Freedom House VIII: Were Liberals Underrepresented?

Aaron Robert Miller, a regular OFK reader and commenter with a very different perspective (much more pro-“engagement” with the N.K. government) than what you regularly read here, has a summary of the entire conference that’s much more comprehensive than my own. He’s posted it on the Korean Cultural Center’s Web site. The Cultural Center is affiliated with the ROK embassy, but Aaron’s views don’t represent those of the ROK government. Aaron has written a very honest and complete summary of the facts, although I naturally disagree with his analysis. Regarding its factual reporting, it even fills in a few items that I recall hearing but didn’t get down on paper. I’m tempted to refer to it to fill in a few holes in my own accounts.

Aaron laments the lack of liberal representation there, but isn’t that mostly a function of too many liberals’ ambivalence (at best) about this issue–as Rabbi Saperstein suggested? Aren’t the views of the New York Times’s Nick Kristof sadly typical of “liberal” thinking on this issue? Kristof, who unabmiguously and often bravely condemned human rights violations in the Balkans, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, and Sudan, derided North Korean human rights as a “pet cause for conservatives” and even said, referring to those seeking to give North Koreans safe haven in China, “Heaven preserve the world’s desperate people from well-intended Americans. Inviting a thinker of this vein to a human rights conference would have been like inviting Pat Buchanan to address the Anti-Defamation League. Ambivalence doesn’t make for very effective advocacy.

Instead, two liberals, Rabbi Saperstein and Anthony Lake, represented their vision superbly and drove to the core of the why there should have been more liberals in the audience, too: ending what is arguably the world’s greatest human rights crisis today ought to be the empitome of liberalism. For what consistent reason can a liberal avert her eyes from the mass murder of millions in favor of relative trivialities like Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo that are (or were already) being examined and reexamined by Congress, by government investigators, and the military criminal justice system? And while I would have loved to hear from Congressman Lantos–who has certainly earned a place on the stage–as Aaron acknowledges, it’s entirely possible that he was invited but was unable or unwilling to attend.

And of course, the conference packed in dozens of speakers from 8:30 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. Jae Ku, who organized the conference, was already tearing his hair out over all of the competing demands for more time (he also had to balance the demands of Korean and American speakers). Were I in Jae’s shoes, one of the factors I’d have considered would have been who had contributed something to this cause thus far. That principle also extends to the Catholic church, which I agree would have been a welcome addition, but as with some quarters of liberal thought, their absence was largely a function of self-selection.

I hope that the Catholic church will be more in evidence in the future, since I don’t have any reason to believe that the church is ambivalent about this issue–maybe it’s just not aware of it yet. I know that several of those who have been fierce avocates on behalf of the North Korean people also happen to be devout Catholics. Perhaps one of them can help bring this issue to the Church’s attention.