North Korea is home to vast horror

[Mid]

North Korea is home to vast horror
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
By Jonah Goldberg

Perhaps it would be better if we simply vowed to never again say "never again" when it comes to the sort of slaughter and institutionalized cruelty we associate with the Holocaust. For decades now, we've known that what's going on in North Korea is too terrible to contemplate.

Even so, what once haunted us as an ill-defined and foreboding suspicion has clarified into the secure knowledge of broad and systemic evil.

A new report by the Korean Bar Association offers a horrifying portrait of the Hermit Kingdom's mountaintop dungeons, which, notes The Washington Post's Blaine Harden, have lasted 12 times as long as the Nazi concentration camps and twice as long as the Soviet gulag.

The North Korean abattoir even survived the largely man-made famine of the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have starved to death.

In the camps, guards are instructed that it is better to err on the side of rape and murder than on the side of mercy or kindness.

Because North Korea's founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, declared, "Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations," even the grandchildren of "traitors" can be sentenced to a life of hard labor and slow death from exhaustion and malnutrition.

Samantha Power, an Obama administration National Security Council official, wrote about America's inability or unwillingness to stop genocidal slaughter. In A Problem From Hell, Power surveyed the cumulative horrors of the 1990s -- in Bosnia and Rwanda -- and was forced to ask, "Did 'never again' simply mean 'never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945'?"

If the answer to Power's sardonic question is yes, then the West should be proud of its record. If we mean that when faced in our own time with the reality of such organized evil we will heed the "never again" lesson, then we have a lot to be ashamed of.

In his recent visit to Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, President Barack Obama insisted that we must "bear witness" to the evil of the Holocaust. Such platitudes are the stuff of every president and potentate who visits such places. And that's fine. It's what we are supposed to say. But we are also supposed to mean it. After all, it's easy to say we must bear witness to things that have already happened and promise to "never forget" the sins of others and our own good deeds.

But what of things figuratively happening under our noses and literally transpiring a click away on our computer screens? You can see the slave camps in North Korea -- not quite live via satellite, but close enough -- where the machinery of suffering chugs along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?

Our collective, bipartisan failure to deal with the human suffering in North Korea is chalked up to the fact that Kim Jong Il's nuclear program is a far more pressing concern than is the brutalization and murder of North Koreans.

That is hardly a trivial argument. But it's looking less compelling every day. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have failed to disarm North Korea because it does not wish to be disarmed; it is a true extortion regime. Its existence is owed entirely to the fact that it has mastered geopolitical blackmail. In exchange for promises to do things it will never do, we give it aid along with as many second chances as it can carry.

Meanwhile, North Korean nuclear brinkmanship and ballistic saber rattling guarantee that outside governments will not exert an ounce of effort on the ongoing humanitarian crisis. "Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible," David Straub, a senior State Department official under presidents George W. Bush and Clinton, told the Post. "They go nuts when you talk about it." And so, we pretend it's not happening.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared North Korea to "small children and unruly teenagers . . . demanding attention." She says we shouldn't give them the attention.

Seen through the window of nuclear diplomacy, Clinton's neo-Bushian stance is entirely defensible. Seen through a moral prism, it's at worst a horror and at best a profound failure to bear witness.

There are no easy or risk-free solutions. But maybe a good place to start would be for the U.S. government to act as if "never again" meant something.

dispatch.com

bold format mine

[gjbkk]

Seems more like another subtle reminder that the holocaust existed by Jonah Goldberg than actual facts

[larvidchr]

This is just one example of where politics becomes rotten and hypocritical, but liberating the people of North Korea would spark an avalanche of criticism against the countries who participated in such an endeavour, it would be Iraq and Afghanistan all over again and be a godsend to the red brigade, so better we do nothing and let the North Korean people suffer quietly

[Mid]

^

courage , wisdom and patience

is the wisdom that has been absent

[storm1fishing]

I'm sure that if there were oil or mineral wealth , the americans would have been in long ago.

[Cujo]

Good article.
The west is now so much more advanced from the point of technological weaponry thet it's about time to take care of business. Level Pyongyang and play defense from there.

[Mid]

Level Pyongyang and play defense from there.

oh were it that easy , targets are well embedded in civilian (innocents) shields

[slackula]

It's only a matter of time until NK collapses under the weight of its own incompetence, but it is a huge blot on our collective conscience that the regime is still in existence.

It'll go down faster than a house of cards in a tornado if China pulls its finger out and gets with the program, pressure needs to be brought to bear on them to be more constructive wrt NK.

