Yet this work of political fiction Michas has concocted must serve a purpose. I fear it is one of creating alibis. "If you see us rolling out the tanks, rescinding a few articles of the constitution, or if you see demonstrators being trampled, beaten like it's Mubarak's Tahrir Square, Manama, or Baniya, Syria", signals Michas to US and global elites, "it's OK": It's only communists and "anarchostalinists" who are being punished for their love of Kim Il Sung. Everybody else just loves being reduced to poverty and insecurity.

Or it could be worse. Michas seems to be wishing for what comes after the tanks: the cleansing of everyone who could present or articulate an alternative to TINA. When the CIA supplied death lists to the Shah in Iran in 1953, to Saddam's Baath party in the 1963 coup against Qasim, to Suharto in Indonesia in 1965, then invariably, the supposed elimination of the communist menace was actually an elimination of all leftist or even just nationalist leaders and opinionmakers of any stripe. This was repeated even without direct CIA help by the military dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay: even collective farmers, artists, sociologists were part of the supposed 'communist danger'. Or, in an earlier era: the White Terror, supposedly a retaliation for the Red Terror of the Hungarian Soviet, mostly hit agrarian activists and also reached social democrats.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}