In North Korea, a generation gap grows behind the propaganda

 TIM SULLIVAN,Associated Press 2 hours 25 minutes ago 

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PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — She dances beneath portraits of two smiling dictators, a modern young woman in a central Pyongyang plaza who twirls to music calling on North Koreans to die for their leader.

When she speaks, a torrent of reverence tumbles out for North Korea's ruling family, as if phrases had been plucked at random from a government newspaper: "The revolution of the Great Leader" ... "Laborers trust and venerate Marshal Kim Jong Un." And as hundreds of students dance behind her in a choreographed display of loyalty, she is adamant about one thing: North Korea, she insists, has no generation gap.

"The spirit of the youth has remained the same as ever!" Ryu Hye Gyong says.

But look more closely — look beyond her words, beyond the propaganda posters on every street, and the radios playing hymns to the ruling family — and the unspoken reality is far more complicated.

A 19-year-old university student with a confident handshake and carefully styled hair, Ryu lives in a city that today feels awash in change. There are rich people now in Pyongyang, chauffeured in Mercedes even as most citizens of the police state remain mired in poverty. There's a supermarket selling disposable diapers. On sidewalks where everyone once dressed in drab Maoist conformity, there are young women in not-quite miniskirts and teenage boys with baseball caps cocked sideways, K-pop style.

In this profoundly isolated country, a generational divide is quietly growing.

Here, where rulers have long been worshipped as all-powerful providers, young people have grown to adulthood expecting nothing from the regime. Their lives, from professional aspirations to dating habits, are increasingly shaped by a growing market economy and a quietly thriving underground trade in smuggled TV shows and music. Political fervor is being pushed aside by something else: A fierce belief in the power of money.

Conversations with more than two dozen North Korean refugees, along with scholars, former government officials and activists, make it clear that young people are increasingly unmoored from the powerful ideology the government long ago placed at the center of every life.

"When Kim Jong Un speaks, young people don't listen," says Han Song Yi, 24, who left the North in 2014, dreaming of pop-music stardom in the South. "They just pretend to be listening."

In her tight jeans and gold-speckled eyeshadow, Han loves talking about fashion and the K-pop bands she and her friends secretly listened to back home. She can also deconstruct how the sudden emergence of short skirts in her hometown in the autumn of 2012 mirrored not just the ascension of Kim Jong Un, the new leader often photographed with his glamorous wife, but also the political cynicism growing around her.

"North Korea in the past, and North Korea today are so different," she says.

Nobody in North Korea will talk to an outsider about this, and it's easy to see why.

Stand at nearly any Pyongyang street corner and reminders of the state's power are everywhere. Mounted portraits show the first two rulers: Kim Il Sung, who shaped the North into one of the world's most repressive states, and his son, Kim Jong Il, who created the personality cults that now dominate public life. Immense rooftop signs spell out praise for grandson Kim Jong Un, the ruling party and the military.

The message is unmistakable: "People are always careful about what they say," says Han.

For generations, propaganda about the Kim family was all that most North Koreans knew, a mythology of powerful but tender-hearted rulers that still suffuses everything from children's stories to TV shows.

It's an emotional tug felt by many older North Koreans. In part that's because they remember the days of relative prosperity, when the state provided food, apartments and clothing.

An economic shift began in the mid-1990s, when Soviet aid ended and devastating floods caused widespread famine. The police state weakened. Smuggling flourished. While the state eventually tightened its hold again, private enterprise just grew.

But to people who came of age after the famine, when it had become clear the regime was neither all-powerful nor all-providing, the propaganda is often just background noise.

"After a while, I stopped paying attention," says Lee Ga Yeon, who began helping support her family as a teenager during the famine by selling food door to door. "I didn't even think about the regime anymore."

That lack of interest frightens the regime, whose legitimacy depends on its ability to remain at the core of life.

"They know that young people are where you get revolutions," says Hazel Smith, a North Korea scholar at SOAS, University of London and former aid worker in North Korea. "This is the cleavage that the government is worried about."

