There is only one country in the world where Orwell’s fears have come close to realisation, and that is North Korea. Indeed, to outsiders, the totalitarian horror of that brutalised place can seem like fiction. As revealed in a number of new books about North Korea — most notably Barbara Demick’s extraordinary reportage in Nothing to Envy — Orwell predicted almost every aspect of the planet’s nastiest political regime.

North Korea is a state whose very survival depends on propaganda and mass mind control, the threat of war, constant surveillance, brainwashing, censorship, the absence of individual rights and the repression of individuality itself. Kim’s exhortations to his benighted people — “Let’s live our own way”, “Adore Kim Jong Il with all your heart” — are echoes of the slogans of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace”, “Freedom is slavery”, “Ignorance is strength”.

There is no personal privacy in North Korea. Any perceived transgression against the regime is punishable by death, or at least indefinite incarceration. Evenings are spent in indoctrination classes and factory breaks are devoted to “hate” sessions; spying on the neighbours is a patriotic duty; at political rallies, officials scan the faces of the faithful to detect any hint of scepticism.

The only splashes of colour in the drab landscape are the propaganda posters demanding ever more abject subservience to the absurd, bouffant-haired Kim, who sits in his palace, drunk on power, French wine and Western pornography.

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death,” Winston Smith writes in his journal. The same is true in North Korea. In the political camps, informers report disloyal “sleep-talk” to the Thought Police. When Winston Smith awakens in his cell, screaming his forbidden love for his beloved Julia, he is sent to Room 101.

Full article at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article7039984.ece