Flar Earth: Brain fever

ANOTHER glorious example of authoritarian raving is provided by North Korea, which proudly announces that it is becoming a nation of intellectuals. It has, it claims, 1.73 million of them and is moving towards 'the assimilation of the whole society to intelligentsia'.

It describes this feat of cerebral Stakhanovism as a 'brilliant fruition' of the ruling party's education policy. What a young North Korean has to do to qualify as an intellectual is not made clear, but juche - the Great Leader Kim Il Sung's philosophy of self-reliance - has a lot to do with it. Every politically correct intellectual once had to aspire to be a worker or a peasant. Are we to expect the Korean Workers' Party to change its name?

(Photograph omitted)