When awful floods inundated large swaths of Louisiana last month, thousands of Americans volunteered to travel to the southern state to aid in recovery efforts. Now that terrible flooding has inundated parts of North Korea, meanwhile, Kim Jong-un’s regime is “deploying” 100,000 residents to the stricken region, reports Daily NK. “Provincial governments have been ordered to select 5,000 residents [per province] to assist in flood recovery efforts,” reports a source in the country.
It’s a point that we sometimes forget: In the part of the world that we broadly consider free, the citizen is sovereign. But in unfree countries, “citizens” are in fact subjects—nothing more than the property of their regimes, really. And so Cuban doctors are “sent” abroad to work. More than one million Beijingers are “evicted” to build sports facilities. And 100,000 North Korean citizens are “deployed” to flood-ravaged areas of their country. The essential nature of these regimes, particularly North Korea’s—and the dim view they take of their citizens—is worth keeping in mind, particularly as we are set to endure yet another wave of calls for “engagement” with Pyongyang in the wake of its latest nuclear test. There are fundamental differences of worldview that will make any genuine accord all but impossible.
