North Korea

By scale, perhaps the most egregious thing going on in the world today is the situation going on in North Korea. North Korea is in a very real way 1984, and in some aspects, surpasses the heights of paranoid totalitarianism that was Orwell’s nightmare. It brings to mind Stalinist Russia, with its gulags for those that don’t precisely toe the party line, Nazi Germany, with its assembly line concentration camps, and takes tyranny to a level that those countries only dreamed of. That something like that would be allowed to exist in this world of today is absolutely shocking to me. Concentration camps were, I thought, a nightmarish anomaly that only existed on the pages of history books. There are camps covering the area of Washington DC, or Los Angeles, with 50,000 people who committed, or were suspected of committing, crimes injurious to the state along with their parents and children. Not only will the son pay for the sins of the father, but the father will also pay for his son’s sins. Human experimentation, public executions, mass famines, gas chambers for whole families, forced labor; it really is at least as bad as the world the George Orwell feared. It is absolutely frightening. In North Korea, you have no rights at all; you are the property of the state. You do absolutely nothing unless you are told to. You don’t get food to eat, a place to sleep, you get nothing unless the state grants it to you. Every single aspect of your life is beyond your control. Not one minutiae of freedom is allowed. And the leader, Kim Jong-Il is deified, worshipped as God incarnate. If you don’t follow and fall into lockstep with the party’s ideology, you are as good as dead. The leadership of the country has a messiah-complex, and partakes in the fine products of western culture, while nurturing his delusions of being a benevolent patron of the arts. While sipping champagne, spraying on hairspray, and watching the latest that Hollywood has to offer, thousands are starving while working 12 hour days, to support Kim Jong-Il’s expensive tastes, and to provide him with the most destructive weapon on earth. It is truly bizarre, nearly unbelievable, and nauseatingly barbaric; there is no lack of adjectives that would be apropos. The dark fantasies of the most cynical, misanthropic of novelists could be based on that country, with no need of exaggeration or artistic license. It is a country of slaves, with almost an insect like mentality reminiscent of the fanatical loyalty exhibited by honey bees, termites, and ants. That suicidal, blind obedience that they impart on people is quite simply terrifying. North Korea is so demarcated, separated from the rest of the world that the people there are clueless. They have been brainwashed into believing that their’s is a utopia, a paradise on earth. They believe that anything good happens because of the supreme ruler, Kim Jong-Il. Everything comes from him. That there is this type of society in existence while the rest of the world goes about things obliviously is incomprehensible.