Thank Solidarity that someone has at last had the guts to tell it like it is: North Korea is better than you think and anything wrong with it is the result of U.S sanctions. I was particularly impressed by Christine Ahn’s assertion that we alienated Westerners could learn a lot from the collective responses of the North Korean people. One could make a cheap joke about forced collectivised grief or the collective nature of famine, but this would just be racist. Many would claim that it is possible to berate American imperialism in the region *and* also critique the North Korean kleptocracy, but those people are effeminate liberal-anarchists who don’t realise you need a Manichean response whenever unfortunately flawed Jacobin State Socialism is pitted against Western Imperialism, regardless of the contradictions this creates. Thus Tim Shorrock’s emphasis on the self-reliance of North Korea may seem a little odd against his admission that the North Korean economy crumbled without the support of the Soviet Union, but it is only contradictory if you are a nihilist.