In the fullest possible sense, the contemporary leaders of North Korea are the intellectual and moral descendants of [the] Stalinists… North Korean camps were built according to a Stalinist model, and … they continue to be run that way… …As in Stalin’s time, North Koreans are arrested for trumped-up political “crimes”, such as reading a foreign newspaper, singing a South Korean pop song, or “insulting the authority” of the North Korean leadership. As in Stalin’s time, North Korean prisoners - even children - are given ludicrous and impossible work “quotas” to fulfill and are subjected to brutal, irrational punishments. And, as in Stalin’s time, North Korea’s leadership doesn’t want anyone to know any of these details, since such revelations not only will damage their foreign reputation but also put their own regime at risk.

[That’s why reading Hawk’s book is so important! It comes complete with aerial photographs of camps whose existence is still denied by NK’s leaders. Also Stalinesque.] …Certainly after absorbing [the details of this book] it will be more difficult for Americans or Europeans to … negotiate coldly with their Korean counterparts and not mention human rights violations. South Koreans… will find it more difficult to argue in favor of appeasing the Northern regime… North Korean police and admministrators… will find it more difficult to justify their own behavior, or to claim that they don’t know what is really happening in the camps.

And if the full truth about the camps becomes known to the wider population, then whatever support remains for the state constructed by Kim Il Sung and Kim JOng Il will begin… to ebb away. This is not to say that words can make a dictatorship collapse overnight. But words certainly can make a dictatorship collapse over time… Totalitarian regimes are built on lies and can be damaged, even destroyed, when lies are exposed.