Claudia Rossett outlines the horrors of Kim Jong Il’s totalitarian concentration camps:
The report presents the grim individual stories of 30 defectors interviewed by Mr. Hawk in-depth, and culled from these, to further clarify the customs of the camps, is a long list of the tortures described. “Worst of all,” as the report puts it, is a roster of stories detailing the routine murder of babies born to prisoners, as told by eight separate eyewitnesses. One common denominator is that when pregnant women are forcibly repatriated after fleeing to China, it is policy to murder their newborns, because they might have been fathered by Chinese men. One account describes babies tossed on the ground to die, with their mothers forced to watch. In another interview, a former prisoner, a 66-year-old grandmother, identified as “Detainee #24” to protect relatives still perhaps alive in North Korea, describes being assigned to help in the delivery of babies who were thrown immediately into a plastic-lined box to die in bulk lots. The report notes: “The interviewer had difficulty finding words to describe the sadness in this grandmother’s eyes and the anguish on her face as she recounted her experience as a midwife at the detention center in South Sinuiju”–one of the sites shown in detail in the accompanying satellite photos.
One of the lessons I drew from Iraq is that, when push comes to shove, there are some regimes that, regardless of any other factors, should be destroyed, if we can, purely because of their unmitigated evil. North Korea is one of them. Yes, I know that its ambiguous nuclear capacity makes military action all but impossible. But the horrors of its system beggar belief. I’m suspicious of any and all attempts to placate Pyongyang. But I don’t have any brighter ideas either. You can download the report on NoKo’s gulag here. I found reading it to be a horrifying and shaming experience.
FRUM ON GAYS: You can judge for yourself whether his response to my response adds up. But let me puzzle the final point he makes. I asked why he seems to offer no positive measures for gay people in their relationships, why he is opposed to civil unions and marriage, and why the needs of gay citizens seem irrelevant to him. He replied:
3. This call for ‘asides’ to ‘nod toward’ gay concerns surprises me. It would seem to me impertinent and improper to start administering pats on the head to people who have their own lives to lead and their own choices to make. My vision of a good society is that of the Prophet Micah: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.” Every man – and woman too.
What does he mean? No one is asking him to provide marital advice to gay people. I was asking why a social conservative – defined as someone who believes that laws and morals shape behavior and that the state has a role in encouraging socially beneficial behavior and discouraging bad – should have no public policy toward a group of its citizens. If Frum is genuinely saying he doesn’t believe government should be doing such a thing, then fine. But why is he encouraging civil marriage for straights? Indeed, why have civil marriage at all? But here’s one thing Frum has now done: established that he will never criticize gay culture in the future. That would surely be “impertinent.”
The Dish 