In a delightfully creepy bit of propaganda out of North Korea, the makers of this video inadvertently toss Hitchens' line about not being able to escape Pyongyang's totalitarian system until you die on its head.

"Don't worry about us, sister. Our father is still with us."More >>

The new poll showing North Koreans as the second-happiest people on the planet (naturally, published and propagated by the Pyongyang regime itself) is interesting for a few speculative reasons.

First, it's unlikely that its being circulated domestically. Internal propaganda in North Korea is almost never the same as the external propaganda that the KCNA publishes to the world.

Secondly, on the off chance that it is being publicized inside the country, it wouldn't really be all that sensational. As early as the mid-1990s, people started to find out, and now its established fact known by most North Korean citizens, that material life in China is better than in the DPRK. However, North Korea has never prioritized the improvement of material conditions as being a vital part of its ideology or justification for legitimacy.

The mistake journalists commonly make is assuming that the DPRK was anything like the Communist Bloc in ideology, and that the inflow of goods made in capitalist societies will be any kind of a tipping point. It won't.

Thirdly, its also possible that such an index is being circulated in China as a somewhat less than tacit acknowledgement that North Korea would like to follow in the steps...More >>