During our recent vacation I finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son, a haunting tale of life and mostly death in North Korea, and also winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Not escapist reading, obviously, being set in North Korea, but a useful glimpse into a totalitarian state the likes of which we cannot really even imagine. For three generations the three members of Kim family have been subjugating, torturing, starving, brainwashing, and often murdering the people of North Korea.
That made this read on North Korean defections, and a family who didn’t make it even more poignant.
More here (rare photos taken by a Swedish photographer back when Obama was president)
Three generations. I don’t know if there’s anything else like it in human history. Seventy years of totalitarian brutality is hard to imagine.