'We should've stopped the Holocaust but we didn't. Well, we learned at least. Never again.'
'Rwanda, eh? We'll know for next time. Never again.'
'Darfur too? Third time's the charm, right? Never again.'
http://freekorea.us/2007/02/18/holocaust-now-looking-down-into-hell-at-camp-22/
Never again?!
People have wondered--I've wondered, myself--how the world stood by during the Holocaust. The sense of it seems to be that most people didn't know about it. Those who had some idea, didn't much care. Those who had the power to act, lacked the will.
If these reports are true, and there is evil underway in North Korea to the degree of malevolence described therein, then are media are complicit in these atrocities for not doing more to bash the story down our collective throats, the American public is complicit in these atrocities for yawning at the sanctity of life they claim to hold so dear, and the American government--who no doubt knows a lot more about this than is publicly available--is directly an accessory to these crimes by not intervening to stop them.
I didn't know about this. The descriptions are so terrible that I can't even bring myself to accept their validity without corroboration. I want for them to be untrue, not only so that those who are said to suffer in these camps may be phantoms, but so that I won't have to look at the governments of the liberal democracies of the Earth with a new sheen of contempt. If these reports are true, and our nations have done nothing, then my already tenuous confidence in democracy will be shaken all the more.
If I were the president, I would have my military commanders present me with a plan within the month to liberate the camps, at whatever the cost to American military lives and even American civilian lives and the lives of civilians in other nations, should North Korea choose to retaliate with its nuclear weapons. No military should exist, nor nation, if it would not use force to right this kind of a wrong. Power obligates.
I don't understand the depravity of which some people are capable. Even "simple" genocide would be within my ability to understand, if one can relate to it as the eradication of one's enemies, but turning living people's lives into nightmares of every kind of torture imaginable, and dispensing the same to their families, and
then killing them...that's not fathomable to me. Either the people responsible for it do not understand what they're doing, or they're insane. There's no way to rationalize this.
From the Armenians to the Rwandans, the 20th century broke new ground in the scale of horrors that humans have visited upon one another. With Sudan--another country where we must intervene--I had known that the 21st century is off to a good start. But I didn't know about North Korea...
We can't even blame religion on this one. It's fuckery of another kind, human pettiness without even the pretense of righteous justification. It's plain, unadulterated malice. I hate having my politics played with like this, but, if these reports are true, then, despite all the lessons I've learned from Iraq, the next American president to propose attacking North Korea will have my support.
