Hitchens Homers

Christopher Hitchens has a hard-hitting article about North Korea in Slate today that I got wind of through RealClear Politics. The entire thing is a must-read. One of the juicier morsels is below. The hyperlinked satellite image is a must-see as well.

... North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. 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 nighttime 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 demilitarized 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 favorable 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 of the place—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 individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.")

Hitchens also takes the "human rights" activists to task for being mum about a country from which people escape to the relative freedom of China -- from whom they will be repatriated if found out.

Hitchens offers qualified praise to Bush for his "bluntness" in saying that Kim Jong Il runs "concentration camps." As for me, the words "axis of evil" are still hanging in the air, unbacked by action as far as North Korea goes. I'm holding my praise for Bush back until he does something concrete along the lines of regime change and elimination of its nuclear threat.

Six-party talks indefinitely postponed don't count.

Update: According to a human rights group, North Korea has been gassing its own citizens. (HT: Chap.) Might this serve as an altruistic pretext for military action, as if the selfish (and valid) reason we have isn't enough? Might it be a clever way to shame the Chinese into helping us?

-- CAV

Updates

5-5-05: Added link to concentration camp story.
5-6-05: Edited "Update" footnote for clarity.