An Iglauer of His Own Making

You . . . you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theaters and cinemas. . . . You shake yourselves like puppies who have got their fur wet, . . . and you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound. . . . So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.

—Arthur Koestler, The New York Times Magazine, 1944

One thing that the Holocaust deniers of the 1940’s had going for them was a convenient absence of hard evidence. But even as technology makes evidence harder than ever to contain, Philip Dorsey Iglauer, writing in the Korea Times, proves that evidence is no impediment to the rejection of inconvenient fact. Iglauer may be smarting from the dissolution of the North Korean reform model in which he believed as ardently as an elderly parishioner believes in the sacred image on her tortilla. Whether it’s the strain showing, the pressure of a deadline, or just a gimmicky way to lasso his story to the day’s hot news item, Iglauer’s opener is pretty stupefying:

The year-end stem cell brouhaha and the end-of-the-year international conference on North Korean human rights have a lot in common. The bond they share lies in the politically charged atmosphere in which facts and figures are fudged to manipulate our collective instinct for doing the right thing and for scientific progress. So, the North Korean human rights’ obfuscation and the stem cell deception came together in December in a wintry flurry of fubbery.

Were it not for the clumsy grammar and cliche phrases, it might all leave you a bit breathless. Admittedly, the link between an isolated scientific fraud and a growing movement to challenge the world’s worst and most preventable humanitarian crisis had escaped me as thoroughly as the chemical similarities between phosgene and peanut butter cups. I’d venture that Iglauer’s first paragraph has not consummated a state of epiphany for most of us; the connection remains wispy for those working without hallucinogenic assistance. We (almost) want Iglauer to bridge it because we fear being embarrassed for him, and for the newspaper that would publish his work without expecting him to do so credibly.

II.

Incidentally, let’s suspend our discussion of the factual merits of Iglauer’s assertions for a moment. We’ll have time for that soon enough.

U.S. Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea Jay Lefkowitz is a human rights newbie; his real job is as White House strategist and commercial and appellate litigant for a bigwig Washington law firm.

Already, a very bad sign. This is what is known as argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy by which one who cannot argue effectively against an idea argues instead against one or more of its proponents.

Even the target was not well chosen. Jay Lefkowitz, appointed just last August, is a relative newcomer to the cause. There isn’t much question that he’s a Bush loyalist, which makes him far from unique as Washington political appointees go. He’s not a complete human rights newbie, although I won’t deny that better-qualified candidates were available. Yet I was present when the core of the movement for North Korean Human Rights assumed its present form a good year and a half before Jay Lefkowitz had any part in it. Jay Lefkowitz would almost certainly be doing other things had this movement not accomplished its first key political objective by passing the North Korean Human Rights Act and creating, through Sectin 107, the position he now fills. Devastatingly for Iglauer’s effort to marginalize this movement, Congress passed that legislation unanimously. Already, one wonders whether Iglauer is trying to intentionally deceive us or simply has no idea what he’s talking about.

A couple of weeks ago, [Lefkowitz] bemoaned Seoul’s blind eye to the injustices in the North at the Sixth International Conference on North Korean Human Rights & Refugees, which began annual meetings on the evil doings of the regime of Kim Jong-il in 1999.

Seoul’s official blind eye toward the political cleansing of the North Korean people can now be said to be at odds with the opinion of much or most of the world, not just with the unanimous voice of the U.S. Congress. Last month, and for the fourth consecutive time, Seoul conspicuously abstained on a U.N. resolution condemning the North’s dismal human rights record. This last resolution passed in the U.N. General Assembly and was sponsored by those neocons in the European Union. The factual basis of that vote was a detailed report by Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in North Korea. Iglauer, as we will see, has either not read this report or intentionally ignores it, probably because he could not make his argument without ignoring it. Already, we can safely conclude that Iglauer knows more about the biochemistry of a stem cell than he does about conditions in North Korea today. It is a sad statement that this is no impediment to barrels of ink being devoted to his views, such as his view that Jay Lefkowitz has no business representing the values of the United States abroad. Iglauer calls for his smelling salts and gasps:

He even joined a street demo against Seoul’s gently-gently approach toward the North.