[plorf]

All very true, but what to do ? We all know China may be getting impatient with North Korea, but doesn't have enough leverage into pressuring the regime to implement reforms, as could be witnessed in the past few years. It may be its biggest (or almost only) trading partner, but other than that it stubbornly refuses to inform China of important decisions and unilaterally causes a crisis with Japan, which eventually leads to the re-armement of Japan which is the last of Chinas intentions. But China would never allow a full-blown invasion in its backyard, that is clear. Surgical strikes have been debated and dismissed. So what to do with a fully militarised society that is still extremely well-organised and can mobilise its entire population in no time ? Just look at the Mass games to get an impression of what the regime is still capable of, starving citizens don't have the strenght, information or slightest chance of political change.
Certainly the action of the regime should be known and debated in the West, but what good does it when Hillary Clinton mentions these camps ?
It's a bit like mentioning that the Taliban have brutal Sharia-laws, it gets the ignorant public on your side morally, but is otherwise not helpful to any solution at all. And let's not forget, the very last thing South Korea wants is the regime to collapse! The mass exodus and extreme differences between N and S would be an impossible task for the still young democracy and economic powerhouse to manage.
They want N. Korea to stabilise under a new leader and gradually open up economically while maintaining strict borders.

[Smithson]

This is just one example of where politics becomes rotten and hypocritical, but liberating the people of North Korea would spark an avalanche of criticism against the countries who participated in such an endeavour, it would be Iraq and Afghanistan all over again and be a godsend to the red brigade, so better we do nothing and let the North Korean people suffer quietly

Whatever the political color, nobodies claiming things are jolly good in Iraq or Afghanistan. Vietnam didn't go that well either.

The Yanks are certainly slow learners, many still haven't realized that bombing ppl isn't going to help them.

[slackula]

They want N. Korea to stabilise under a new leader and gradually open up economically while maintaining strict borders.

Which is pretty much what has happened in China. Well said.

A Western backed invasion would be unacceptable to the Chinese, and understandably so, but the actual desires of China and SK (and even the rest of us) are probably not that different.

China will be the key to solving NK imhblo

[rotator]

Estimates vary but most are in the region of 1 Million dead North Koreans starved from the trade embargo led by the US and followed by their western lackies

[plorf]

Estimates vary but most are in the region of 1 Million dead North Koreans starved from the trade embargo led by the US and followed by their western lackies

Nonsense rotator. North Korea is a massive food aid recipient from the West (mainly US) and its "western lacky", as types like you wrongly like to call it, South Korea.

South Korea also supplies the North with hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizer! It's most certainly not the trade embargo, but rather a more reluctant South Korea that has once again triggered furious propaganda tirades from N.Korea about lack of food. Needless to say that party officials still feast on the finest beef steaks and hoard massive amounts of foods while the population starves. Get your facts straight before you rant against the West I suggest.

More here for those who are interested:
Asia Times Online :: Korea News and Korean Business and Economy, Pyongyang News

To feed its population of roughly 23.5 million, North Korea requires some 5 million tons of grain and potatoes. Since the early 1990s, the domestic harvest has fluctuated between 3.5 and 4.7 million tons and generated a significant gap between domestic production and actual needs.

When North Korea became a recipient of foreign food aid in the late 1990s, the shortage was covered by international donations. Initially, the United States played a major role, but around the year 2000 the South Korean government replaced Washington as the top aid provider, shipping some 400,000 tons annually. In recent years, China has also become a major food donor.

North Korea also needs fertilizer. Until the current crisis began to unroll in the early 1990s, it had one of the most fertilizer-intensive agriculture sectors in the world. In recent years, South Korean has shipped 350,000 tons of fertilizer each year. It is believed that these shipments increase the average annual harvest by roughly a million tons.

(...)
Yet not everyone supported the famine theory. From mid-summer, the South Korean government began to question statements about a pending food crisis in the North. Seoul maintained that available intelligence seemed to indicate that the 2008 harvest would be satisfactory.
(..)
It was against this backdrop that the US decided to deliver food aid totaling some 500,000 tons - a large part of which has already been shipped. An unknown amount of food aid from China has arrived as well.

[Rattanaburi]

The sons and daughters and relatives of those who run these regimes should be stopped from living abroad. Why let them into any country even on a diplomatic visa. It's obvious they are only abroad to enjoy the world while they see their own people suffering from their stupid governments and their policies. That fat wierd son of Kim Il who is occasionally caught here in this or that country should just strangely disappear. He's just as valuable to the CIA as any terrorist in terms of true information as well.