Things got so bad that there was no precedent for it. I didn’t know what to do because no nation had ever been in such a bad situation. In 1996 floods came once again—and they were just as crippling, if not more so, then the previous year’s had been. It was as if the heavens themselves wanted me to fail. I needed the masses to believe that their nation was the best, even though they ate very little. They had to see the DPRK as “a poor country of abundance.” But it grew harder and harder for me to tell people with empty dishes that socialism is good. They simply weren’t buying it. They weren’t
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