Inside the North Korean Slave State

This long article in the New Yorker Kimworld: Inside the North Korean Slave State is a glimpse at pure wickedness. The Kim regime certainly needs to take its place next to those of Stalin and Hitler on the dustbin of history. A sampling ...

By the time Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, took over from his father as the absolute ruler of North Korea, the country was a slave society, where only the most trusted caste of people were allowed to live in sullen obedience in Pyongyang, while vast numbers of potential class enemies were worked to death in mines and hard-labor camps. After Kim Il Sung's death, in 1994, the regime suspended executions for a month, and throughout the following year it committed relatively few killings. Since this was at the height of a famine, largely brought on by disastrous agricultural policies, hundreds of thousands were already dying from hunger. Then word spread that Kim Jong Il wished to “hear the sound of gunshots again.” Starving people were shot for stealing a couple of eggs.

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The highest-ranking defector from the North was a man named Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Il Sung's chief ideologue... According to Hwang, about a million people starved to death in 1996 alone.

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The religious cult around the Kims goes further, however; they really are worshipped as divinities, in a peculiarly Korean mixture of native animism and pseudo-Christianity. Martin writes about the Party congress of 1980, when Kim Jong Il, then still the young dauphin, was elected to the five-person presidium of the politburo. The Party newspaper, in a pre-Christmas editorial, offered the Kims as a replacement for the Father and Son in the Holy Trinity. “People of the world, if you are looking for miracles, come to Korea!” it went on. “Christians, do not go to Jerusalem. Come rather to Korea! Do not believe in God. Believe in the great man.” After the son's ascent to the presidium, the newspaper reported, there was “an explosion of our people's joy, looking up at the star of guidance shining together with the benevolent sun.”

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What the Kims have done to their country is so appalling, though, that almost anything is better than its continuation. The challenge is to bring Kim down without taking millions with him.