Kim Jong Un, who wasn't even 30 when he came to power after his father's 2011 death, now faces the challenge of his own generation.

On his gentler days, Kim has reached out to young people. There was an increase in youth-oriented rallies after Kim's ascension, and public pledges of youth loyalty. There's propaganda now clearly aimed at young people, like the all-woman Moranbong Band, which performs in tight skirts and high heels.

Most of these young people have grown up with at least some access to smuggled DVDs or flash drives, and South Korean soap operas are now beloved, despite being officially banned. To many young Northerners they are windows onto a modern world.

Today, couples in Pyongyang can occasionally be spotted holding hands. In a culture where arranged marriages were the norm until very recently, young people now choose their own spouses. And college students dream of business jobs.

But while the generational divide has grown, there have been no signs of youthful anger: no university protests or political graffiti. Because the power of the police state remains immense. And because the gap isn't about politics.

"It's not about the regime," says Lee, who now studies literature at one of South Korea's top universities. "It's about money."

Money now courses through North Korea. Experts believe the private sector, from small traders to textile factories, accounts for as much as half of North Korea's economy. There's also much more to buy now: battery-powered bicycles, Chinese electronics, solar panels for electricity outages.

"In the past, everybody wanted to be a government official, that was the number-one dream," says Lee. "But more and more, people know that money can solve everything."

Nero, the Execution of Peter and Paul, and the Biggest Fake News in Early Christian History

Christian tradition maintains that after Rome nearly burned to the ground, Nero engaged in a brutal crackdown on Christians which led to the executions of Peter and Paul.

CANDIDA MOSS

07.23.17 12:00 AM ET

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH BROCKWAY/THE DAILY BEAST

On the evening of July 18, in the scorching summer of 64 CE, a fire started in a shop under the Circus Maximus in Rome. The fire quickly spread to nearby homes and businesses and the Circus itself. The fire burned for six days, ravaging the city. It left only four of Rome’s fourteen quarters untouched. 

The reigning emperor, Nero, a man known for his cruelty and love of theater, scapegoated the Christians for the disaster. According to tradition and later historians, as a punishment, Nero devised grotesque executions for the Christians: he covered them in animal skins and had them torn apart by dogs, and he doused them in tar and used them as human torches to light the night sky for his dinner parties. It was in the wake of the fire, Christian tradition maintains, that the most important Apostles–St Peter and St Paul–were arrested and executed. But while the fire of Rome was a devastating historical reality, did Nero actually target Christians as a result?

Most of the historical evidence for Nero persecuting Christians comes to us from the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote between 115-120 CE, at least fifty years after the events he was describing. According to Tacitus, the people of Rome blamed Nero for the fire and Nero responded by deflecting blame onto the Christians. He writes, “Nero fastened guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on [the Christians who] were hated for their abominations.”  Christians were rounded up, arrested, and interrogated for information about others in the city and, in the end, “an immense multitude” was convicted and executed.

In Roman biographies, Nero is known for murdering his own mother; he is certainly capable of this kind of cruelty, but this does not mean that Tacitus’s story is correct. In his recent Journal of Roman Studies article “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” distinguished Princeton classicist Brent Shaw has argued that Tacitus’s story is a later fabrication (full disclosure: I’m inclined to agree with Shaw because I argued something similar in my book Myth of Persecution). 

Shaw points out that there are no references to Christians in the writings of any Roman historians prior to Tacitus. Cassius Dio, another Roman historian who discusses the Great Fire, never mentions the Christians at all, and other later Roman sources that do mention the fire are entirely dependent on Tacitus. Suetonius, the only other second-century Roman writer to mention the mistreatment of Christians by Nero, does not connect these punishments with the Great Fire. He says that they were punished for being a “new and evil superstition.” 

