Christopher Hitchens on North Korea

How did I miss this? I’d normally hang on every word of a Hitchens article about British cuisine; this time, he nails the human rights issue in North Korea, drawing unfavorable comparisons to history’s most infamous oppressions:

To call a set of actions “genocidal,” as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the “slavery” of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves “captive.” The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

Hitches castigates the human rights industry, the one that’s so lazy, facile, publicity-hungry and morally unfocused that it can’t see a gulag unless there’s a place near the front gate to hold a press conference:

It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.

Hitchens, formerly a rabid leftist and now a liberal with a recovering post-9/11 moral perspective, once rather famously called for the indictment of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. I do not know if he’s ever retracted that particular position, but if the North Koreans researched him, they probably saw those early writings and felt safe giving him a smidgen more access to the North Korean countryside. They obviously didn’t get the toadying Walter Duranty / Ted Turner figure they’d hoped for.

Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more. Bravo to President Bush, anyway, for his bluntness.

I’d endorse the last sentence wholeheartedly if President Bush’s policies were as supportive of North Korean refugees and undercover dissidents as his words have occasionally been. Otherwise, Hitchens has nailed it.