North Korea is, to put it mildly, a “problem.” The so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea devotes much of its time to threatening other nations. Pyongyang spends money that it doesn’t have on nuclear weapons, missiles, and bizarrely choreographed and synchronized propaganda ceremonies. It has pioneered a system of monarchical communism, passing power from one idiot son to another.
Worse, at least for the North Korean People, the DPRK has created a genuine gulag state, with a smaller but still murderous “gulag archipelago,” as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously called Joseph Stalin’s creation. The most important political challenge facing Washington remains the North’s nuclear program. But the ultimate objective is to relax Pyongyang’s grip over the suffering population.
That the DPRK is repressive is hardly news. However, it is difficult for anyone in the West to imagine the full extent of repression in the North.
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea recently issued the second edition of David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag: The Lives and Voices of “Those Who Are Sent to the Mountains.” The study is grimly enlightening, relying on satellite imagery and personal testimony, ever more abundant now that there are more than 23,000 North Korean escapees now living in the South. The publication is a critical attempt, observes Roberta Cohen, who chairs the Committee, to breach “the conspiracy of silence surrounding the camps.”
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