Christopher Hitchens: Even wierder and more despicable than you thought.<p>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 <i>Lebanon</i>! In reality, him and his photographer went to certain Beirut neighborhoods and provoked the locals until he was slapped around by teenagers.<p>Let me say that again: Hitchens went to the Middle East to pick fist fights. Yeah, very intellectual.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=Hitchens+Lebanon+brawl" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=Hitchens+Lebanon+brawl</a><p>:-|<p>I value his take on North Korea as much as I value Octomom's opinion on Cuba.
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.
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.<p>...<p>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 <i>nationalism</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>A few notes: <i>All</i> dictatorships are militaristic in some important sense. That's because all dictatorships crush dissent, and sometimes you need a tank when all else fails.<p>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.<p>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 <i>bona fides</i>."
I watched this documentary some time ago, <a href="http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3" rel="nofollow">http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-...</a>. Pretty cool, strange country.
Those curious about North Korea may also find the story of Joe Dresnok, the last American defector to-North-Korea still residing there, interesting.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Dresnok" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Dresnok</a><p>CBS's report, with video:<p><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/25/60minutes/main2398580.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/25/60minutes/main2398...</a><p>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:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robert_Jenkins" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Robert_Jenkins</a><p>His wife had been shanghai'd from the shores of Japan by North Korean agents to help train their spies.
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.<p>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.