“Worse Than Nineteen Eighty-Four”
Hitchens’ commentary on the state of North Korea. In
response to President Bush’s comment that N. Korea runs concentration camps, Hitches writes, “It would be truer to say that the Democratic People’s Republic
of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp…even more accurate
to say…that North Korea is a slave state.” He backs this up by pointing out, “…not
even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the Gulag, or of Mao’s
Great Leap Forward, was there a time when all the subjects of the system were
actually enslaved.”
He recommends that all democratic states announce how many refugees they will take from North Korea to encourage defection…sort of the opposite of what we did for the European Jews prior to WWII. He also recommends this book:
New learning: Funny quote, “George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-four 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.)”
New word: dystopia = imagined state in which everything is
unpleasant or bad (antonym of utopia)
“North Korea: A
Nation of Racist Dwarves”
Hitchens commentary on racism as a driving force behind the
North Korean State. Best just to quote. About a tour guide Hitches had on a
visit to the North, “He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving
country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and
never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world’s most
hysterical and operatic leader-cult…The people of South Korea, he pointed out,
were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners— even black American
soldiers, or so he’d heard to his evident disgust— and were losing their purity
and distinction.”
He goes on to say “Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the
North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in
the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of
others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror
show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not
face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.”
A picture of the Korean peninsula from satellite at night...notice that all North Koreans are required to observe curfew and a fixed time fir lights-out.
New learning: North Koreans have an intense hatred of
non-North Koreans…”A black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to
show his family the sights of Pyongyang.”
New word: Brumaire
= the second month of the French republican Calendar
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