North Korea Won’t Leave Me

I can’t stop thinking about North Korea, for all the wrong reasons. Not because I’m drawn to its culture or impressed by some innovation or charmed by something about the place. It’s the horror that won’t let go.

The pure fact of it existing in 2013 makes no sense. A state sorting people into castes, controlling the images they see, executing them however the regime feels like. Whole families wiped out. Entire generations locked away. Guilty, innocent—doesn’t matter. The system is so complete it feels like something from another era, except it’s happening right now.

Channel 4 put out a documentary recently and it found its way onto the usual video sites. Interviews with people who escaped. Secret recordings. Footage from inside the system. Young people talking about their lives under constant control, constant threat, the state pressing down on everything.

What gets me is that Kim Jong-un isn’t a cartoon. He’s not some laughable figure everyone jokes about. He’s a man killing people, running an entire country through pure cruelty, and the reason it continues is because nobody does anything about it. I keep turning that over—how absurdity and horror are the same thing when it’s actually real.