Defining "Hellhole"

So the North Koreans were insulted that we called their proletarian paradise a hellhole? Perhaps we need to define "hellhole," then. How about:

Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers. ...

"As prisoners eat rats in the camp, rats were almost depleted and became harder to find. ... The children never lost opportunities to catch rats, as they watch so many other prisoners dying of undernourishment and pellagra. Rat is the only source of meat for prisoners for 10 or 20 years." ...

During the extreme famine of the late 1990s when about 3 million people starved to death in North Korea, public executions were staged nearly every month in every town in order to prevent spontaneous uprisings by the local population, according to Jang Yeop Hwang, the former secretary of North Korea's ruling North Korea Workers' Party.

These exceptional definitions of "hellhole," are from The Hidden Gulag in today's San Diego Union Tribune, authored by Young Howard, a pro-democracy activist from South Korea, is currently a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. From 1999 to 2001, he assisted North Korean refugees along the North Korea-China border. (h/t Real Clear Politics)