Perhaps the most devastating piece of evidence is the use of the term “Christian.” The first followers of Jesus were Jews. By the time Tacitus was writing in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the second century they had adopted the name Christian and caught the attention of Roman authorities, but it’s not at all clear that Christians thought of themselves or were known as Christians in the 60s. Paul, for example, never uses the word. 

As University of Exeter professor David Horrell has shown, the earliest use of the name “Christian” in writing seems to be the biblical book 1 Peter, which was written at the very end of the first century.  Some have argued against Shaw that the Acts of the Apostles (the book of the Bible that tells the story of the actions of the apostles after the death of Jesus) states that Christians were first called Christians in Antioch in the 50s. But how accurate is Acts? Clare K. Rothschild, a professor in the Department of Theology at Lewis University, told the The Daily Beast that while “scholars typically date Acts anywhere from 56 to 140 CE… a comprehensive study by the late Richard I. Pervo … has persuaded many that Acts was composed closer to the year 115.” What all of this means, then, is that Christians weren’t Christians in 64 CE. They were Jews. Nero could not possibly have targeted a group that didn’t yet exist.

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So what actually happened? Shaw argues that after the fire there were rumors of Nero’s involvement. Nero responded by punishing some arsonists, but these people were not actually Christians, even if they were likely innocent of the charges. In the fifty years that elapsed between the events of 64 CE and the time of Tacitus, those individuals punished by Nero came to be associated with the Christians, because, by the time of Tacitus and Suetonius, Christians were known as trouble makers.

What does this mean, then, for the deaths of Peter and Paul? Well, as I pointed out in Myth of Persecution, the earliest versions of the deaths of Peter and Paul don’t mention the Great Fire at all. In fact it takes centuries to connect the two Apostles to those events. The earliest reference to their deaths (a Christian document called 1 Clement) says that they were executed because of “jealousy.” Several scholars have argued that the word “jealousy” here refers to intra-Christian disputes, meaning that it was because of other church members that Peter and Paul ended up being arrested and killed. Shaw concludes his article by saying that neither the death of Peter nor that of Paul have anything to do with the Great Fire, adding that in both cases their executions had nothing to do with being Christian. He hypothesizes that they were in fact charged with disturbing the peace.

This doesn’t mean of course, that the Great Fire of Rome wasn’t historically significant even beyond the devastating effects of the fire. This is, as Sarah Bond of the University of Iowa has written, an important moment in the history of fire fighting. But much of what we think we know about the fire is the product of legends associated with a tyrannical emperor. To this day people use the expression “fiddled while Rome burned” to refer to Nero’s conduct – but violins wouldn’t be invented until the 11th century, and when the fire broke out he was 35 miles away at his villa. It’s a great turn of phrase, but it’s pretty shoddy history. 

Mosul: Corpses, booby traps and snipers are everywhere in devastated city

Igor Kossov, Special for USA TODAYPublished 11:35 a.m. ET July 20, 2017 | Updated 12:14 p.m. ET July 20, 2017

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There were huge celebrations in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Monday evening after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the Islamic State group in Mosul. (July 10) AP

(Photo: AP)

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MOSUL, Iraq — The massive effort to drive the Islamic State from what had been Iraq's second-largest city is now being matched by an enormous challenge to bring an ancient metropolis back to life from near total ruin.

Much of the historic Old City in western Mosul has been reduced to rubble, with corpses rotting on the streets or buried under debris. Unexploded bombs and booby traps litter the terrain, as Islamic State guerrillas continue sniper attacks. And hundreds of thousands of former residents who fled remain in limbo.  

Rebuilding after the nine-month offensive that ended in July will take years and billions of dollars, but the priority now is to make the city safe enough for residents to return. That means hunting down Islamic State stragglers, removing thousands of bodies and locating all the bombs that could still go off. 

"It's very hard for us," said civil defense Col. Zacharia Ahmed Hassan, who heads a 19-man crew working 10 to 12 hours a day in 118-degree heat to recover bodies in western Mosul. "It's very hot, and we have to get up at 6:30. But we have to do our jobs."

