http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/ Tue, 22 May 2012 09:51:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-57280 OneFreeKorea » KCNA Trips Over the Truth on Human Rights Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:55:42 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-57280 [...] That last point merits reconsideration, and it deserves a prominent place in Kim Jong Il’s indictment. North Korea’s systematic discrimination against hereditary social groups extended to depriving them of food. Were it not for Stalin’s self-serving intervention when the U.N. was writing its definition of genocide, Kim Jong Il’s starvation of the “hostile” classes, like Stalin’s starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks, would have been classifiable as such. [...] [...] That last point merits reconsideration, and it deserves a prominent place in Kim Jong Il’s indictment. North Korea’s systematic discrimination against hereditary social groups extended to depriving them of food. Were it not for Stalin’s self-serving intervention when the U.N. was writing its definition of genocide, Kim Jong Il’s starvation of the “hostile” classes, like Stalin’s starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks, would have been classifiable as such. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-57056 Food Shortages Reach The N. Korean Elite « Unclemeat Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:03:18 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-57056 [...] The Beginning of the End: Food Shortages Reach Pyongyang The regime has contained and survived mass-casualty famine and dissent in the countryside before.  A severe downturn in Pyongyang, however, is a game-changer.  If the regime can’t even feed its elite, it’s going to have to take some chairs away from the banquet table.  That means commissars and apparatchiks will shiv each other for the remaining chairs as though their lives depend on it.  A rumored phase-out of the “military first” policy introduces a whole new pool of potential coup plotters. This could be the beginning of the end.  If the report is true – and if China doesn’t execute an Olympic-sized airlift to reverse those conditions fast – there’s a 70% chance of regime collapse within the next year. [...] [...] The Beginning of the End: Food Shortages Reach Pyongyang The regime has contained and survived mass-casualty famine and dissent in the countryside before.  A severe downturn in Pyongyang, however, is a game-changer.  If the regime can’t even feed its elite, it’s going to have to take some chairs away from the banquet table.  That means commissars and apparatchiks will shiv each other for the remaining chairs as though their lives depend on it.  A rumored phase-out of the “military first” policy introduces a whole new pool of potential coup plotters. This could be the beginning of the end.  If the report is true – and if China doesn’t execute an Olympic-sized airlift to reverse those conditions fast – there’s a 70% chance of regime collapse within the next year. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-55620 OneFreeKorea » South Korea Abstains Again Sat, 24 Nov 2007 04:25:08 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-55620 [...] . . . in a U.N. vote to condemn North Korea’s human rights atrocities (via Korea Unification Studies).  They abstain, for the record, from condemning this, or this, or this.  Or this. [...] [...] . . . in a U.N. vote to condemn North Korea’s human rights atrocities (via Korea Unification Studies).  They abstain, for the record, from condemning this, or this, or this.  Or this. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-55513 OneFreeKorea » Korean Election Update: Lessers Versus Evils Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:13:02 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-55513 [...] Only two things have been missing from the Korean conservatives’ campaigns for the last two years:  an agenda and decent candidates.  And yet they still win.  Perhaps realizing that they could win elections on negative turnout alone, they’ve mostly run against the excesses of their opponents while articulating few principles to really challenge the left, especially where it went horriby wrong.  Just next door to the greatest act of national self-immolation since the Khmer Rouge fled Phnom Penh, Park Geun-Hye’s North Korea policy has been inert, triangulated, and Clintonian: ”flexible and future-oriented“ on abetting more years of famine, terror, and atrocities comparable in scale and depravity to Mauthausen and Tuol Sleng.  History is unforgiving of such things.  And rather than repudiating her father’s (mostly benevolent but) dictatorial legacy, she has basked in the desires of some to see the return of more “decisive” leadership.  Her occasional support for censoring opposing views reinforces our worst fears, though Roh Moo-Hyun’s rule was hardly a paragon of free speech, either.  Park was bested by Lee Myung-Bak for the GNP nomination, but she emerged from the race with a reputation for personal gravitas, maturity, integrity, and cool under fire.  She may now be the race’s new king-maker.  As of this morning, she’s backing Lee Myung-Bak.  In a move that’s classic Park, she backed the safe, consensus candidate, but left herself room to wriggle away from Lee if his troubles deepen. [...] [...] Only two things have been missing from the Korean conservatives’ campaigns for the last two years:  an agenda and decent candidates.  And yet they still win.  