Another Public Execution Video

The guerrilla cameras of the North Korean resistance have brought out another video of a public execution. Like the most recent video releases, showing border guards hauling away South Korean food aid and the display of a dissident banner, it’s from South Hamgyeong Province. The Daily NK has stills and audio, although the images, for understandable reasons, are not clear. The headline says the video depicts a woman being executed for stealing corn from another woman’s home. Later on, however, the story says that the condemned woman also “accidentally” killed the daughter of the woman who owned the corn.

In a place where food is so (unnecessarily) scarce, ordinary concepts or morality are warped. Stealing corn in a starving country is slow murder in itself. The real culprit is a society that squanders its resources on arms and creates this sort of desperation.