A very interesting read on north Korea. I often invoke the comparison between north Korea's gulags and Nazi concentration camps. But I think this explanation is one of the very best and illustrates why the Kim Family Regime must be consider one of the worst criminal human rights violators in history.
Comparing Nazi concentration camps and North Korean camps is regularly done, but Hawk says that evoking Auschwitz is unnecessary and somewhat inaccurate. North Korea’s camps work people to death, rather than exterminate them. “The point of the Kwan-li-so camps in North Korea is to exterminate a family line—that’s why the whole family is put in there—but to do it after a lifetime of forced labor.”
North Korea Won’t Be Liberated in a Day
North Korea’s prison camps are roundly condemned as heinous, but remain untouched. When an idealistic young reporter takes on a mission to help shut them down—bearing Hemingway and Vollmann in mind—he winds up on the doorstep of the Embassy of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.
Mary Anne Kluth, A Volcano Millions of Years Ago, a Rock With Eensy-Beensie Holes, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, San Francisco.
Shin Dong-hyuk was malnourished, subjected to medieval torture, and worked to exhaustion while imprisoned for 23 years in North Korea's Kwan-li-so (penal labor colony) No. 14, in Kae'chŏn county, 50 miles north of Pyongyang. He was born in the camp and imprisoned under a guilt-by-association law due to the crimes of his parents—his father's crime was that his brothers had fled to South Korea in the Korean War, and his mother never revealed to Shin why she was imprisoned. Shin watched his mother and brother’s executions by hanging. Children in the camp were given enough schooling to be able to work, and he saw a classmate beaten to death.
Reading about Shin’s life in Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden turns North Korea into something more than a joke with Kim Jong-un as the punch line. Mercifully, Shin escaped and was able to tell Harden and the world about the secrets of the North Korean gulag. But crimes committed against the North Korean people—crimes being committed as I write this—are rarely discussed. Up to 400,000 people have died in the camps since the 1960s. “There are now five political labor camps with about 135,000 inmates,” Harden told me by email. The camps work to punish political enemies and serve as a warning to the general population. Most of the prisoners will never be released, meaning we can multiply Shin Dong-hyuk’s nightmarish story by at least 135,000.
I started the book last June. The more I read, sitting at my desk in London, the more I wanted to help. Even though trying to fix one of our day’s greatest geopolitical problems seemed dumb, naïvely idealistic, even meddling.
After I finished the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about the prisoners Shin left behind in the gulag. I’d be standing at the meat counter at the supermarket choosing between the highest quality lamb, steak, pork, and chicken, and I would remember the rat meat that helped keep children alive in the camp, and the undigested corn kernels they pulled from cow dung. I felt an urge to act so strong that I couldn’t ignore it. Perhaps idealism is more than just a slur inflicted on the young and hopeful. Perhaps being idealistic is a principle worth standing up for.
(Continued at the link above)
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