
Hitchins: North Korea is even weirder and more despicable than you thought - rglovejoy
http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/pagenum/all/
======
mahmud
Christopher Hitchens: Even wierder and more despicable than you thought.

This self-promoting buffoon should be exposed for the what he is. He went to
Lebanon last year to film his one-man crusade to impose Liberal Democracy on
the "unwashed Arab masses", he made a fuss about being attacked by Nazis in
_Lebanon_! In reality, him and his photographer went to certain Beirut
neighborhoods and provoked the locals until he was slapped around by
teenagers.

Let me say that again: Hitchens went to the Middle East to pick fist fights.
Yeah, very intellectual.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=Hitchens+Lebanon+brawl>

:-|

I value his take on North Korea as much as I value Octomom's opinion on Cuba.

------
hh
Most countries that have limited interaction with outsiders are often very
racist. We are very lucky to live in an open society and in addition we are a
country of immigrants that is why we don't see too much of that. In fact, we
are the exception and not the norm.

~~~
netcan
I assume that by "we" you mean Americans. It sounds a lot like you are saying
that America hasn't seen much demagogy, racism or xenophobia which sounds like
a delusion of the type that might disprove your point.

~~~
hh
Some part of the country, i.e. the red states are still having this problem
but overall, we are much better then we were. The bottom line, we are a
working progress.

~~~
dantheman
I'd actually disagree, I think overall America is very tolerant of immigrants
as long as they make some effort to integrate into society.

Also, can we stop with this red/blue state madness -- it's very hard to
generalize the views of a given state, especially large populous states.

~~~
chrischen
How about wording it like this: the density of racists in a red state is
statistically significantly higher than that of a blue state.

But I'd agree, considering America is a salad bowl of cultures, it's probably
more tolerant than most homogenous countries out there. Of course being a
salad bowl, you'll get more _collisions_ too which is why it may _seem_ like
America is less tolerant of different cultures. More homogenous countries
simply have less foreigners to be racist towards.

~~~
dantheman
Here's a map of hate groups:
[http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/images/splc_hategroups.pd...](http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/images/splc_hategroups.pdf)

As you can see the blue states and the red states are fairly well represented,
with CA having the most. The southern states which are typically red have a
significant amount. But the western states that are red have less than the
western blue, so as I said before I don't think you can draw any conclusions.
Also the majority of the southern red states used to be blue, so that's
something else to consider.

~~~
justin_vanw
This is totally meaningless though. The existence of a hate group is just a
geographically local group of people who are racist AND like forming clubs.

A map of the per-capita hate crimes committed would be more educational, but
again it would not be a measure of racism. To have hate crimes you need 2
things, people who hate some group, and members of that group they can act
against. In the areas that were most heavily racist they chased out all hated
minorities 50+ years ago.

The town I grew up in had 5000 residents and no black families (actually, some
have moved there, but only when I was in about 3rd grade did that start). I
didn't see any racism at all in that town, but how could I? Driving 30 minutes
away to the nearest sizeable black population center and you see tons of it.
Look at the school zones and you see tons of it. Hate crimes were non-existent
however, just because you can't hit someone who isn't around. Finally, if one
did happen, how would it get reported? In areas where hate crimes are super
rare I would assume they would also be under reported since the justice system
would be unfamiliar with recording and prosecuting them.

Finally, saying one area (red states) is 'more racist' than another is the
exact same in-group out-group dynamic that feeds racism in the first place.
Due to the stuff I listed above, I would expect blue states to have far more
racist acts, just because there are more cross-race interactions and
boundaries (which are the only 'opportunity' people have to commit racist
actions). There is no discrimination against minorities for jobs if there are
no minority applicants, and there is no discriminatory school zones or public
service allocation if there are no minority communities in a city. The
unanswerable question is, "Would there be if there were minorities there", but
that can't be captured in these sorts of statistics.

------
pvg
Author's name is "Hitchens". The original title refers to the North Korean
_regime_. Among the 382096 reasons not to make up your own titles.

~~~
adelevie
I don't think a reasonable person who knows anything about NK and its regime
would take away from the title that Hitchens is calling the North Korean
people crazy and despicable.

~~~
pvg
The point is, there's no good reason, most of the time, to leave it to the
interpretations of a 'reasonable person'. An equally reasonable person can
just leave the original title alone - problem solved. Oh and spell the
author's name correctly.

~~~
adelevie
I think it's pretty fair to write using some assumptions about the audience
(ie that they are 'reasonable').

~~~
pvg
I think it's pretty fair (and easy) to write accurate, correct titles. We can
dance all night about what's 'reasonable' and what assumptions and on and on.
The article was poorly retitled. No getting around that.

------
mynameishere
I just started reading this, but I want to add something immediately: It's my
understanding that South Koreans are also very racist. So I'm not sure if the
regime is at fault for that one.

...

Yeah, I dunno. It's Hitchens and he seems to be writing a sideglance apologia
for Communism. (As in, "See these shrunken slaves: It's _nationalism_ that
made them this way, not Marxism.") Nothing new really. China is doing
something very similar actually, and they have been replacing Communist
rhetoric in schools with nationalistic rhetoric, and for them it seems to be
not a problem.

~~~
patio11
The difference between China's democides/labor camps/external aggression and
North Korea's democides/labor camps/external aggression is largely that China
got rich doing it and North Korea got poor. (Well, "rich", at any rate. About
10% of China is a fast growing dynamic economy which has eventual aspirations
of being a world power -- and the other 90% lives in grinding poverty.)

Anyhow, since China is rich, it is considered sort of impolite to say "China,
please stop committing genocide" or "Hey, China, working people to death in
your laogai camps is sort of uncool." (This is sort of related to how it was
tres gauche to mention that Soviet Russia was a brutal, genocidal dictatorship
and how a huge portion of the American and European intelligensia supported
that model and wanted it for their own countries. Which is itself related to
it earlier being quite undiplomatic to talk about what the Austrian chap was
doing in addition to his economic reforms.)

Be that as it may, reluctance to confront evil in China should not lead to
reluctance to confront evil in North Korea.

~~~
maxklein
That's a very japanese point of view you have there. Why does nobody speak of
the exploitation of china (nanjing massacre, etc) as part of what made Japan
rich.

~~~
patio11
People do discuss Japanese wartime atrocities. Frequently.

It would have been a bad example for the above post, though, because people
actually opposed Japan's conduct in Manchuria _contemporaneously_ (whereas
China's conduct in the status quo, the Soviet Union's conduct for its entire
existence, and the first few years of German fascism were/are dealt with limp-
wristedly when they were not actively applauded).

For example, the United States hit Japan with a steel/oil embargo after
Japanese refused to withdraw from Manchuria, which was the proximate cause of
Japan deciding to go to war with the United States. (Funny little historical
note: the US didn't actually intend the embargo to be a total embargo. When it
was conceived in Washington it was as a temporary cutback to force Japan to
the negotiating table. A minor bureaucrat misfiled something, though, and the
planned periodic review never happened, which turned it into a total embargo.
"Whoops.")

As an aside, essentially none of Japan's present economic prosperity is owed
to wealth stolen from China. Most of that got very comprehensively burned,
along with the rest of the country. Japan was pretty desperately poor postwar
prior to the US' Korean war buildup, which they largely sourced in Japan, re-
laying the industrial base which ignited the Period of High Economic Growth
(高度成長期) that brought Japan from "substantially poorer than Mexico" to "really
freaking rich".

Apologies for the lecture.

------
miked
Hitchens' central claim thesis is that North Korea is really right-wing since
it's racist and militaristic. In making that claim, his problem is that N.K.
is a communist dictatorship, and he can't find any way to spin that as right-
wing. The problem then reduces to showing that it's not really communist.

He does this by saying that, since one recent government document doesn't
mention the word communism, the country's not really communist at all. No
mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked in
years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of
communism.

A few notes: _All_ dictatorships are militaristic in some important sense.
That's because all dictatorships crush dissent, and sometimes you need a tank
when all else fails.

As for racism: Stalin launched numerous pogroms against the Jews (and, in a
nice Stalinist touch, put a jew in charge of the operations). The Soviet Union
had only one non-Russian on the Central Committee, despite a large number of
ethnic minorities in the USSR.

A guess on the Deeper Subtext behind this mess: "Yeah, I supported the war in
Iraq, and I've lost readers like crazy. But I'm really a leftie. Here, watch
me establish my _bona fides_."

~~~
elblanco
> No mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked
> in years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of
> communism.

Good then you agree that North Korea was never a proper communist state since
it never really showed any of the classic characteristics of communism.

------
jcnnghm
I watched this documentary some time ago, [http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-
guide-to-travel/vice-guide-...](http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-
travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3). Pretty cool, strange country.

~~~
aquateen
The one on Liberia was great too: [http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-
travel/the-vice-gu...](http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-
vice-guide-to-liberia)

------
gojomo
Those curious about North Korea may also find the story of Joe Dresnok, the
last American defector to-North-Korea still residing there, interesting.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Dresnok>

CBS's report, with video:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/25/60minutes/main2398...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/25/60minutes/main2398580.shtml)

Some may also remember from the news a few years ago another Korean War
defector, Charles Robert Jenkins, who was able to move to Japan with his wife
in 2004 during a period of Japanese-North Korean rapprochement:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robert_Jenkins>

His wife had been shanghai'd from the shores of Japan by North Korean agents
to help train their spies.

------
cageface
This seems kind of OT for hacker news.

------
skulgnome
But so is South Korea.

------
kentosi
This author holds an air of bias about him. Even in the title "...more
despicable than you thought" suggests this is more of a tabloid than anything
factual.

I'm interested in knowing what's going on in North Korea, and he does have
some facts in here, but on the whole I'd prefer something a little more
informative.

~~~
patio11
Alright, here's some factual discussion for you. I'm about to make claims
which you may not think I mean literally. I mean them literally.

1) North Korea runs concentration camps, in which inmates are worked to death
in mines and factories to increase industrial production.

2) North Korea is a military dictatorship which has used democide via famine
against its own people to make it impossible to resist its dictatorship. If
you're on the winning side with the army, your family gets to eat better than
grass. In the late 90s a famine killed about 3 million people. That's the
regime's estimate, incidentally. (Communists tend to have rosy accounting
about such things.) The population of North Korea is about 23 million.

3) North Koreans are some of the most desperately poor people on earth. They
don't have much, and what they do have gets forcibly expropriated to maintain
one of the largest standing armies in the world. Its number one enemy is its
own people, though if you believe the propaganda it has crushed the
imperialist Yankee under its boot and exacts tribute from him, which explains
all the bags of rice bearing American flags without which the population would
again starve.

4) The regime is supported by a personality cult of Kim Jong-Il and his
father, Kim Il-sung, who has been essentially deified. That is not an
exaggeration -- North Korean propaganda has attributed the creation of the
world to him.

Any educated person should know the above four facts already. If you know
them, "Wait, hold on a second, let's not rush to judgement or use overly
emotional language when discussing this country" sounds like you're so open-
minded your brain has fallen out.

~~~
elblanco
You forgot to mention the national religion/ideology of Juche (in support of
your #4 point).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche>

