Consider what might be called the politics of emergency. Ever since the days of Kim Il Sung, the regime in Pyongyang has used the threat of internal and external enemies to justify the suspension of rights and the criminalization of dissent. In North Korea’s revolutionary war for survival, free inquiry (or “counterrevolutionary thought”) is not just unhelpful and irritating; as far as the government is concerned, it is seditious. A perpetual state of existential danger has meant that certain pillars of civilization—a free press, for instance, or the equal application of laws—must be understood
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