The letter, North Korea a happy place (September 19) paints an enthusiastic but deluded picture of communist North Korea, where allegedly people are happy and schools look like palaces. It appears that the writer is as easy to fool as left-leaning Western intellectuals were by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s. But the difference is that the letter writer does not have the excuse of not knowing any better. North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by a dynastic leadership and utterly devoid of civil liberties. The country reliably occupies the bottom rungs of global freedom indices and is notorious for its brutal prison camps, starving population and Orwellian mind control. It is a matter of deep concern to see that the SA Communist Party (SACP) has not learnt anything from history. North Korea teaches us that phenomena such as the Soviet gulags, the holodomor, cults of personality and the destructive effects of command economics all have present-day equivalents. The ...
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