Mitch Berg writes a sobering and important piece on the living nightmare that is North Korea. He points out that what is going in inside the borders of North Korea is a genocide that must be stopped:
On the eve of World War Two, most of the Western world buried the story of the Holocaust, until they couldn’t bury it – when the troops started liberating camps. Before the war, it was an inconvenient stumbling block for diplomatic negotiation. During the war, the powers that be either doubted the story, or thought it smacked of WWI-style propagandistic overkill. In the end, they were both wrong.
—
Attacking Kim – or Castro – today is like attacking Hitler or Stalin in 1933; despite their ghastly crimes against humanity, the lunatic left fears the beginning of a slippery slope.
The story may go away – it may never even arrive, as far as the consumer of American news is concerned. We – those who pay attention to these things, and the part of the Blogosphere concerned with actual rights for real humans – need to do our best to fix that.
I believe that if we are to have a truly peaceful world, it is unacceptable to allow such barbarous actions to continue. For too long the West ignored the concentration camps of Germany. For years, the gulags of Russia were ignored until brave men like Alexander Solzhenitsyn forced the world to confront the horror of the Soviet regime head on.
In the twenty-first century, many have a difficult time believing that things like concentration camps and mass graves still exist. Yet in North Korea there is a human disaster that must be dealt with, but is being ignored.
Therefore, I will be joining with the Northern Alliance of Minnesota bloggers to raise our collective voices on this issue. The Free North Korea blog has much valuable background on this subject, and more on what can and should be done to free the people under the vicious bootheel of Kim Jung Il.
Human rights activists like Norbert Vollertsen have been beated and bloodied for trying to make the world aware of what is going on inside North Korea.
This is not a partisan issue. All members of the human community have an interest that transcends party or affiliation to end the suffering of others. Only through awareness and moral outrage can this situation be ended. Too few people know what is going on behind the DMZ where Western cameras cannot go. These are stories that must be told and evils that must be stopped.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that "The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."
It is time to tell the truth about what is going on in North Korea.
