In North Korea, I’m regularly startled to encounter a Hermit Kingdom where a leader is taken to be a god, everyone marches to the beat of a single drummer and mass chants and calisthenics are daily enforced to remind everyone of collective responsibility. My neighbors in what for more than two centuries was itself a Hermit Kingdom tend not to think of most of this as strange—when they were young, they saw Japanese policemen arrest citizens for going to the movies, drinking coffee or eating sweet potatoes in the street. It’s not North Korea’s unbending upholding of order that unsettles my
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