A follow-up from yesterday’s post, which in turn is a followup of my earlier musings about cults of personality. The story I described yesterday is of course real. I might have gotten some of the details wrong (vague as I tried to make them) but this really is what happened to Mr Shin, as detailed by this one-hour talk he gave at Google.
[Video link]. I strongly recommend you watch it but if not then hopefully my last post and this one should provide a meager substitute.
It’s probably pointless to argue which country in the world is worst to live in but I still think North Korea is the obvious contender. Some countries might have slightly lower standards of living (although even that’s debatable since NK is an information black hole in terms of statistics), but in North Korea this is combined with total repression. Plus the low standard of living is largely imposed from above. North Korea is the closest any country has ever gotten to a “perfect” totalitarian state, and I think Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR or other similar places don’t even compare. Possibly Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge might — this kind of level of repression is probably only possible in a relatively small country with a small population where there really is enough capacity for total control.
Still, the main problem is probably malnutrition. As said in the Google Talk introduction, it appears that an entire generation of North Koreans has been lost to developmental problems due to not getting enough to eat as a child. It’s very hard to do anything about “regime change” or some such concept if you’ve been mentally and emotionally stunted. True, people in photos from the capital Pyongyang always look fine — but the capital gets an overwhelming proportion of resources. If you go to YouTube and look for footage of the countryside it really is bleak.
North Korea practices collective punishment. This is why Mr Shin was born in a concentration camp: if you are condemned (I can’t say convicted, can I?) of a particularly serious crime your entire family gets sent to camps. These Gulags house certainly well over 100,000 people, and any children they have are raised in the Gulags, basically receiving a life sentence as they are born. The camp Mr Shin was born in is in the special exclusionary zone, which is the darkest of dark places. The camp houses only people with life sentences so they will never see North Korea. This is why they didn’t even bother to indoctrinate people like Mr Shin into the propaganda of Juche ideology as a child.
Mr Shin escaped to China and then to South Korea. However, China tracks NK escapees and turns them over to NK authorities. There is no question that they will be brutally tortured to death — the extradition is knowing and complicit.
So what’s to be done? North Korea does not respond to any kind of diplomatic channels and is capable of waging war at a minute’s notice. Their control is so tight it’s not really possible to provide resources to some budding “democracy movement” — there is no movement and nobody is thinking about a movement if they’re so hungry they’re resorting to cannibalism. The USSR ran over enormous territory and many more people and so would seem more unstable — and even that lasted over 70 years. How long can this regime last for. Any bright ideas on what people outside NK can do?
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