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NOT even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom.

The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliche, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il-Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint ("Hmmm - good book. Let's see if we can make it work").

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's imagined world. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop.

Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed).

A recent night-time photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarised zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed.

In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favourable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation.

The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour - North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave - my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up grains of food from barren fields (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest").

Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned. It seems mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, orientated to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more.