Perhaps realizing that they could win elections on negative turnout alone, they’ve mostly run against the excesses of their opponents while articulating few principles to really challenge the left, especially where it went horriby wrong.  Just next door to the greatest act of national self-immolation since the Khmer Rouge fled Phnom Penh, Park Geun-Hye’s North Korea policy has been inert, triangulated, and Clintonian: ”flexible and future-oriented“ on abetting more years of famine, terror, and atrocities comparable in scale and depravity to Mauthausen and Tuol Sleng.  History is unforgiving of such things.  And rather than repudiating her father’s (mostly benevolent but) dictatorial legacy, she has basked in the desires of some to see the return of more “decisive” leadership.  Her occasional support for censoring opposing views reinforces our worst fears, though Roh Moo-Hyun’s rule was hardly a paragon of free speech, either.  Park was bested by Lee Myung-Bak for the GNP nomination, but she emerged from the race with a reputation for personal gravitas, maturity, integrity, and cool under fire.  She may now be the race’s new king-maker.  As of this morning, she’s backing Lee Myung-Bak.  In a move that’s classic Park, she backed the safe, consensus candidate, but left herself room to wriggle away from Lee if his troubles deepen. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-55478 OneFreeKorea » Walking the Road to Hell With the Eugene Bell Foundation Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:12:52 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-55478 [...] Some policies, of course, are easier to understand than others, and mostly absent from Linton’s “explanations” are North Korea’s suffocating repression, its hellish concentration camps, and of greatest relevance for Linton’s work, its culpable misallocation of food which, according to various estimates, killed between half a million and three and a half million people.  Like other defenders of the regime, Linton views sanctions in a vacuum, without mentioning the acts of terrorism and proliferation that led to them, its stubborn refusal to convincingly renounce those methods, or its compulsion for turning plowshares into thrust-vector nozzles.  Is nothing Kim Jong Il’s fault?  If so, Linton isn’t saying. [...] [...] Some policies, of course, are easier to understand than others, and mostly absent from Linton’s “explanations” are North Korea’s suffocating repression, its hellish concentration camps, and of greatest relevance for Linton’s work, its culpable misallocation of food which, according to various estimates, killed between half a million and three and a half million people.  Like other defenders of the regime, Linton views sanctions in a vacuum, without mentioning the acts of terrorism and proliferation that led to them, its stubborn refusal to convincingly renounce those methods, or its compulsion for turning plowshares into thrust-vector nozzles.  Is nothing Kim Jong Il’s fault?  If so, Linton isn’t saying. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-35392 OneFreeKorea » Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22 Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:10:54 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-35392 [...] I served in South Korea with the Army for four years, from 1998 to 2002. As I was serving in Korea, more survivors of the camps began to describe the conditions there. We already heard about the completely preventable famine that killed about 2 million North Koreans while Kim Jong Il built a nuclear arsenal and bought artillery, submarines, missiles, and MiG’s. For the soldiers, in a way, none of this really mattered much. Most soldiers tend to be fairly apolitical. For those who kept up with the reports, it only reinforced what we knew, but could not really change, about the brutality of life inside North Korea. What struck me more was why South Koreans didn’t care. This comment on my blog typifies the mixture of denial and justification so many South Koreans, especially the young, applied to the horrors in the North. It’s a wierd witch’s brew of nationalism and socialism that, in its various forms, periodically incinerates lives by the millions, like a fire burns away the August grain. [...] [...] I served in South Korea with the Army for four years, from 1998 to 2002. As I was serving in Korea, more survivors of the camps began to describe the conditions there. We already heard about the completely preventable famine that killed about 2 million North Koreans while Kim Jong Il built a nuclear arsenal and bought artillery, submarines, missiles, and MiG’s. For the soldiers, in a way, none of this really mattered much. Most soldiers tend to be fairly apolitical. For those who kept up with the reports, it only reinforced what we knew, but could not really change, about the brutality of life inside North Korea. What struck me more was why South Koreans didn’t care. This comment on my blog typifies the mixture of denial and justification so many South Koreans, especially the young, applied to the horrors in the North. It’s a wierd witch’s brew of nationalism and socialism that, in its various forms, periodically incinerates lives by the millions, like a fire burns away the August grain. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-19980 OneFreeKorea » Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22 Sun, 18 Feb 2007 19:49:30 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-19980 [...] I served in South Korea with the Army for four years, from 1998 to 2002. As I was serving in Korea, more survivors of the camps began to describe the conditions there.  