What does much of the US press, the American left, and Korean dictator Kim Il Sung have in common? They all believe -- or at least say they believe -- that Christians are trying to take over their country.

Here's how that's playing out in North Korea right now:

While demolishing a vacant house, soldiers found in the basement, hidden between two bricks, a Bible and a list of 25 names. Among the list were individuals identified as a Christian pastor, two assistant pastors, two elders, and 20 parishioners who were identified by their occupations.

Hunted down at their workplaces by military police, the 25 Christians were rounded up and detained without any formal judicial procedure. Later that month, the parishioners and their clergy were brought to the road construction site, where spectators had been arranged in neat rows to observe the public execution of the pastor, assistant pastors, and elders. According to a report based on an eyewitness account, the five church leaders "were bound hand and foot and made to lie down in front of a steamroller," accused of subversion and of being Kiddokyo, or Protestant Christian, spies.

The 20 parishioners were detained near their clergy, and watched, along with the assembled audience, as the five Christian leaders were told they could escape death if they denied their faith and pledged to serve only Kim Jong Il and his father, the first dictator of communist Korea, Kim Il Sung. According to the eyewitness, the clergy remained silent.

For their steadfast belief, the Christians were executed. According to the report, "Some of the fellow parishioners assembled to watch the execution cried, screamed out, or fainted when the skulls made a popping sound as they were crushed beneath the steamroller."

Now contrast that coverage with this, where Andrei Lankov, PhD, tells us that North Koreans become Christians -- amazingly -- in order to escape suffering:

Given the privation and suffering in North Korea, it's not surprising that the masses would find solace in the opiate of the people.

Yes, I'm sure that helps them escape from their problems. Except that it tends to land them in prison camps, chemical weapons laboratories, or under steamrollers. But reality is no obstacle to a leftist editorialist.

Thankfully, some of Lankov's piece is better than that. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, we learn that Kim Jong Il was born into a "family of prominent Protestant activists."

This was fairly typical: it seems that a majority of early Korean communists had Christian family backgrounds, even though Christians were few and far between in the general population.

I'm not surprised, given my pet theory that leftist/socialist ideology is simply a symptom of channelling missionary-like zeal into a faith in Government and Human "Reason" (quotes necessary) rather than God.

Nonetheless, left-wing Christianity was not a success in North Korea....

In retrospect, Christians who rejected leftism seem to have been quite prescient. Not that they weren't persecuted for failing to adopt each new leftist dogma...

Thus in 1946-50 Protestants formed one of the major groups of the refugees who moved to the South. When the Korean War began, these Protestants often helped the advancing United Nations troops. Such incidents once again demonstrated to the Pyongyang leaders what they believed anyway: that Christians were politically unreliable.

Thank God.

In the 1950s anti-Protestant propaganda reached a hysterical pitch. All kinds of religious worship were banned, but Protestantism was particularly singled out as a "wicked teaching of the US imperialists." .... The educational efforts of the early missionaries were explained as part of their scheme to pave the road for the long-planned US invasion.

Non-leftist Christianity and missionary work depicted the tool of "US imperialism"? Hmmm... where have I seen that strategy before? (Do such leftists ever notice they think in the same vein as some of the world's worst dictators? Does it ever cross their minds?)

It is remarkable how successful Protestantism is among Northern defectors who are currently living in South Korea.

It is? Only to a leftist professor, I suspect.

Many of them converted in the first months of their sojourn. Once again, this can be partially explained by the active involvement of right-wing Christians with the refugee community (the secular left and South Korean society in general are quite indifferent if not hostile to these people).

Perhaps this is a sign of things to come, and Pyongyang is on the verge of regaining its old title "Jerusalem of the East". The collapse of Kim Jong-il's rule someday is likely to leave a serious ideological and spiritual vacuum, which can be easily filled by Christianity.

So the reporter correctly understands that there is both an "ideological" and "spiritual" aspect to the North Korean state religion. Yet when North Koreans convert to Christianity, and become "right wing" (e.g. disposed to believe government is harmful), it is not beause they've simply been through the whole government-worship thing -- no, it's because they've been duped into such beliefs by "right-wing Christians".

And why are North Korean refugees hated by South Koreans? Undoubtedly, their political conservatism and distrust of the state (and probably UN, given the UN's betrayal) has something to do with it, and, from what I know of South Korea's raging leftism, that's not a politically welcomed stance to take. (Apparently, they want more of what the North has got!)

And so, at the end of Lankov's little narrative, what are we warned about? North Korea's militarism? The importance of human rights? The South's callous attitude towards poor refugees who need them most? The atrocities which follow from deifying leftist ideology, and demonizing those who hold Judeo-Christian values?

Oh, no. That would be far too obvious.

We are warned about the real danger -- the Christians of North Korea!

And it seems likely that in many cases the new-found North Korean Protestantism will take rather extreme forms.