We live our orderly, sheltered secure lives beset with our own often-relatively minor yet significant-appearing problems in getting on with our lives, while elsewhere in the world - in so much of the world - people live under repressive regimes which care less for the basic welfare and necessities of life for their populations than the acquisition of advanced military technology.

NPyongyang residents react as they mourn the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il

Not to say that the ordinary concerns of life, meaningful and intimately successful relationships, the welfare of one's family, concerns about the direction of society and requisite economic advancement, secure employment, a reliable education- and health-care system, assurances of security and equality under the law, one's personal health concerns, do not cause us anxiety.

But it's difficult to imagine people having all these concerns and much more, living in societies where their rulers are tyrants imposing their will upon the populace, ensuring that with the support of the military, the courts and the police that they control, that compliance will be complete. We see these scenarios from the Middle East to Asia, Russia, the Balkans and South America.

North Korea stands as an outpost of reclusive tyranny, whose ruler-by-inheritance has brought the country to financial ruin, incapable of feeding its population, heavily reliant on international humanitarian aid to provide basic sustenance. Yet the regime spared none of its scarce treasury in funding research into nuclear technology, succeeding in becoming a nuclear-armed nation.

Its threats to its near-neighbours from South Korea to Japan and its bellicose threats beyond Asia have marked it as a potent and potential threat to world stability. A country of little over twenty-four million people, with a standing army of well over a million military, which is the demographic that is fed and cared for, all others fend for themselves.

And in a mass outpouring of public grief, of what can only be thought of as the Stockholm syndrome on a grand scale, there is the spectacle of North Koreans beset by unassuageable grief at the sudden, albeit not totally unexpected, death of their "Dear Leader", Kim Jung-il.