US Ban on Visiting North Korea Part of 'Demonization' of DPRK

US citizens had been brainwashed by official government propaganda painting North Korea as an oppressive totalitarian state, Betsy Yoon, a member of the Nodutdol for Korean Community Development group, believes.

The US ban on tourist travel to North Korea is aimed a "demonizing" the country and justifying military intervention there, says an organizer of cultural exchanges.

US President Joe Biden's administration renewed a ban on tourist trips to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in July, with the State Department claiming there was a "continuing serious risk of arrest and long-term detention of US nationals" there.

The ban was first imposed in 2017 under previous president Donald Trump.

Betsy Yoon told Sputnik there was "no substance" to the government's claims, stressing that her organisation Nodutdol had organised 11 education exposure programs to the DPRK between 2001 and 2015 which "faced no issues... In fact, participants find that it's an extremely safe environment."

She said the side-issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programme was something "the US itself has a hand in escalating."

"What is most crucial at this time is the need to end the Korean War formally and enact the peace treaty for permanent peace," Yoon stressed. "And in the absence of any permanent peace guarantees, the inevitable effect will be things like military escalation, such as the wargames that the United States is practicing with South Korea or North Korea's efforts to ensure that it can be defended."

The community leader said the ban was effectively a "demonization" of the DPRK with two main aims.

"One is to make people here feel like people in North Korea are sort of alien, very separate, and not think of them as everyday human beings," Yoon said. "The second purpose is to make the case for that these people need to be rescued from themselves," noting that "military intervention is often stated as how this rescue can be effected."

She noted that North Korea was not the only country subject to that kind of demonization by the Western powers. Washington has placed severe restrictions on travel to its socialist revolutionary neighbour Cuba, which effectively make tourism there impossible for US citizens.

"This would apply to any place that's being currently demonized by the United States," Yoon said. "But going there directly and engaging with people on a very human level really helps to lift the cloud of brainwashing that has been inflicted on the United States people, people in the West in general about what kind of place North Korea is, what kind of people North Koreans are."

The organizer said her group's delegations were mostly from the Korean diaspora in the US.

"So there's a particularly personal dimension that comes into play when our delegation visits, and the realization that typically almost always accompanies is this that we are all Koreans," Yoon said.

For more insightful commentary on global events, check out our Sputnik Radio show By Any Means Necessary.