Dear Friends,
I have read of Christopher Ahn and Adrian Hong and their mission. As a proud American citizen, born into freedom that was hard won by my ancestors, I feel duty bound to act and to raise awareness. As I hope will you upon reading this.
As you read this message, 25 million people are being held as hostages in North Korea. In what can barely be called living, the North Korean people suffer under systemic dehumanization that grinds them into a vicious cycle of submission and survival. They are subject to slavish labor conditions. Women are raped and grossly exploited at the hands of powerful men. Children go without proper food and education, and concentration camps litter the country.
Meanwhile, their abusers, the North Korean regime led by Kim Jong Un, plays the world stage to its tune. It sells arms and missiles to America’s enemies from North Korean embassies across the world. It extorts from its own people. It enriches itself at the expense of international peace building and nonproliferation.
Make no mistake: the potential peace that North Korea has been proposing to President Trump is one where the privileged elite may retain power to exploit their people, and where its Weapons of Mass Destruction soon come to hold the American Government and free world hostage.
This is not a true peace. It is not a just peace.
Earlier this year on March 1st , 2019, the Provisional Government of Free Joseon emerged to challenge the tyrannous North Korean regime. They declared that they would push back against the threat of North Korea and promote the politics of change and freedom.
Led by exiled North Korean refugees, concerned South Korean humanitarians, and a global Korean diaspora, they embody a spiritual successor to Korea’s March 1st Movement of 1919 a century earlier, when the Korean people rose up against their colonial masters for independence. Inspired by the ideals of an American leader, Woodrow Wilson, the Korean people of 1919 championed the cause of self-determination for a new age of world peace and national dignity. Embracing Wilson’s Fourteen Points, they waited in turn to be embraced and aided by the United States in their quest for freedom.
The United States instead chose to be in league with the imperialist powers of the day. It would be many more painful years before liberation came to the Korean peninsula in 1945, at great cost.
Are we, the people of the free world, willing to make the same mistake again? Can we stand by and simply read about how freedom fighters that rose to challenge the most brutal totalitarian regime are crushed by, of all people, the government of the United States?
Remember: North Korea has threatened to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, while The Provisional Government of Free Joseon has instead vowed to bring an end to this hostility and open North Korea to the world.
The Korean people in the north are still waiting for true freedom, and the resistance that is growing in The Provisional Government of Free Joseon is testament to the fact that they will not sit idly by for others to be their savior.
We must help them in their own endeavors, and finally, we now have the chance to right the wrongs of over a century in the making.
The government of the United States is currently, willingly or otherwise, aiding and abetting Kim Jong Un, the current leader of the North Korean regime. In the interest of appeasing him, certain persons in the United States Government detained an American Marine veteran, Christopher Ahn, who has put his life on the line for the North Korean people after doing the same for his fellow Americans. Likewise, the United States Marshals are tracking down a lifelong human rights activist, Adrian Hong.
If caught and extradited on dubious legal grounds, all at the behest of a dictator, these men face grave risk of being murdered in retaliation by North Korea’s foreign service agents.
By allowing this continued persecution of good men fighting for freedom, the free world loses its moral standing. American taxpayer resources that should be directed towards other issues are currently being used to track down good men. We must not bargain innocent American lives for Kim Jong Un’s favor.
No one should live as the North Korean people do, and they are on the cusp of making huge leaps in the unrelenting march for progress. The American government has a chance to redeem itself for its past mistakes, and fight to be on the right side of history. It must stop backing dictators and appeasing the agents of so much misery in North Korea.
Freedom for North Korea is a moral imperative and historical necessity for the progression of humanity, and it can start with Freedom for Free Joseon, Christopher Ahn, and Adrian Hong.
Just as the United States was born in revolution, so too can a new, Free Joseon arise.
Tell President Trump, Secretary of State Pompeo, and Attorney General Barr that they must stop imprisoning and hunting the resistance fighters of our time!
— A Concerned Citizen of the United States of America