A New Kim. A new Chance?

This is  from an op-ed by New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof 

The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!) It blares like that all day.

The fact that the George Orwell novel comes to mind when thinking about the loudspeaker should surprise no one because like the two way television in the novel it can't be turned off.

 Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.

Ten of thousands of people starved to death during this famine yet because North Koreans get their information from a single source what else is there for them to believe or compare with in an information blackout.

 Faith and fear combine to keep people in line. In a book about North Korea, Bradley Martin tells how one of Kim Jong-il’s aides told his wife about his boss’s womanizing. The wife truly believed in the basic decency of the North Korean system and wrote to the leadership to protest the debauchery. The letter was passed on to Kim Jong-il, who brought the woman in front of a crowd and denounced her.Her own husband then stepped forward, pleading to be allowed to execute her. This request was granted, and the husband then shot his wife to death.

Denounce your wife or die with her that's a hell of a choice.