If You Don’t Have a Case, Try a Smear

Over at NKZone, the Jack Pritchard groupies and Clintonites are attacking the North Korean Freedom Act and the North Korean Human Rights Act as pretexts to open North Korea as a new market for Christian evangelism. Since I’m uniquely free of that purported taint, I went on the counteroffensive on behalf of my Christian bretheren. The new tactic of the appeasers is to label those who are moved to fight patent evil with faith-driven compassion as spiritual junk bond peddlers. Such prejudice overlooks this question: isn’t it vaguely possible that the spiritual beliefs of a Christian are equally capable of inspiring selfless compassion as those of the Dalai Lama? As for the legislation itself, the main argument against it is that the United States tolerated other dictators before, therefore it is morally constrained to tolerate and abet Kim Jong-Il. My response:

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Any attempt to compare North Korea to Guatemala, Pakistan, or Honduras in the tired quest for moral equivalence demonstrates an ingorance of the facts about each of those countries. Take the case of the most severe of the “comparisons” Ralph draws, Guatemala in the mid-80s, where the wildest estimates of leftish NGOs are that 100,000 people died in the course of an ugly war against brutal guerrillas who disguised themselves among the civilian population (I suppose one could come up with even wilder estimates). In fact, President Rios-Montt was a murderer and an embarrassment, and once that became apparent, the United States quietly worked to remove him without destabilizing the entire country and opening the door for a gang of Shining Path / Khmer Rouge clones to take power. In other countries, the U.S. made regrettable moral compromises in the interest of preventing the same thing on a global scale. We continue to pay a price for some of those decisions, and it’s right that we should question them to better guide our nation’s conscience in the future. That does not bring any of this to the level of mass murder and terror we see in North Korea, however.

The government of North Korea, despite the lack of any apparent reason for doing so, has murdered 2,000,000 of its own people through the systematic deprivation of food, or by other more expeditious methods of murder and torture. It kills Christians by pouring molten iron on them, crushes babies under jackboots, and gasses entire families in gas chambers. It has 250,000 political prisoners in gulags. It is the most repressive state that exists anywhere on earth, and is a strong candidate for Worst Government Ever. When did the United States ever condone anything like that, unless you count Madeline Albright’s toasts with His Porcine Majesty in Pyongyang?

Thus, Feffer turns and bites his own tail. The moral basis for his argument against the NKFA and the NKHRA is that America has wrongly coddled other dictators and thus (somehow) lost its legitimacy to oppose this one. Yet those whose policies he supports are the most clearly guilty of the charge, and in the very same context.

Attempts like Feffer’s to create moral equivalence where none exists are like sugar candy–irresistably delicious to some, often brightly colored, completely water soluble, and lacking in any apparent nutrition. They persuade only the naive, the intellectually lazy, or those who are too emotionally drawn to a preordained conclusion to let facts get in the way. The preordained conclusion is that because we have associated ourselves with unsavory regimes in the past, we should not oppose truly horrific and dangerous ones now. How exactly does that conclusion follow?