Hitchens' central claim thesis is that North Korea is really right-wing since it's racist and militaristic. In making that claim, his problem is that N.K. is a

Hitchens' central claim thesis is that North Korea is really right-wing since it's racist and militaristic. In making that claim, his problem is that N.K. is a communist dictatorship, and he can't find any way to spin that as right-wing. The problem then reduces to showing that it's not really communist. He does this by saying that, since one recent government document doesn't mention the word communism, the country's not really communist at all. No mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked in years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of communism. A few notes: All dictatorships are militaristic in some important sense. That's because all dictatorships crush dissent, and sometimes you need a tank when all else fails. As for racism: Stalin launched numerous pogroms against the Jews (and, in a nice Stalinist touch, put a jew in charge of the operations). The Soviet Union had only one non-Russian on the Central Committee, despite a large number of ethnic minorities in the USSR. A guess on the Deeper Subtext behind this mess: "Yeah, I supported the war in Iraq, and I've lost readers like crazy. But I'm really a leftie. Here, watch me establish my bona fides."