Kim Jong-il’s regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought

Or so says Christopher Hitchens in a compelling piece in Slate on North Korea. Part reminiscence, part reconsidertion, and part book review, Hitchens praises the book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, recently written by B.R. Myers, in which Hitchens repeats Myer’s theory that communism in North Korea is dead—its most recent constitution drops all mention of the word and there is no dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, Pyongyang operates like a textbook fascist totalitarian government, maintained by slave labor, and based on racism and xenophobia. (Ironically, many of the principles may be carried over from Japanese imperialism.)

I think the population’s ignorance about their state of affairs is overblown, and I don’t think that Hitchens’ one racist, xenophobic tour guide is quite as representative of the population as he claims to think, and I think that in the past few years the people of the DPRK have learned that their government is dirt poor compared to their southern neighbor. (The country recently backtracked on its currency devaluation after it unleashed public outrage, a mighty rare occurrance.) But that’s about the only point of optimism in the Korea.

Hitchens’ article is titled A Nation of Racist Dwarfs, and the reason is clear only at the end of the article:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

I think the last line is interesting coming from Hitchens, a left-wing radical who supported advocated invading Iraq on the grounds that the civilized nations of the world will inevitably have to face off against such a tyrant, and that it was better to do so on our terms. He stops short of advocating a strike on North Korea, but the dreaded implication is that we are going to have to deal with the fallout from North Korea’s tragic situation at some point, and the legacy will likely be with us for a century or more.