지금 북한주민들의 삶의질은 1984년도보다 훨씬 더 악화된, 노예국가로 전락했다.

약 55년전, 돌아가신 박대통령이 혁명을 하고, 한창 잘살아보겠다고 팔을 걷어 부치고 주야로 경제건설에 나라의 모든 역량을 쏟아 부을때만 해도  북한은 한국보다 월등하게 국민들의 생활조건이 좋았었다.  그때 이후로  이북의 3대세습 정권은 한가지 변하지 않고, 계속해서 국민들에게 독려하는 구호가 있다.  이름하여 "쌀밥에 고기국을 국민들에게 배불리 먹이는 것이다"라고.  얼마나 어리석고, 거짖으로 가득한 국민 기만 전술인가.  조국 남한에서는 쌀생산량이 계속 적어지고 있지만, 이마져도 국민들이 다 소비하지 못해 잉여쌀이 수만톤씩 남아돈다.  쌀밥은 비만의 원인이고, 성인병의 첫번 원흉이라고 해서, 대신 건강식품을 찾아 먹으면서, 인생을 즐기고 있는 판인데....   북한 전문가, Christopher Hitchens의 Article에 따르면, 북한은 1984년도 당시의 북한주민들 생활은, 지금의 북한 주민들 생활보다 훨씬 여건이 좋았었다는 연구내용이다.

하루밥 세끼도 못먹이고, 매년 백만명 이상이 굶주림에 허덕이다, 결국 목숨을 잃고 있는데도,이에는 아랑곳하지않고혈맹인  중국마져도 이북을 비난하고, UN 결의안에 찬성하고, 전세계가 북한에 경제봉쇄 정책을 시행중에 있다.  그렇다고 남한은 잘 하고 있는가? 천만의 말씀이다.  좌빨과 이북에 수조억원을 국민몰래 퍼다준 좌파정권의 실세였던 자들이 차기 대통령하겠다고, 온 나라를 소용돌이 속으로 몰아넣고 있고, 이에 동조하는 빨간물이 들은 국민들이 전국을 빨간물로 색칠하기에 하루 24시간이 모자랄 정도로 날뛰고있는 현실을 이제는 더 외면하지 않기를 간절히 바라면서, 여기에 과거 부시 대통령때의 연구내용을 옮겨 싣는다.

                                 1975년도에, 나이어린 김정남이 군복정장을하고 그의 할머니와 찍은 사진이다.


How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment's thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il's government runs "concentration camps." It would be truer to say that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.

This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word "genocide" has. To call a set of actions "genocidal," as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.'s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

In consequence of this, and for the first time since the founding of Kim Il Sung's state, large numbers of people have begun to take the appalling risk of running away. If they make it, they make it across the river into China, where there is a Korean-speaking area in the remote adjoining province. There they live under the constant threat of being forcibly repatriated. The fate of the fugitive slave is not pretty: North Korea does indeed operate a system of camps, most memorably described in a book—The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan—that ought to be much more famous than it is. Given what everyday life in North Korea is like, I don't have sufficient imagination to guess what life in its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.

It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.

북한 주민들을 노예와 시키고 있는 김정일과 그일당들은 핵무장화 하기위해 계획표를 짜놓고 채찍질을 서슴치 않고 있다.  이를 위해 그들은 북한주민들을 쥐어짜서 노동현장에 내몰고 있다고 하겠다.  그러나 이들 집단의 실패한 정책과 그사회가 영구집권할 것으로 생각하는가?  또다른 계획표에 따르면 북한을 자유화시키고, 그들 집단을 몰아낼려고하는 계획에 김정일 왕조은 가장 두려워 하는 것이다. Bush 대통령의 뚝심에 찬사를 보낸다.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/05/worse_than_1984.html