Kim Jong-un Is Not a Punchline

No country interests me right now more than North Korea—and for entirely the wrong reasons. It doesn’t pull at me the way Japan does, with its layers of culture and its precision. It doesn’t fascinate me the way America does with its velocity and its contradictions. North Korea just disturbs me. The bare fact of it. The persistence of it.

That a regime like this still functions in 2013 is something I genuinely can’t process. That a state can still classify its population by loyalty tier, control what people see and hear and believe, imprison entire families for the transgression of a single member—not just imprison but execute, disappear, erase—and do all of this while the rest of the world watches, not because it doesn’t know, but because it has decided that knowing is enough.

British broadcaster Channel 4 aired a documentary about the country. Young North Korean refugees speak on camera about what they lived through, their accounts supported by hidden footage that someone risked everything to smuggle out. The specificity of what they describe—the ordinary texture of life under a system that has deleted the concept of ordinary—is more harrowing than any dramatization I’ve seen. The flatness in how they tell it. This happened. It is still happening.

Kim Jong-un is not a meme. The man with the bad haircut who launches missiles and has his relatives killed is not a joke. He runs a machine designed to produce suffering, and it runs efficiently. The international community’s tolerance for this is one of the stranger moral failures of the era—not dramatic, not a single moment of weakness, just a slow accumulation of inaction dressed up as geopolitical caution.

I can’t look away from it. I’m not entirely sure I want to.