We already heard about the completely preventable famine that killed about 2 million North Koreans while Kim Jong Il built a nuclear arsenal and bought artillery, submarines, missiles, and MiG’s. For the soldiers, in a way, none of this really mattered much. Most soldiers tend to be fairly apolitical. For those who kept up with the reports, it only reinforced what we knew, but could not really change, about the brutality of life inside North Korea. What struck me more was why South Koreans didn’t care. This comment on my blog typifies the mixture of denial and justification so many South Koreans, especially the young, applied to the horrors in the North. It’s a wierd witch’s brew of nationalism and socialism that, in its various forms, periodically incinerates lives by the millions, like a fire burns away the August grain. [...] [...] I served in South Korea with the Army for four years, from 1998 to 2002. As I was serving in Korea, more survivors of the camps began to describe the conditions there.  We already heard about the completely preventable famine that killed about 2 million North Koreans while Kim Jong Il built a nuclear arsenal and bought artillery, submarines, missiles, and MiG’s. For the soldiers, in a way, none of this really mattered much. Most soldiers tend to be fairly apolitical. For those who kept up with the reports, it only reinforced what we knew, but could not really change, about the brutality of life inside North Korea. What struck me more was why South Koreans didn’t care. This comment on my blog typifies the mixture of denial and justification so many South Koreans, especially the young, applied to the horrors in the North. It’s a wierd witch’s brew of nationalism and socialism that, in its various forms, periodically incinerates lives by the millions, like a fire burns away the August grain. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-17293 OneFreeKorea » Mysterious Pits in a North Korean Field, 39.944 N, 125.471 E : Image Analysts Wanted Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:43:47 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-17293 [...] On the other hand, the suggestion that this is a burial site doesn’t seem implausible on its face.  We do know that the North Korean famine killed between 600,000 and 3.5 million people.  We know that many of the dead were buried in mass graves (keep reading for an eyewitness account).  In Korean tradition, white is the color of mourning.  Note also that Andrew Natsios, for Administrator of USAID, now Special Envoy on Darfur, and previously World Vision’s North Korea Director, has previously described witnessing a mass burial of famine victims from across the Chinese border.  His description is chillingly consistent with this image. I’ve been to famines before. I’ve watched mass burial in North Korea on Tumen River… went up undercover in October, November of 1998″ when he was across the river with his South Korean friend, Ven. Beopryun, he said. [...] [...] On the other hand, the suggestion that this is a burial site doesn’t seem implausible on its face.  We do know that the North Korean famine killed between 600,000 and 3.5 million people.  We know that many of the dead were buried in mass graves (keep reading for an eyewitness account).  In Korean tradition, white is the color of mourning.  Note also that Andrew Natsios, for Administrator of USAID, now Special Envoy on Darfur, and previously World Vision’s North Korea Director, has previously described witnessing a mass burial of famine victims from across the Chinese border.  His description is chillingly consistent with this image. I’ve been to famines before. I’ve watched mass burial in North Korea on Tumen River… went up undercover in October, November of 1998″ when he was across the river with his South Korean friend, Ven. Beopryun, he said. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-15419 OneFreeKorea » Hundreds of North Koreans Freeze to Death Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:32:30 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-15419 [...] Some have suggested that this famine will be less severe because only the most hardened ”survivors” still remain alive, but a severe humanitarian tragedy seems to be unfolding.  As with the Great Famine of the 1990’s, scholars may debate whether to attribute deaths from cold and disease to famine, but what is clear is that all of them are preventable, and that the failure to prevent them is a crime against humanity. [...] [...] Some have suggested that this famine will be less severe because only the most hardened ”survivors” still remain alive, but a severe humanitarian tragedy seems to be unfolding.  As with the Great Famine of the 1990’s, scholars may debate whether to attribute deaths from cold and disease to famine, but what is clear is that all of them are preventable, and that the failure to prevent them is a crime against humanity. [...]

]]> http://freekorea.us/2005/11/26/defining-genocide-down/comment-page-1/#comment-14270 OneFreeKorea » Giving Up on the U.N. Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:16:59 +0000 http://freekorea.us/?p=38#comment-14270 [...] What I hope Fred and his readers will consider is that the North Korean people are not Kim Jong Il’s wasting assets.  They are the victims of his greatest crime against humanity. [...] [...] What I hope Fred and his readers will consider is that the North Korean people are not Kim Jong Il’s wasting assets.  They are the victims of his greatest crime against humanity. [...]

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