A REPORT ON NORTH KOREA, from The New Yorker:

PHILIP GOUREVITCH: It’s one of the most brutal governments on earth. One of the difficulties in assessing the nature of existence inside North Korea is that it’s so sealed off and insular. And the regime is masterful at preventing anybody who comes in from seeing what’s really going on. So, in the end, one has to rely to a large extent on the word of people who come out. The testimonies of such refugees and defectors have been available only since the mid-nineties, when more and more people, driven by extreme hunger, started to flee North Korea. The picture that has emerged from their accounts certainly confirms everything that one had suspected. It’s a place where the level of sheer physical brutality is extreme and the psychic violence is constant. . . .

There is no civil society. There has never been a civil society in the territory known as North Korea. There was an oppressive dynasty. There was an oppressive imperial presence, and then there was an absolutely and totally oppressive prison camp. I mean, the country’s a gulag. It’s a prison camp. That doesn’t mean that these people are all zombies. They live in a zombie-ish culture, but many of them, judging by the defectors, are capable of retooling their mentality. But it takes a lot. These are lives that have been criminally wasted.

Read the whole thing. If you have the stomach for it.

UPDATE: Michael Ubaldi emails: “Reading that Gourevitch piece really puts the Albright wine-and-dine into a different, more blood-curdling context.”

Yes. It’s sometimes necessary for diplomats to wine and dine thugs, of course. What’s distressing is how many of them seem to forget that it’s thugs they’re wining and dining.