Sad but True - I

Sad but True - I belong to the Presbyberian Church.

I know what you're saying; "Mitch! You're a conservative! How can you be a member of a church that is so unreservedly, unabashedly, unreconstructedly sixties-liberal?" The answer is, "it's not easy". My reasons are purely theological, and have nothing to do with temporal politics.

I remember during the prayer portion of a service a few years back, when news of North Korea's potential famine became known. An older woman - a very unpleasant person whose ugliness was utterly internal, a product of a character deficit - took the US to task for "allowing this unjust starvation" to take place, demanding that we work toward "peaceandjustice" (as if they're interwoven) by feeding the people...that Kim Jong Il could have fed himself, were he not wrapped up with building the biggest per-capita military in the world.

Someone sent me this today - enlightening, but hardly surprising. Totalitarians must rely on total enforcement of their "visions", including forcible removal of dissent. That means mass murder, and massive camps.

And yet, after three decades of reading about the Gulag and the Holocaust, this sort of thing still amazes and disturbs me:

NBC’s investigation revealed that North Korea’s State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps, mainly in remote areas. The worst are in the country’s far Northeast. Some of them are gargantuan: At least two of the camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are larger in area than the District of Columbia, with Huaong being three times the size of the U.S. capital district.

And this leads to this:

Ahn Myong Chol, a guard at the camp (which is sometimes known as Hoeryong) from 1987 through 1994, examined the satellite photos of Camp 22 for NBC News. They were taken in April, eight years after he left. But he says little has changed. He was able to pick out the family quarters for prisoners, the work areas, the propaganda buildings.

Looking at the imagery, Ahn noted what happened in each building:

“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.

“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.”

Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.”

Read the whole thing.

I can hear the bleat from the far left already; "It's propaganda from the conservative, corporate media". Let's leave the absurd contradiction for a moment - damn straight it's propaganda. As well it should be. Americans should be angry, furious, disgusted about this. 9/11 and Israel's suicide bombers are acute instances of terrorism - but this sort of thing is chronic terrorism; not the terror of the roar and the sudden flash, but of the Orwellian "boot in the face - forever", varying only in intensity.

Kim Jong Il has to go, too. Sometime. By fair means or foul; the way of Hussein and Hitler and Amin, or the way of Gorbachev and Jaruzelski and Honecker. The means aren't important; the timing must be driven by the fact that Hussein is the greater danger. But he must go, and his whole regime with it.

Here's a question; what do you suppose the left'll do when satellite evidence of Castro's camps are revealed?

Posted by Mitch at January 16, 2003 06:55 AM