Damage is far more extensive in western Mosul, where the prolonged fighting and airstrikes were more fierce. In contrast, reconstruction in Mosul's eastern half across the Tigris River has been ongoing since January. A large proportion of buildings there remained intact.

Six images tell story of Mosul's destruction

"Some facilities have been damaged, but electricity, water and markets have all come back" in eastern Mosul, said Saeed al-Jayashi, a spokesman for the Iraqi military, during a recent visit to Washington, D.C. "Even university students were back at school, defending their dissertations." 

Hassan said his team works without body armor, making them easy targets for any remaining sleeper cells of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

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Iraqi forces' fight for Mosul underway

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Iraq's federal police members wave Iraq's national flag as they celebrate in the Old City of Mosul on July 9, 2017, after the government's announcement of the "liberation" of the embattled city. Iraq declared victory against the Islamic State group in Mosul on July 9 after a grueling months-long campaign, dealing the biggest defeat yet to the jihadist group.  Fadel Senna, AFP/Getty Images

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Iraqi forces' fight for Mosul underway

Brig. Gen. Saad Maan, in a recent speech to the U.S. Defense Department, said ISIS fighters continue "to have attacks against civilians out of desperation," though they don't hold any territory any more.

Being around so much death takes a toll. Hassan said his most difficult moment was recovering the bodies of five of his relatives from a collapsed building a month ago. 

"It's a bad memory," he said. "The youngest two of them were medical students."

Some of the remains belong to ISIS fighters, but a majority of the bodies are civilians. The team points out that those killed deserve proper burial, but the bodies also pose a public health risk of spreading potential disease if left on the ground. 

Many civilians were shot in the streets by ISIS fighters while attempting to flee, although most were buried under collapsed buildings, largely as a result of airstrikes and other explosions, Hassan said.

More than a dozen civilians previously told USA TODAY they lost relatives in airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition that leveled buildings with scores of people inside. ISIS often used civilians as "human shields" during fighting and airstrikes. 

With so many bodies underneath rubble, extracting them requires much work, although the civil defense team has few vehicles and only basic shovels and pickaxes.

"Many of the civil defense tools were destroyed in the occupation and the fighting," Hassan said. "We don't have the tools we need to help us with the bodies. They sent us a team from Baghdad and some trucks, but they are damaged."

Some team members use their own trucks, and sometimes a private citizen will loan the crew a bulldozer.

The difficult task is further complicated by the presence of many anxious residents, begging the team to help identify their loved ones. "People come to us all the time, shouting and crying," Hassan said. "We understand them."

In one day, the team picks up 20 to 50 bodies, which are taken to the closest hospital for identification. While the work is challenging, there are pleasant surprises.

"Seven days ago, we found 23 people who were still alive. We took them from their graves, under the rubble, and took them to the hospital — men, women and children. They were very weak, hungry and sick, but alive," Hassan said.

The job is dangerous in another way — no protection from the myriad explosive devices. When an bomb is spotted, civil defense calls in the Federal Police's Emergency Response Division to dispose of it.

Most of the bombs are unexploded mortar and rocket-propelled grenades, as well as bombs — between 500 and 2,000 pounds — that were dropped from planes, according to the civil defense and Federal Police. Only a fraction are Improvised Explosive Devices or booby traps set up by ISIS.

Once the explosives are removed, they are handed to the Iraqi army for safe disposal.

"The situation in Mosul is dangerous, especially on the west side," said Col. Taha Zebari of the Emergency Response Division. 

It's hard to know how many explosives remain after five months of intense fighting in western Mosul. 

Zebari said that while his team has not had any losses from the explosives, the job is still difficult because of few funds. 

"My team members are missing fuel and transportation," he said. "Only three members of the team are taking money from the government," with the rest contributing money out of their pockets for equipment.

Contributing: Oren Dorell from Washington, D.C.