Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

"A. I lived in North Korea for a year from 1984 to 1985. I went there from a relatively mild dictatorship which then existed in the Soviet Union. Of course, the USSR was an authoritarian state, no free elections, a lot of censorship and the like, but in terms of personal freedom it was a relatively free place. At this point in the Soviet Union, North Korea was seen as the embodiment of dictatorship, so I had very negative assumptions when I went there. I sort of expected to see robot-like people, goose-stepping on the streets, soldiers with automatic rifles standing at every corner. This was not the case. It appeared to be a perfectly normal country. I remember how surprised I was, in my first few days, that it did not look that terrible. Eventually I came to realise that it was indeed a very bad, very brutal dictatorship, but most people had a normal life nonetheless. I saw something important. First, when people live under a very oppressive regime they don’t usually think much about politics unless they are unlucky enough to be in a concentration camp, where they still think largely about getting food. Even if our lives are determined by politics, I don’t believe that we think of politics most of the time. People manage to lead normal lives in all kinds of societies, including North Korea."