I won’t dictate terms to any nation that chooses to take him in, although, his convicted crimes against South Korean citizens means he’s probably not a good candidate anywhere in the EU, and especially if it comes at the cost of annoying the US when the EU is looking at a very aggressive Russia.
I’d bet on Russia first, although I could see Belarus adding him to their Wagner allies/pawns. And as @ASL_v2.0 point out upthread, any number of citizens in that block are contenders, assuming NK doesn’t keep him themselves.
Even if so, he could expect to receive a discharge type that would impede launching a successful career in the United States. And maybe worse, any American employer who googles him would see his criminal convictions in South Korea.
Defecting was a high-risk move for several reasons. One is that the U.S. will try hard to get him back, and may succeed. Another is that North Korea has it’s own history of racism. A third is that North Korea is even less of a country of second chances than the U.S. But if King was convinced he could display great self-discipline if only given a fresh chance, defection probably was a rational choice.
We already knew that he was acting for irrational reasons. So the North Korean statement shouldn’t be discounted just on grounds that the reasons they state are irrational.
I have no particular reason to trust anything North Korea says, but in this case, I think it likely that their simplest and most effective propaganda move was just to accurately report what he really did say. Just because it’s propaganda doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not true.
He couldn’t get a dishonorable or bad conduct discharge. Those are only given as punishment after conviction in a court martial. He wasn’t court martialed he was tried in a civilian court. A lesser discharge might keep him from getting a federal job but that’s about it.
As you point out racism, opportunity and everything else is worse in North Korea. It’s not rational.
I had intended to say close to the opposite, but it obviously was unclear because of all the qualifications I made. It’s impossible for me not to qualify, but I’ll try again, going at it a bit differently.
North Korea is much worse, for the average DPRK citizen, than the United States is for the average American citizen. That’s true even when Donald Trump is my President! But if you have a westernized nation criminal record, as Travis King has, living, and, especially, working, in the U.S. is likely to suck. You almost surely won’t starve in the U.S., but, for a guy like King, the same will be true in North Korea. They have something approaching a caste system, and if King, from a DPRK perspective, behaves himself, he can reasonably hope to be treated as an upper class semi-celebrity (the big exception being that North Korean women will be reluctant to date him – hope he took that into account when he made his decision).
In my career I had a lot of returning customers. People with extensive criminal histories. They all have cars, TVs, cellphones, pocket money and the freedom to move about as they wished. Everything I’ve heard of NK is horrific and worse than any level of life in the US. That includes those few soldiers who have defected. The upper class of North Korea consists of one guy.
Don’t bark to loudly lest some other hungry NK person will decide you’re just the thing to enrich his diet of grass and the occasional smidgen of weevilly rice.
For some reason it reminds me of a comment I’ve long though amusing. One of my college buddies describing some decent pot: “Two bong hits and I was out in the parking lot drinking out of a puddle!”
I remember reading a story from a NK Doctor who had escaped into China during the late 90’s. She wandered, freezing, through the Chinese countryside, looking for a safe place to sleep and she came upon a barnyard. There were these two bowls with scraps of food in them, bits of rice, meat, and vegetables.
After she had been there a day or two she realized they were the dog’s bowls. She wrote with such eloquence, I wish I could quote her. But the jist was about her utter shock in realizing that dogs in China ate better than Doctors in North Korea.
That story is in a book called Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. I have it. She mentioned that up until that moment, she still believed that North Korea was the best place in the world. But seeing that…
Thank you ekedolphin. It was an amazing read and I’m glad to see it properly attributed. The strength of these folks is astounding. I will never understand folks who look down on immigrants; it can only be hubris.
Basically, because her life in North Korea was miserable, both from a family standpoint (her husband had divorced her, taking her six-year-old son with him), she was only able to “cobble together” meals from her patients’ gifts of food, and her weight had fallen below 80 pounds, to the point where her breasts shriveled and she even stopped menstruating.
It was the late '90s, and there was a severe famine in the country.
