The Reality of North Korea

Two years ago, conductor Lorin Maazel said the following, en route to North Korea to entertain the country's leadership. He was responding to American criticism of his concert tour:

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country -- the United States -- is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.''

Here is another understanding of North Korea:

The unlucky -- the ghastly -- part of Mi-ran's experience was that when she encountered the 5- and 6-year-olds who were to be her classroom charges, she noted that they "looked no bigger to her than three- and four-year-olds" and might have been present only to eat the school's free lunch, a soup constituted from leaves and salt. Over time, attendance thinned ominously, from 50 children to 15. As Barbara Demick writes in "Nothing to Envy," a piercing account of the lives of a handful of North Korean refugees, Mi-ran "described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean." The Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, Demick takes her title from a song of national pride that teachers commonly had their classes sing, which claimed, "We have nothing to envy in the world."