(You have to wonder what apoplectic neo-con conniption fit would result if a German or French diplomat joined one of Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war vigils?)

You may believe that France’s opposition to the war in Iraq originated in Machiavellian geopolitics, the alleged viability of more leaky sanctions, Jacques Pascua’s bank balance and TotalFinaElf’s share prices, or a combination of these reasons. Either way, France is perfectly free to associate itself with Cindy Sheehan and all that we heard her stand for just before The Big Hook pulled her off the media stage. We’re equally free to receive it about as well as we received France’s choice of Woody Allen as its spokesman. France’s latest ad campaign attempts to dispel the popular notion that it has an unproductive business climate. These are questions of marketing and tactics, not of the rules of diplomacy. Nations have never shied from carrying their messages to peoples in other nations. Envoys, particularly those whose mandates go to issues rather than to relationships, represent the views of the governments that appoint them. More directly to the point, the South Korean government has spared no expense to sell its message of appeasement directly to the American people. Let me list just a few examples of this:

• President Roh, addressing a civic group in Los Angeles, gave his best argument for why we should all understand North Korea’s desire for nuclear weapons (as opposed, presumably, to full bellies). The South Korean Foreign Ministry paid a Washington PR firm over $1 million “to put a positive spin on its U.S. policies in a nation that has been reading them as increasingly hostile.”
• Korea’s former ambassador recently launched a program to correct America’s “misconceptions” about Korea, such as the apparent misconception that anti-Americanism is widespread there.
• Korea’s embassy quietly hired a former U.S. journalist–one apparently unregistered as a foreign agent–to provide a how-to guide to influencing U.S. news coverage by selectively “feeding” sympathetic journalists stories.
• During the last presidential campaign, South Korea is alleged to have tried to funnel thousands of dollars in illegal contributions to the Kerry campaign. The Kerry campaign later returned the money.

Is it Iglauer’s view that the United States alone is forbidden from the exercise of public diplomacy? And what of the fact that Seoul’s ministers snubbed Jay Lefkowitz when he attempted to exercise private diplomacy?

III.

Iglauer then attacks some of the most self-evidently credible evidence of the abuses in the North, although Iglauer can’t quite bring himself to state that things up North are all peachy.

What is less known is that the smuggled video footage and testimony of ‘defectors” has often been taken deconstructed on the Internet and in the mainstream media and, at times, found to have been fabricated.

Like Hwang Woo-suk’s stem cell flimflam, the evidence for North Korean rights abuses is sometimes altered, even fabricated, and made to order for Japanese broadcasters and Western media outlets willing to pay as much as $75,000 for video of things awry in North Korea.

. . . .
Whether it is smuggled video footage of a summary execution or of a woman being manhandled by border guards, evidence is routinely deconstructed in the South Korean blogoshere. Thus, Netizens are making North Korean human rights activists hard to believe.

“Found to have been fabricated” by whom? By “the Korean blogosphere.” Which means that the “deconstructions” to which Iglauer refers consist of summarized hearsay of comments on Naver blogs, or perhaps, Voice of the People, which he does not even bother to link, and whose specific arguments he does not even cite. If Iglauer places himself on a higher plane of intellectual rigor than Hwang, I’m missing how he comes by that sense of superiority after relying on such feeble sources without even citing the specific arguments. This marks the point where Iglauer’s argument collapses beneath its own pomposity.

And what of Iglauer’s use scare quotes around the word “defectors?” Does Iglauer mean to suggest that they’re something else, perhaps underpaid actors? What does Iglauer call this family, which risked its life to lodge a protest for its rights to treatment as refugees right in a UNHCR office in Beijing? I’d especially like to hear Iglauer explain the condition of this woman, who walked across China on the stumps of her half-severed feet.

