North Koreans will keep quiet, or else

The late Kim Jong-il

As you may not have been able to avoid learning, North Korea's "great leader" died Saturday, and his son, "the great successor to the revolution" and "the eminent leader of the military and the people," took over. The king is dead; long live the king, and all that.
    According to Monday's New York Times ("Kim Jong-il, North Korean Dictator, Dies," by Choe Sang-Hun and David E. Sanger):

An enormous funeral service is scheduled for Dec. 28 in Pyongyang, according to K.C.N.A., a state news agency. The following day, a separate “national meeting of mourning” will take place, with all North Koreans instructed to pay a three-minute silent tribute to Mr. Kim. [emphasis mine]

    If you're wondering why they have to be instructed to be quiet, you might find instruction of your own in the following passage from Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22:

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted and where there is either too much law and order or too little...One of the articles for Graydon Carter [Vanity Fair] that won me the most praise was an essay titled "Visit to a Small Planet," in which I described acquiring another identity and bribing my way into North Korea. Every time I got a tribute to the success of this piece I felt a slight access of shame, because only I could appreciate what a failure it was. I had exerted all my slack literary muscles to evoke the eerie wretchedness and interstellar frigidity of the place, which is an absolutist despotism where the slaves are no longer even fed regularly (and is thus its own version of the worst of all possible worlds), but I knew with a sick certainty that I had absolutely not managed to convey to my readers anything of how it might feel to be a North Korean even for a day. Erich Fromm might perhaps have managed it: in a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.... [p. 349]

    "Visit to a Small Planet" appeared in the January 2001 issue of Vanity Fair. It is not included in Hitchens's final collection of published essays, Arguably, for it had already been collected, in 2004, in his third collection, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.

Nicholas D. Kristof reports today in The New York Times ("A New Kim. A New Chance?") that when he went to North Korea in 1989, he visited quite a few ordinary North Koreans in their homes:

The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!^*) It blares like that all day.
    The Loudspeaker underscores that North Korea is not just another dictatorship but, perhaps, the most totalitarian country ever. Stalin and Mao were murderous but low-tech; the Kim family added complex systems of repression.
    Anyone disabled is considered an eyesore, for example. So people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.
    Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.
    Once in North Korea, I stopped in a rural area to interview two high school girls at random. They were friendly, if startled. So was I when they started speaking simultaneously and repeating political lines in perfect unison. They could have been robots....

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* December 22. Apparently this refers to an actual announcement. The Christian Science Monitor reports (in "Kim Jong-il: Legendary golfer and mythical powers even in death," by Jean H. Lee) that "The first time he bowled, Kim Jong-il scored a perfect 300, according to North Korean media. Similarly, in his first-ever round of golf, he had five holes-in one for a 38-under-par round."
    I googled but couldn't find any photos of Kim Jong-il playing golf (or bowling). But I did discover that someone has been running the "Kim Jong-Il looking at things" Facebook page.