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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. Christopher Hitchens, article Slate magazine 2nd May 2005, ‘Worse than 1984: North Korea, Slave State’
A place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Not since North Korean’ media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim il-Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed. Christopher Hitchens
I’m very glad it’s not true that there is a permanent, unshakable, unchallengeable supervision [God], a divine North Korea in which no privacy, no liberty, is possible from the moment of conception not just until the moment of death but until well after. Christopher Hitchens v Reverend Al Sharpton
It is the wish to be a slave [God]. It is the desire that there be an unalterable unchallengeable tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep. Who can subject you – who must indeed subject you – to a total surveillance ... A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? ... At least you can fucking die and leave North Korea. Christopher Hitchens
Once you assume a creator and a plan it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well ... And over us to supervise this is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? debate 2010
The whole North Korean state is based upon the idea that there will have to be an ultimate war with American imperialism. There is nothing we can do to make them behave any better. They’re absolutely committed to this course of folly. They’ve starved their own people till they’re six inches shorter than a South Korean to make this happen. The idea that if we were more warming and gentle to them they would be less aggressive is ridiculous. Christopher Hitchens v Robert Wright, debate 2007
North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as duck. Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essay
Here, contained within a hermetic quadrilateral of territory enclosed either by sea or by near-impenetrable frontiers, is a land entirely given over to adulation. Every waking moment of the citizen – the subject – is consecrated to praise of the Supreme Being and his Father. Every schoolroom resounds with it, every film and opera and play is devoted to it, every radio and television transmission is given up to it. So are all books and magazines and newspaper articles, all sporting events and all workplaces. I used to wonder what it would be like to have to sing everlasting praises, and now I know. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great pp247-248
His dead father is still the head of state for ever. Christopher Hitchens, lecture Centre for American Studies University of Western Ontario March 2005, ‘The Axis of Evi’, Youtube 1.12.27
It’s the perfect combination of evil, if you will: the concept of freedom is unknown … Nor is there the most elementary of provision. ibid.
Possibly the most theocratic country … The only duty of the citizen, starving and stunted and enslaved as he or she may be, is the worship of the leader and of the leader’s father. Christopher Hitchens, lecture The Axis of Evil Revisited 2009, Fora TV/Youtube 1.00.52
All of North Korea is a jail. Kim Y Sam
Mysterious and terrifying, North Korea is the most isolated country on Earth. North Korea Undercover, National Geographic 2013
A million-strong army. ibid.
A personality cult more strong than any in history. ibid.
The Dutch documentary A Day in the Life shows a mother singing nursery rhymes as she walks her child to school. ibid.
North Korea goes to extremes to show its best face to the outside world. ibid.
The DMZ or Demilitarised Zone is a four-kilometre buffer that runs the full 238 kilometres along the border of North and South Korea. ibid.
A famine killed up to three million people. ibid.
The world’s first communist dynastic handover. ibid.
Perhaps there is very little difference between faith and fear. ibid.
Tonight: inside the world’s most secretive nation. Panorama: North Korea Undercover, BBC 2013
North Korea is one of the poorest places on Earth. ibid.
Their latest propaganda claims their rockets could hit the American mainland. ibid.
Kim I’s cult of personality is everywhere reforming people’s thoughts. ibid.
There are 25,000 defectors from the North here [South]. ibid.
North Korea’s tested a nuclear bomb believed to be ten times more destructive than Hiroshima. Kim Jong Il vs Donald Trump is the most dangerous stand-off in decades. Panorama: North Korea’s Nuclear Trump Card, BBC 2017
The US still maintains 24,000 troops in South Korea. ibid.
It [North Korea] tested what it claimed to be a hydrogen bomb. ibid.
North Korea is now thought to have more than 30 nuclear warheads. ibid.
A network of extensive nuclear facilities. ibid.
North Korea’s modern-day slave trade. 150,000 workers sent abroad to raise billions for the regime. Hidden cameras capture Korean work gangs in China, Russia and even in Europe. Panorama: North Korea’s Secret Slave Gangs, BBC 2018
The Mass Games Production Company should be staffed with people who are unfailingly loyal to the Party and the Leader and technically qualified. Kim Jong-iI
Developing Mass Games is important in training schoolchildren to be fully developed communist people. Kim Jong-il
North Korea is the least visited. North Korea is the least understood country in the world. It is home to Mass Games, the largest choreographed spectacle in the world. North Korea: A State of Mind, BBC 2013
‘I long for the day when I perform for the General so I train through the pain.’ ibid. Pak Hyon Sun
In 2003 a British documentary crew followed two North Korean schoolgirls as they prepared for that year’s Mass Games. ibid.
An estimated four million people, many of them civilians, were killed in the three-day war. ibid.
‘We have to endlessly hate the US and fight them to the end.’ ibid. Pak Hron Sun
Girls sing: ‘Leading shining North Korea to victory. Brightening the future of communism. The beloved comrade Kim Jong-il. Glory glory, Kim Jong-il our excellent leader.’ ibid.
Malnutrition is now the biggest threat to the next generation of North Koreans. ibid.
Most nights are spent without electricity at some point in the evening. ibid.
Just six international flights per week. ibid.
North Korea has taught a great lesson to all the countries in the world, especially the rogue countries of dictatorships or whatever: if you don’t want to be invaded by America, get some nuclear weapons. Michael Moore