, Madam Chung and several other middle-aged North Korean women painstakingly copied words like “airport”, “luggage” and “bus stop” onto their notepads. They chuckled when they came upon an English word they all knew: “money”. “How much is this?” they repeated after Corporal Seo Young-wook, a South Korean soldier based at Yongnam.
The classes are also an education for the American tutors, giving them a chance to see what ordinary people in North Korea — the country they are trained to be ready to fight — are like.
“It’s also good because we get to relearn English as it’s supposed to be spoken, as opposed to all the slang we usually use,” Cpt Ellerbe said. NEW YORK TIMES
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