What would he say to the parents of this boy, who died of exposure in an ill-fated effort to flee from China to Mongolia, through the Gobi Desert? That all of them risked life and limb to escape . . . fubbery? One must presume that Iglauer has no more access to the closed counties of North Korea, far from the Emerald City of Pyongyang, than the rest of us. It must take some extraordinary chutzpah to denounce all of these people as fakes without being possessed of one scintilla of hard evidence to back his charges.

And like the Korean stem cell spin-meister, whose achievements likely have merit, activists decrying the abysmal human rights situation in the North have a valid point. Twisting evidence to fit a pre-arranged conclusion, however, ruins credibility and poisons dialogue on what is already a divisive issue.

One again, Iglauer levels charges and offers neither evidence nor specifics. Ironically, at the time of writing, Iglauer still believed that Professor Hwang’s scientific “achievements” had some residual merit, meaning the “thwack” you just heard was the sound of the facts overtaking Iglauer before his rather unhinged piece even made it into print (more). From here, his coherence fades further, as he claims that activists opposing the North Korean regime’s repression “have a valid point,” while discounting all of the “flimflam” supporting their views, which, of course, are divisive. Show me a mass murder and I’ll show you a gaggle of maniacs with nothing better to do than try to obstruct it.

As promised, it’s time to examine the evidence. Iglauer would have us think that these secret tapes are mere fodder for so many gullible church ladies. He neglects to mention that such notorious neocon mouthpieces as the BBC, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian have produced news stories and documentaries based on them.

Here are links to some of the actual videos. View them for yourself. Look for details and backgrounds. Listen for accents. Deconstruct at will; no reasonable argument will be turned down. This much is only reasonable for any evidence that can’t be verified on-location, which explains why you’ve seen me ask plenty of my own critical questions. Ask yourself what kind of elaborate deception would be carried so far as to starve these children until their cheeks and eyes sink into their skulls, or to plant dying children and dead adults on the streets, or to put up wire encloses with resistors and guard towers. Ask yourself whether someone would actually build a full-scale movie set of a place as bleak as Hoeryong. Ask yourself how any person who has actually viewed these videos could honestly believe, in light of the totality of the circumstances, that anyone has perpetrated such an elaborate fabrication.

• The execution video that Iglauer dismisses so easily.
• Footage of a North Korean detention camp for repatriated refugees, aired on South Korea’s MBC network (narration in Korean).
• Alleged video of a North Korean gulag.
• A clip from the BBC documentary, “Access to Evil,” in which a North Korean defector describes testing chemical weapons on an entire family in a gas chamber. Obviously, this is not video from inside North Korea itself, but the BBC verified a description of the dying family’s symptoms with a British chemist.
• Video evidence, narrated by Barbara Demick of the L.A. Times, that international food aid is being diverted. There is also much video depicting the poverty in North Korea, particularly its orphaned children.
  “Children of the Secret State,” a documentary that recently aired on the Discovery Times channel. This is the complete documentary with a considerable amount of video from inside North Korea, so set aside some time.
• Video of an anti-Kim Jong Il banner posted under a bridge in Hoeryong (CNN later interviewed the man who claims to have put up the banner and taken the video, and several North Korean defectors contacted by a regular reader of my blog confirmed that several of the scenes from the first part of the tape were indeed taken at Hoeryong.
• The CNN documentary to which I refer above is called “Undercover in the Secret State,” and it will air again on January 9th, at 4:00 a.m. (set your VCR or Tivo). You can read my blog post on it here.
• Lastly, Iglauer should ask USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios about the time he personally witnessed mass burials in North Korea. He should ask for a copy of Natsios’s tape, too. And I will repeat my charge that those millions of famine deaths were preventable at best and premeditated at worst.

