Like this esteemed professor of Korean history, who, in response to Bush’s remark, “Kim Jong Il’s got a gulag the size of Houston!” [which is a fact], remarks, “Meanwhile we have a longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons, incarcerating upward of 25 percent of all black youths. This doesn’t excuse North Korea’s police state, but perhaps it suggests that Americans should do something about the pathologies of our inner cities—say, in Houston—before pointing the finger.”
Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: The New Press, 2004), 176.

Polls, as you know, are susceptible to distortion, especially by how the questions are framed. Here’s a Yonhap News report from May 2007, a survey of just 250 college students in Seoul. The headline is “only 47.7% surveyed responded that unification is essential.” To me, what’s more telling is that 57.7% said that they had heard of the “political prisoner concentration camps” in NK. Granted that the 42.3% that has never heard of such a thing is nothing close to “vast majority,” but again, my admittedly hyperbolic comment was not about “hearing” of it but “knowing something” about its cause and effect. And imagine what the rate of ignorance might be for the rest of the South Korean population, especially non-college students.

http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=100&oid=001&aid=0001643720

You might recall that in a survey of 800 South Korean adults conducted on January 5, 2004 by Research & Research, a South Korean polling board, 39 percent of those surveyed, in responding to the question, “Which country poses the greatest security threat to South Korea?” identified the U.S. 33 percent chose North Korea. The perception gap along the generational lines is even more telling, with about three times more people in their teens and twenties identifying the U.S. as the greatest threat than those who do North Korea (58 percent to 20 percent). The pattern extends into South Koreans in their thirties, with 47 percent to 22 percent, respectively. 59 percent of college students and 52 percent of “white collar” workers with college degrees surveyed identified the U.S. as the greatest threat. The Chosun Ilbo, January 12, 2004.

This is another example of South Korean apathy and ignorance about the nature of the North Korean regime. Yes, this is early 2004, not even a year after the invasion of Iraq, when war paranoia was running high. Still, as far as I know, I don’t think any US president, from Truman down to GWB, ever threatened SK to make a ‘”sea of fire” of it or reduce it “ashes.”

JAMIE RUBIN: In prison camps and slave labor? Is that real?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: There are probably prison camps in North Korea.

Now, not to single this man out–for sadly, he is not alone, in the US or South Korea–but this kind of reluctant or hesitant or diffident or half-hearted reply, say, in the field of European history, to the query “Were there prison camps and slave labor in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union?” would not get you very far. You will come across as either dumb or an individual of morally questionable character. However, in the undistinguished field of Korean studies in America, you can build a successful career on such a “relativist-skeptical” stance.

The more frustrating thing about all this is that the same is sadly true of academics and politicians in South Korea, believe it or not.

We were never in disagreement. When I mentioned how Prince Harry’s stunt angered many Britons, it was clear that I was not depicting as representative of British attitudes towards Hitler and Nazism.

That transcript is several pages long, and I don’t care to wade through it. Could you post the part you want me to read?