 Shockingly, American politicians and bureaucrats practice some of North Korea's most egregious sins, includingtorture (they even use similar methods). And they actually exceedNorth Korea's evil in other areas. For example, the latter's administration claims to monitor everything its subjects say or think: "When they brainwash students in North Korea," one defector reported, "they say: 'We can read your words, actions and thoughts ... If you have bad thoughts about the Kim family they will know.'" A schoolgirl "actually believed that our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, could read my mind, and I would be punished for my bad thoughts."
America's National Security Agency is humbler — but equally disingenuous — in its assertions. It usually denies its abilities, leaving boasts about reading our minds to ostensibly private companies like Google. (Naturally, Google then "shares" what it learns from invading our privacy with the Feds.) But gainsaying the NSA's modesty is its unofficial motto, "Collect It All," and its computers. They house complete dossiers on each of us: every phone call we've ever made, every email we've sent or received, every purchase.
The NSA's omnivorous appetite matches its capacity and our habits. Not only has the agency squandered $1.5 billion of our taxes on 1,000,000 square feet to store our data (and that's just one of its facilities), but most Americans live on their electronics. Our overseers glean every detail of our day from our computers and phones.
Contrast that with North Korea, where such machines are scarcer than food. "...[F]ew of its people are connected to the Internet," except those the government employs as hackers. Incredibly, "most North Korean offices operate without internet or even computers." Kim can't "read minds" any more than the NSA can refrain from doing so.
So how does the North Korean government spy on its taxpayers? Simple: the old-fashioned way. Human spooks "were everywhere, listening at the windows and watching in the school yard."
Sounds like Nazi Germany, doesn't it? Or the modern United States, with its diabolical "If you see something, say something" propaganda that recruits Americans as tattletales. Granted, the punishments meted out to offenders in the communist dystopia of North Korea are far more draconian than those in the fascist dystopia here: the former fills its unspeakable concentration camps and its ubiquitous firing lines with the targets of snitches' allegations.
Yet informants in the U.S. regularly send their friends and neighbors to prison, especially in the War on Drug Users. And in some cases, incarceration amounts to a death sentence, even if it's slower and less efficient than North Korea's executions.
Like the U.S., the "Hermit Kingdom" takes a dim view of its subjects' travels, particularly at the borders. "Over 1,500 miles of North Korean coastline are surrounded by electric fences to prevent people from trying to flee the country." Astoundingly, many Americans beg their rulers to barricade their supposedly free country, too. And if you think that closed borders only keep others out, any North Korean can tell you otherwise.
When they flee Kim's hell, refugees risk the only thing their government has left them, though just barely: their lives. So we might suppose that anyone encountering these emaciated waifs would sympathize with and help them. Nope: neighboring countries despise them as much as Americans do "illegals." Worse, they sic their versions of the U.S. Border Patrol on them: "on...the day before [one North Korean who'd made it to China] turned 14, a barrage of Chinese policemen — armed with guns and electric batons — knocked down the door and rounded up the terrified defectors." Wanna bet that traumatized this poor kid just as American cops' kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez petrified him?
Few of North Korea's "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" reach the distant U.S. after escaping their nationwide prison. But if they do, bureaucrats in the land of liberty alienate their inalienable right to movement: "...the United States has admitted only 122 North Korean refugees to this country since the adoption of the North Korea Human Rights Act (NKHRA) in 2004, and... only an estimated 25 have received political asylum ... major obstacles continue to block their admission to the United States."
Most tragically of all, America and North Korea are startlingly alike in their serfs' idolatry of government.
To North Koreans' immense credit, though, their rulers must compel devotion from them. "A North Korean is required to hang in their homes [sic] portraits of Kim il Sung and Kim Jong-il, the grandfather and father, respectively, of the current leader. There are routine checks by authorities to ensure these are kept immaculately clean." During "holidays in North Korea..., ...citizens are 'asked' to pay homage to the great leader at various monuments. The resulting lines can last several miles." Indeed, "worship of the Kims" is "reinforced in documentaries, films and shows broadcast by the single, state-run television station. The indoctrination starts as soon as you learn to talk and are taken on your mother's back to the inminban [neighbourhood unit] meetings everybody in North Korea has to attend at least once a week. In school you are drilled in the Ten Principles of the regime, like the Ten Commandments."
Indoctrination permeates America, too, but aside from public education, most of it isn't compulsory. No matter: conservatives reflexively genuflect to the State while Progressives regularly and rabidly proclaim it God.
Critics often dismiss North Korea as a "rogue regime." But it isn't. Rather, it carries communism in particular and the State in general to their logical conclusions. Kim's brutality, greed, murder and lies are characteristic of all political governments, in kind if not degree.
One woman who sneaked out of the country recalls, "I didn't even know what it meant to be free." Nor do most Americans.
-- Becky Akers
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