What’s happening in North Korea is insane. So few people seem to understand the truly dystopian nightmare its people have endured for decades. They don’t need high-tech NSA type surveillance, through old fashioned fear and paranoia they have instead created a massive self-policing state that far exceeds anything Orwell could have imagined. If someone speaks ill of anything, even something simple like low food rations, they could be reported by a neighbor or friend. It is illegal to even sing songs from South Korea, and doing so can brand them as an enemy of the state. There is a constant fear that if anyone see someone else violating any rule, it is a loyalty test and if you fail to report it then you will be the one arrested. Thus the perfect self-police state.
And if you are branded an enemy of the state, the conviction is carried by three generations of your family. So you, your parents, your sisters, brothers, and children, will all be arrested if you are not uniformly loyal in all things at all times. It is one thing to think of sacrificing oneself to a political cause, but knowing you would be dooming your entire family to certain death, makes that picket sign much, much heavier.
If you are arrested, that is when hell truly begins. You and your family are separated and sent to one of North Korea’s many labor prison camps, where currently anywhere from 400,000 to 1.5 million are held. There you will work until you die, or are indiscriminately tortured and killed. Murder is institutionalized to both weed out the weak, and maintain order. Without these work camps what little is left of North Korea’s economy would collapse. They are in effect using their own populace as a massive slave labor force. This is going on right now, today.
The atrocities committed in North Korea defy imagination. It is so overwhelming even just attempting to illustrate some small piece diminishes the massive scale of the horrific reality.
So anyway, this week I drew a picture of a crow.