The Pastor Outwitting the North Korean Regime, Bitcoin Enforcing Our Human Rights, & Reimagining the Future Without Rulers.
With individual freedom comes responsibility.
Friends, hello!
We’ve been led to believe the world is messed up beyond repair. Divisiveness, political unrest, economic catastrophes, and never-ending wars cover the front pages of news outlets. Naturally, we buy into impotence.
But what if Harriet Tubman or Gandhi or Malcolm X bought into impotence? The world wouldn’t be what it is today.
While we can’t easily fix a whole system as an individual, we still can fix it (at least some parts of it). We can turn inwardly for personal awakening, transform ourselves, reach out to others, and build a web of goodwill within our community. That’s how we begin to make a change, by first changing the very real world inside ourselves.
What have you done this weekend to reignite your awakening?
From This Week: 3 Stories Worth Highlighting.
Outwitting the North Korean Regime.
When we think of North Korea, we think of rockets, missiles, and nuclear tests. We forget about the North Korean people, many of which complete a painful 12,000 kilometers out of North Korea – crossing jungles, three to four borders, and the Mekong River – to find freedom.
As North Koreans escape in search of a better life, many of them get caught and sent back. Women and children become victims of human trafficking, with some forced into marriages, prostitution, adult video chatting, and more.
For the last 23 years, Pastor Seungeun Kim has been rescuing North Koreans.
He leads the Caleb Mission, “a South Korea-based Christian church that bills itself as a modern-day Underground Railroad for North Koreans.” He, along with other smugglers and activists, helped more than 1,000 North Koreans seek refuge in South Korea. Not just that, he helps them become self-reliant too. (One of the defectors is now his wife.)
Throughout his mission, Pastor Kim has endured many injuries, some of which involved surgeries.
“But none of that pain could compare to the loss of my own child. My son passed away when he was seven years old in an accident while I was helping defectors. I will always carry the burden and pain for my child, who I couldn’t protect because of my mission.
After that, my wife and I decided to serve North Koreans with a love even greater than the love we had to give to our child. We focused more on rescuing North Korean homeless orphans who starve to death on the streets without help from the state.
I looked into how to send rescued children for adoption, but I found out that it is impossible under international law. Many efforts have been made to change the law, but in the end, international law has yet to be improved.” – Pastor Kim
Pastor Kim reminds me that love, faith, hope, and commitment are key ingredients for the fight against dictatorships. And that with individual freedom comes community responsibility.
There is a lot to learn from a faithful man in the midst of darkness. I encourage you to check out this interview with Pastor Kim, talking about defection from North Korea and the future of the country.
How Bitcoin Enforces Human Rights – Privacy.
Ok, so this is not technically a story, but still important.
Anita Posch is an educator, author, and founder of Bitcoin for Fairness, a non-profit organization “raising the understanding of Bitcoin for people in emerging countries”. She shared a short Twitter thread on How Bitcoin Enforces Human Rights that I found insightful.
She says that privacy is a human right defined by the United Nations. According to Article 12 in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, we have the right to privacy. The problem is that privacy is slowly being taken away from us, particularly within the digital realm.
Anita continues:
“It's not about hiding, it's about protection. Privacy enables people in authoritarian countries to use money to fund their resistance. Privacy is a human right! Bitcoin enables us to gain much more privacy than credit cards and bank payments. Bitcoin is a freedom tool for people living under authoritarian rulers.” – Anita Posch
This reminds me of what cybersecurity expert, Runa Sandvik, said:
“I always say that it’s not about something to hide but about having something to protect. I think that it’s not that people don’t care, it may be that they don’t know what’s going on or get the impact that surveillance has. This is an area in which continued education is helpful, along with continued push for secure by default and encrypted communications by default.”
