"North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia."

I'm not sure what Christopher Hitchens stands for, politically, but he certainly isn't blinded by the Noam Chomsky Left. He's an equal opportunity critic. He writes and speaks bluntly about evil, in this case the North Korean hell on earth. I've railed in the past about the comparisons of American life to Orwell's 1984, but when he applies the trope to North Korea, it falls short of the true horror:

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.

The very name, Democratic People's Republic, tips you off that the regime protests too much--all three words refer to government of, for and by the people, and they all lie. In this case the "republic" is a slave state, a huge concentration camp.

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 clich�, 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.

My generation grew up under the threat of nuclear war, but I don't remember being frightened by it, because in the end, the Russians were rational, if ruthless, adversaries. The threats posed by the Axis of Evil acquiring nukes today are far more unnerving.

Read the whole thing.