Nicholas D. Kristof on North Korea

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"On my first trip to North Korea in 1989, I made a nuisance of myself by randomly barging into private homes. I wanted to see how ordinary North Koreans actually live, and people were startled but hospitable.

"The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!) It blares like that all day.

"The Loudspeaker underscores that North Korea is not just another dictatorship but, perhaps, the most totalitarian country ever. Stalin and Mao were murderous but low-tech; the Kim family added complex systems of repression.

"Anyone disabled is considered an eyesore, for example. So people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.

"Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.

"Once in North Korea, I stopped in a rural area to interview two high school girls at random. They were friendly, if startled. So was I when they started speaking simultaneously and repeating political lines in perfect unison. They could have been robots.

"When videos (of movies, music or religion) began to be smuggled in from China, police began to turn off the power to entire buildings. Then the police would go door to door and examine what video was stuck inside players. A smuggled tape could mean the dispatch of an entire family to a labor camp."