As I type these words, I noticed that Anita shared another Twitter thread on Freedom of Speech. Here’s a teaser:
“Money, too, is a form of language & expression. You are sharing your opinion through financial transactions. If you can’t send money to an abortion clinic in the U.S. or protest against China in Hong Kong for fear of being prosecuted, then your freedom of speech has been taken.” – Anita Posch
Protecting your financial privacy is a way to protect your freedom of speech.
The actions you take today to safeguard your digital privacy will go a long way tomorrow. Your future self may just be glad that you took some time today to learn quick and easy ways to stay private… and that you continued to build upon your understanding.
Unprecedented: Rules Without Rulers [a New Governance Model Humanistic Globalization]
Thinking that history, like the future, is linear is an illusion. As a matter of fact, when we look back at history, we see that change can be fast, unpredictable, and messy.
“Today, most people don’t even know what [the Astro-Hungarian Empire] is. When the pandemic happened in 1918, the world was coming out of a world war that represented the end of European empires. Literally, the European landscape was completely transformed. And many of the empires that existed simply stopped existing in a matter of just a few years. Yet we can’t predict events like that.
We can’t imagine such radical discontinuity. If you told someone at the beginning of the 1900s that the Austro-Hungarian Empire wouldn’t exist in 20 years, they’d think you were a fool, paranoid… and yet that’s exactly what happened.” – Andreas Antonopoulos, Bitcoin advocate, tech entrepreneur, and author
As Antonopoulos suggests, countries and empires can rise and fall faster than we think. Once they do, our understanding of the world becomes a mosaic display of new, mismatched information, unanswered questions, and confusing emotions. We grieve the old way of things, and we become fearful and anxious about the future.
The problem is that when we get stuck in fear and despair, we miss out on the opportunities all around us. And we stop building for a brighter world. For example, how many people in today’s day and age notice that we have a new governance model emerging?
“We do have a new governance model. We do have a new non-institutionalized institution of trust. We do have a global narrative and mimetic machine in the form of the internet. And out of that has come an independent network of trust built upon decentralized, open blockchains.
These independent networks of trust give us a new glimpse of what governance can be when we replace rulers with rules without rulers.
The network of trust gives us rules without rulers, and that is a fundamental departure from our status quo. And it’s very necessary because the status quo has never had less status. The status quo has failed to rise to the occasion and has left a massive gap. And we are ready to fill that gap.” – Andreas Antonopoulos
…
“They [our institutions] are failing because they are unable to scale to the enormous complexity of a modern world that is super interconnected and that exhibits chaotic behaviour and massive information flows that are impossible to process.” – Andreas Antonopoulos
A new, decentralized future might be difficult for you to imagine because we’ve never seen it in the past. Since human imagination is limited, it’s hard to envision this new reality. But don’t dismiss new innovations – like decentralized money and communications systems – simply because they haven’t existed before.
Just like those living under the Astro-Hungarian empire couldn’t imagine its collapse in a few short years, we can’t imagine our familiar systems possibly failing in a few years. We can’t quite visualize the new systems that will replace the old systems.
But, as Aantonopoulous suggests, a lot can change quickly. The future, like the past, is unpredictable, non-linear, and at times messy.
"There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen" – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
This 20 minute video is nothing short of fascinating. If there’s anything you watch today, let it be this. I was blown away.
Quick and Happy Updates from People Featured in The Misfit.
The Abuelita (grandma) who accepts bitcoin – and whose house was burned to the ground – was so touched to receive bitcoin/money from 700 strangers (including you!) that she made a video thanking them all. Here it is.
Justin Rhedrick is raising bitcoin donations on Geyser Fund as he prepares to teach financial literacy and bitcoin to people in prison. You can send him sats directly on this page here.
That’s it for today, friends!
Remember that no matter how much negativity is thrown your way, you can always step aside, reawaken yourself, and arm yourself with hope to make a change.
Above all, don’t let hope be taken away from you. In the words of Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption:
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
Until next time,
– Ayelen xx
Wow you always leave me with so much think about. Also, I learn so much about international stories that you would never here in news or current events! Thank you for bringing light to the stories in the margins!!!