Shin Dong-hyuk's North Korean Prison Camp Lies Exposed

Shin Dong-hyuk's North Korean "Prison Camp" Lies Exposed

By Steven Argue

Shin Dong-hyuk (born Sin In Gun) apologized this week for lying about a number of details of his claimed life in a DPRK prison camp saying, “To those who have supported me, trusted me and believed in me all this time, I am so very grateful and at the same time so very sorry to each and every single one of you.”

Sin In Gun had described himself as “the only known person born in a North Korean prison camp that escaped and survived to tell the tale”. The supposed camp he lived in is described to sound like a brutal concentration death camp. His testimony was key evidence in UN charges of human rights violations by the DPRK. In addition, his story, written down in the bestseller "Escape From Camp 14", has been key propaganda in the west's portrait of the DPRK as a hell on Earth.

This week, the Washington Post, in reporting Sin Un Gun's changed story said, "Shin was forced to acknowledge the problems with his story after other defectors in South Korea began questioning his version of events and threatened to expose him."

Blaine Harden, who narrated Sin Un Gun's "Escape From Prison 14" said:

“In writing this book, I have sometimes struggled to trust him. He misled me in our first interview about his role in the death of his mother, and he continued to do so in more than a dozen interviews. When he changed his story, I became worried about what else he might have made up.”

The following documentary, for which I provide a link, interviews his father, stepmother, and victims of his crimes showing that Sin Un Gun lied about everything. He was not born into a prison camp. He was not in prison for the political activities of his parents, but instead for a rape he carried out himself. His father was never in a prison camp. The injuries that he claimed were the results of tortures in Prison Camp 14, were actually a result of injuries he received as a child and at work later in life.

Sin Un Gun's lies bring much into question about the west’s narrative on North Korea. The fact that one of the main witnesses who supposedly exposed human rights violations in the DPRK is a fraud does not mean that there are no human rights violations in the DPRK. It does, however, expose the propensity of the United States propagandists and supposed human rights organizations to parade a man around whose story was easily discredited from the beginning, calling into question all of their eyewitnesses.

It is well established that the South Korean government is guilty of torturing and murdering hundreds of thousands of leftists and suspected leftists. The U.S. government also murdered 5 million people to defend that capitalist dictatorship in the so-called Korean War. The United States itself is now known for torture and has an incarceration rate far higher than the DPRK while the U.S. also has police forces across the country that routinely murder people in the streets with complete impunity.

The DPRK is described by imperialist propaganda as an underdeveloped prison house run by a madman where everyone is starving. Truth is, people have not been starving in the DPRK since the 1990s when a combination of terrible weather events and an end to beneficial trade relations with the USSR caused starvation. The DPRK is in fact a relatively modern country with good housing, free socialized health care, socialist food distribution, a 99% literacy rate, and 12 years of free compulsory education (longer than in South Korea).

The DPRK has a socialist economy that has benefited the Korean workers and farmers, but is a country surrounded by a hostile and extremely deadly capitalist world that has murdered 5 million Koreans. Of course it is more complicated than that. North Korea is also ruled by an oppressive Stalinist regime (which I argue is no more brutal than the blood thirsty imperialists). With its socialist economy and overthrow of the capitalist class, the DPRK is a deformed workers state that both needs a political revolution to bring authentic workers democracy and needs to be defended from imperialist attack, economic sanctions, imperialist lies, and internal capitalist counterrevolution. This is the program promoted by the Leninist-Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Tendency for the DPRK along with the need to overthrow the brutally repressive capitalist government in South Korea, throw out 30,000 U.S. occupying troops, and overthrow the system of class exploitation in South Korea as a step towards the revolutionary unification of Korea.

-Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency

The following movie includes eyewitness testimony and exposes the lies of Sin Un Gun (aka Shin Dong-Hyok):

The Truth About Shin Dong-hyok Exposed (DPRK Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P82aad8QQW4

For more on the realities of the DPRK, read the articles on following Facebook page:

Imperialists Out of South Korea & Hands Off DPRK
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Imperialists-Out-of-South-Korea-Hands-Off-DPRK/1539740902975992

Also see:

Revolutionary Tendency on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionaryTendency