An Enslaved State Where Private Life Is Abolished

by Christopher Hitchens - October 10th, 2006 - The Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)

Not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

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 cliche, 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 ("Hmmm - good book. Let's see if we can make it work").

Christopher Hitchens is a man who believes in personal freedom. It is what drives much of his best writing. However it is ironic that the people he most identifies with, liberals, have become so anti-American that he is a rare voice on the liberal side who still touts freedom as a part of the liberal lexicon. Today the elimination of free-enterprise is such a compelling issue that they have actually stopped condemning even such states as North Korea.

I have seen recent articles which try to excuse the attempt to get nuclear weapons by North Korea as George Bush's fault. That the efforts preceed his election by 6 or 7 years makes no difference. The left has lost its way.