Amnesty International is fairly well known for encouraging private citizens like you and like me to write letters to government officials of governments that ho

Amnesty International is fairly well known for encouraging private citizens like you and like me to write letters to government officials of governments that hold "prisoners of conscience." I have done this before, and I should do this more often. When I lived in Taiwan in the early 1980s, under the former dictatorship there, I actually spoke in public at a speech contest for foreign students on the occasion of Sun Yat-sen's birthday on how much Taiwan then didn't live up to the ideals of the 1911 revolution in China as proclaimed by Sun. I have got to look up how to join more direct communication to the reclusive government of north Korea, in my own name, recording my own return address, and making clear that I will not be pushed around by a regime of thugs. I have recently been following the suggestion of another Hacker News participant and have read the three-volume history of the Nazi regime by Richard Evans, the Third Reich trilogy. Evans notes in various places in his books that even the Nazis were responsive to international opinion on some issues. In the early period of the Nazi regime, Hitler used to receive personal letters from American eugenicists and segregationists who praised the policies of his regime. I don't want my not saying anything at all to be construed as consent or as fear of indicating disagreement with a dictator. I will have to openly and frequently express my disagreement with the world's remaining dictators until they all fall. The North Korea Now website http://www.northkoreanow.org/take-action-now/get-your-voice-heard/ http://www.northkoreanow.org/take-action-now/get-your-voice-... provides advice on how to write letters that may have influence on the regime there. Sure enough, one part of the advice is to write to China, the country that does the most to prop up Kim Jung-un's regime. A letter to be broadcast by Free North Korea Radio http://www.northkoreanow.org/now-accepting-letters-from-america-a-special-program-for-u-s-americans/ http://www.northkoreanow.org/now-accepting-letters-from-amer... might also help. A Washington Post editorial from October 2014 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/north-koreas-leaders-must-be-held-to-account-for-human-rights-abuses/2014/10/30/7e6026d4-603f-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/north-koreas-leaders-... lists other steps to take to express disagreement with the regime in north Korea.