On North Korea.

Maybe in the light of North Korea being compared to the Nazi regime due to UN reports revealing the extent of its concentration camps and mass executions some in Britain might have cause for reflection that one prominent figures in the Stop the War Coalition actually look upon this totalitarian model state with sympathy.

The leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain called Andrew Murray, a sometime contributor to the Morning Star and Reader's Digest magazine, stressed this in 2003,

"Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear".

He wrote this with reference to 'the Party' because the US under the Bush administration had referred to North Korea as part of an "Axis of Evil" and was preparing to invade Iraq in that year. Those journalists who supported that invasion have been rightly criticised.

Yet those such as Murray are still allowed to shield behind their ostensibly good work in the Stop the War Coalition as something that is less important than their pronouncements in sympathy with mass murdering totalitarian regimes such as North Korea.

It is about time those truly concerned with being against senseless wars and militarism also were consistent in holding such vile individuals to account and refusing to countenance their position as leading voices in protest against intervention in Syria.

It is impossible to have a sane opposition to the growing trend towards militarism if those allowed to be leading voices in the 'official anti-war' groups in Britain are those who sympathise with a North Korean regime that starves and murders so many of its people.

But, then again, North Korea is a Lodestar for all those obsessed with the idea that it is uniquely, always and everywhere the US Empire that is the 'root cause' of every global ill and who remainn indifferent to the reality on the ground in North Korea.

There is little chance of any form of intervention to try and remove the regime of Kim Jong-un because none of the regional and global powers has any real ability to put pressure on North Korea let alone the willpower to intervene. The comparison with Middle Eastern regimes is also not a good one.

Unlike Iraq and Syria, there have not even been any attempts at internal revolt or rebellion so deeply entrenched and powerful is the hold of the Juche totalitarian state. The DPRK, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, functions as though it took Orwell's 1984 as a model of good governance.

Even China has failed to restrain Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. The entire purpose of King Jong Il's nuclear programme and satellite missile launches was to impress upon the world not only that the leadership was erratic and dangerous but also the message to the people that nobody can liberate them.

The execution of Kim Jong-un's uncle in December 2013 was in continuity with the strategy of keeping those within and without North Korea in fear of the sheer unpredictability of the regime and not to be able to predict its next move and keep the world guessing.

The December purges meant that the opening up of free trade with China, a policy which Jang Song Taek was responsible for, would not lead to alien ideas that might disturb what the repellent British apologist for North Korea, George Galloway, called its 'coherent, pristine and innocent culture' .

The US and South Korea have no way of removing the North Korean dictatorship and both the latter and China and Russia fear the destabilising consequences of what would happen if the regime was to collapse or feel threatened enough with its nuclear weapons.

In addition, neither Russia not China has any geopolitical interest in a re-unified Korea that would be pro-US right on their eastern borders, so the DPRK acts as a sort of militarised buffer state in which no power has any real interest in destabilizing it.

China has its trade links and a policy across the globe of non interference with the internal policies of the dictatorships it deals with on a 'no strings attached' basis. Even increased trade has been incapable of any thawing of North Korea's stance towards the rest of the world.

Without any resources the world could be interested in, the North Korean regime seems set to last indefinitely .It is ethnically homogeneous. There are no sectarian divides. It uses its nuclear missiles and sabre rattling to intimidate the rest of the world into accepting it as a fact lest it do something crazy.

As Orwell put it in 1984-“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”