Note that I excluded the alleged “beating” video, about which I’ve expressed some doubts of my own. I’m in no better position than Iglauer to speak to its authenticity, of course. As with the other videos, you should decide for yourself. Unlike Iglauer, however, you should also look at the rest of the evidence and make an honest conclusion. Iglauer wants us to extend his doubts about one such video to a conclusion that they’re all fakes, something that the evidence simply doesn’t support. But then, Iglauer is well aware that he can’t just pick up his own camera and book a flight to North Hamgyeong province to watch the filling of the mass graves. Imperfect as it may be, the evidence from RENK and from the defectors is all the evidence the North Korean regime has permitted us to consider, a dilemna we’ve seen before in the last century:

Disbelief during the tense times of all-out war, compounded by wearisome information about “wailing Jews,” was hardly the stuff to awaken the conscience of the world to the Holocaust, hardly the stuff to compel the usual editor, working at the usual news desk in World War II, to decide to “front” the Holocaust — at least, not then.

One explanation was that the Nazis were so skillful at hiding the facts. They used the tools of modern totalitarianism to control the flow of information, to confuse the enemy, and to stimulate a rush of pride and patriotism among their own people. They not only dominated the German press, all of which was filled with propaganda, lies and distortion; they also controlled and intimidated the small number of sympathetic, Berlin-based foreign correspondents, who came to understand that they had to play ball with the Nazi authorities or they’d be expelled or imprisoned. They functioned, to the degree that they functioned at all, under a rigid system of censorship. Their reporting, like soft porn, was soft propaganda. There was no real reporting from Germany — no equivalent of CNN’s Peter Arnett in Baghdad. There was no broadcasting, no television (then still in its infancy), and no wire service dispatches. German and foreign reporters were intermediaries of Nazi propaganda. The news from Germany was the news from Hitler’s headquarters.

One can’t escape the sense that Iglauer would prefer it were thus today. All the better to absolve us of any responsibility. All the better that we not poison dialogue. In fact, let’s all agree to stay away from the word “poison.”

V.

From here, Iglauer’s argument almost fisks itself. Iglauer nearly makes my argument for me when he decries the “flip-flop of ideological groups” and lists a series of “liberal” groups that opposed South Korea’s right-wing dictatorship, and which have had next to nothing to say about horrors in the North. Freedom House, Iglauer suggests, carries no weight without the National Council of Churches by its side. Is anyone particularly shocked that the NCC–justly infamous for its support for the state-sanctioned sham churches in China and North Korea–had far more to say about Kwangju than a state-engineered famine whose toll was the equivalent of one Kwangju per day for six years? Does any serious observer believe that this says more about conditions in North Korea than the moral rot within the Old Left?

Iglauer also asserts that the South’s campaigners for human rights in the North were all content to remain silent or support the fomer military dictatorship, a statement that’s also a demonstrable falsehood. South Korea’s most prominent champion of human rights in the North, Kim Moon-Soo, spent years in and out of jail for his courageous opposition to South Korea’s dictatorship. Ditto Ha Tae-Gyeong, a personal friend and the Director of Open Radio for North Korea, which recently began direct broadcasts into the North. Even giving Iglauer the benefit of a presumption of ignorance, it’s still hard to explain why he has any business writing for a major newspaper. If only Iglauer had to carry the burden of providing links to back his assertions.

After that, Iglauer descends into a rant that skips clumsily between Professor Hwang’s scientific fraud and his allegation that Lefkowitz also engaged in some kind of scientific manipulation about stem cells. In the process, he mostly illustrates how much more support he can cite against the latter than against the former. After plowing through this clumsy effort to tar both with one brush, one is only left wondering why, for the entire point would be of little probative value even if Iglauer could support it. Indeed, he implicitly acknowledged that North Korea’s human rights abuses are worse than China’s in a previous piece in which he argued in favor of lifting the EU’s arms embargo against Beijing.

And where does all of this leave us, besides having lost irreplaceable minutes from our finite lives? Iglauer believes that human rights conditions in North Korea are bad, but believes it in a vague sort of way that, without any specific basis, conclusively alleges the evidence proving the assertion is fraudulent. He views the defectors and the secret tapes on which the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, and a spectrum of reputable news organizations have relied as so much Christian flubbery. Got that? It’s the ones whose conclusions are backed by evidence whom we should write off as the faith-blind fanatics.

All of this teaches us two lessons. First, one should not confuse the appearance of sophistication with the presence of logic. Second, we have seen how much ink you can buy for arrogance alone.