Hitchens: NKoreans Worse Than Slaves. Slaves Were Fed.

Christopher Hitchens remains a lucid commentator of the Orwellian tragedy that North Korea has become. Some nuggets:

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom.

The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliche, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il-Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint ("Hmmm - good book. Let's see if we can make it work").

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's imagined world. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop.

Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed).

A recent night-time photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarised zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed.

In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favourable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation.

The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour - North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave - my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up grains of food from barren fields (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest").

Hitchens goes on to call for dismantling this member in good standing of the UN that China and the former USSR refuse to impose sanctions upon for its nuclear program.

Good for Hitchens.

BTW, Jimmy Carter and senile drunk Ted Turner both appear to admire the slave state, but they have long been ruled out of the saner parts of the intellectual firmament.

And gosh, Cindy Sheehan should visit. She seems to admire Castro and Castro-wannabe Chavez. Why not go to the living avatar of Stalin, miniature mini-me, and watch him strut his stuff in Pyongyang? I'm sure they have some dog left over to munch on as hors d'oeurves.

But in Cindy's case, that would be cannibalism!