Word: ils
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...were assigned a "leader" who watched their every move, listened to their conversations and constantly threatened them. They were forced to study propaganda 10 hours a day, six days a week, and memorize it in Korean. (To this day, Jenkins can recite lengthy propaganda monologues: "The Great Leader Kim Il Sung taught ...") There were frequent exams. If any of the men failed one, they would all be forced to increase their study to 16 hours a day, every...
...days a month. There were about 30 students in each class. "They wanted us to teach them American pronunciation," he says, a prospect that seems amusing considering many Americans would have trouble deciphering Jenkins' thick accent. Often the text consisted of translated utterances by Kim Il Sung, who became the North's first leader in 1948, when Korea split into two countries, and remained in power until his death in 1994. The classes studied the guerrilla fighters who took on Japanese soldiers during World War II and discussed the "news" students had heard that morning on state-controlled radio...
...Pyongyang had designs on Jenkins beyond teaching English. Like his three colleagues, Jenkins was a prize cold-war souvenir: an American who had voluntarily wandered into North Korean hands. He was an asset and certainly more valuable alive than dead. "At some point, someone told us that Kim Il Sung said that one American was worth 100 Koreans," says Jenkins. "After that, I didn't think they would kill us without a good reason." His first experience as a propaganda tool occurred soon after he was captured, when he and his fellow deserters were profiled in a cover story...
...Trey Parker and Matt Stone production Team America: World Police is a delirious send-up of the international save-the-world action genre spoofing every movie from the Star Wars trilogy to Knightrider to The Matrix and unsympathetically mocks every public figure from Michael Moore to Kim Jong-Il to, curiously enough, Matt Damon. And they do it with puppets. Unlike most politically-motivated comedies these days, there’s no clear slant towards either the left or the right. Team America is a throwback to the kind of movie that casts the establishment as the good...
...North Koreans are desperate for good publicity," says Aidan Foster-Carter, a Korea scholar at Leeds University in Britain. "Since they're incredibly bad at [p.r.] themselves, it makes sense to have foreigners do it for them." Director Daniel Gordon suggests that the project was authorized by Kim Jong Il himself. "Permission for something like this must have come from the very top," he says. Despite his unprecedented access, Gordon says that the government had "no editorial control or input," although when inside the country he and his film crew were accompanied everywhere by official "guides." The royal treatment...