The Death of a Tyrant

In the wake of the death of Kim Jong-Il, below is a famous picture of North Korea that pretty much sums up his and his father's tyrannical reign:

I will let Christopher Hitchens, who was one of only a handful of Americans to ever have stepped inside North Korea under the current tyranny, have the last word on Kim Jong-Il:

Yet there is one place on earth that is home to all these forces of misery: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Into this tiny space has been packed the worst combination of absolute despotism and utter breakdown -- a weird coincidence of totalitarianism with state failure.

It's the totalitarian aspect that strikes you first, as it did me when I visited North Korea last winter. Fifty years of ultra-Stalinism have made the very idea of a private life almost unthinkable. Every move and utterance is planned and scripted, with an entire people endlessly mobilized for a cult of hysterical adulation. The president of the country is a dead man named Kim Il Sung, whose rotund visage glares from every wall. All other official leadership posts are held by his son Kim Jong Il, whose birth is said to have been attended by miraculous signs and portents. All films, all books, all newspapers and all radio and television broadcasts are about either the Father or the Son. Everybody is a soldier. Everybody is an informer. Everybody is a unit. Everything is propaganda.