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Worse Than 1984North Korea, slave state.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, May 2, 2005, at 1:48 PM ET

How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment's thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il's government runs "concentration camps." It would be truer to say that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.

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This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word "genocide" has. To call a set of actions "genocidal," as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.'s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

Related in Slate

Fred Kaplan questioned whether President Bush understands the situation in North Korea in this "War Stories"; Kaplan's other Slate articles on North Korea can be found here. In March, Soyoung Ho filed a "Foreigners" detailing her conversation with a North Korean defector living in Seoul. Brendan Koerner explained why the North Koreans kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s in 2003. This 2002 "Assessment" of Kim Jong-il said that, "It would be easy to dismiss Kim as a madman, but his behavior is too consistent for that."

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But 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.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 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.")

Actually, 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.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

In consequence of this, and for the first time since the founding of Kim Il Sung's state, large numbers of people have begun to take the appalling risk of running away. If they make it, they make it across the river into China, where there is a Korean-speaking area in the remote adjoining province. There they live under the constant threat of being forcibly repatriated. The fate of the fugitive slave is not pretty: North Korea does indeed operate a system of camps, most memorably described in a book—The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan—that ought to be much more famous than it is. Given what everyday life in North Korea is like, I don't have sufficient imagination to guess what life in its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.

It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.

Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more. Bravo to President Bush, anyway, for his bluntness.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays, in which a longer account of North Korea can be found.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The trouble with Hitchens is that he can write a generally strong and persuasive article, such as this one calling attention to the horrors of Kim Il-Jong's slave state and urging the noble goal of international support for an "Underground Railroad" of escaped North Koreans, yet the Ghost of Hitchens Past will nearly always rise up at some point in the article and destroy all the goodwill.

Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more.

In the context of the preceding article it seems to me that Hitchens is referring to a future in which a tide of liberated North Koreans rips out the heart of Kim's regime and triggers the ultimate implosion of the regime. This is a vision of a future which all decent people would embrace.

And yet...

When I hear the words "regime change" from Hitchens, they toll like church bells at a funeral. Surely he isn't seriously suggesting THAT again? Yet even if he isn't suggesting an invasion, this obviously deliberate word choice still spoils the mood. It was the stubborn inability of Hitchens and his ilk to grasp the difference between "regime change" and "invasion and occupation" that resulted in the ongoing carnage and chaos in Iraq…

--ShriekingViolet

(To reply, click here)

…It is easy to treat both China and South Korea with distain on this issue, since rather than pay a price for the freedom of the North Koreans they would apparently rather see them continue to starve in slavery. But there is certainly some merit in their fears, as the challenges in putting Korea together again will undoubtedly dwarf those created by the still-problematic integration of East with West Germany.

This is where the world can help, and it is Hitchens' insight to suggest it...I move that the OECD countries all commit to taking in a certain number of the millions of Korean refugees. In the long run, it will benefit all the countries who participate, and it will help to eliminate one of the last totalitarian dictatorships on earth.

Consider: the ONE benefit that derived to the U.S. from the 10 years of horror that was the American Vietnam War was the approximately 1 million Vietnamese refugees who ended up, one way or another, migrating to America. We thereby inherited 1 million hard-working individuals from a Confucian society who have contributed greatly to our national welfare…South Korea should not be asked to bear the burden of the refugees alone. A commitment by the U.S. to take in, say, 100,000 refugees a year for the next five years would hopefully motivate other countries to do the same. If approximately 5 million of North Korea's population of about 22 million could find refuge in adoptive countries, most of the refugee issue would be solved. The refugees, although not currently in a good position to compete in a modern service economy, would soon enough become a source of capital and currency for the folks back home. In 20 or 30 years, the standard of living along both sides of the 38th parallel should stabilize.

--freetrader

(To reply, click here)

…Perhaps it's no coincidence that North Korea was "allowed" to become as bad as it is considering that it has a couple of nearly insurmountable strategic advantages in its favor. One of these is that NK holds the major business and population center of South Korea—Seoul, located within easy artillery range of the heavily militarized border—hostage, and has made continual threats to turn it into a fireball if any military conflict were to break out again. Another advantage is that they have always enjoyed the support of China, who single-handedly turned the tide against a complete military defeat for NK during the Korean War, and would represent a serious impediment to any military actions taken against NK. Take these advantages together with NK's nukes, and it's hard to see how any Western power could successfully make a case for going to war. The price would simply be too high.

You can bandy phrases like "regime change" around all you want, but as the impressive longevity of Castro's reign in Cuba—in the veritable back yard of the United States itself—shows, without a credible military option, those are ineffectual words indeed. In my opinion, it only makes our side look foolish to talk tough and rattle sabres when military options are so clearly not in the cards. As dreadful as it is, it seems that we're forced to respect the strategic advantages of this mean little pissant of a regime, and find some diplomatic remedy that trades verifiable and enforceable weapons inspections for a guarantee that their horrible system will continue in perpetuity. Like it or not, they've got the rest of the world over a barrel…

--Fingerpuppet

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