drive-by rant

Okay, officially I'm Still Not Posting, at least for another week: too much going on right now. But some things cannot be ignored.

Like this Anne Applebaum column in the WaPo, which is rightly garnering much attention.

Nowadays, it seems impossible to understand why so few people, at the time of the Auschwitz liberation, even knew that the camp existed. It seems even harder to explain why those who did know did nothing. In recent years a plethora of respectable institutions — the Vatican, the U.S. government, the international Jewish community, the Allied commanders — have all been accused of “allowing” the Holocaust to occur, through ignorance or ill will or fear, or simply because there were other priorities, such as fighting the war.

We shake our heads self-righteously, certain that if we'd been there, liberation would have come earlier — all the while failing to see that the present is no different. Quite a lot has changed in 60 years, but the ways in which information about crimes against humanity can simultaneously be “known” and not known hasn't changed at all. Nor have other interests and other priorities ceased to distract people from the feelings of shame and guilt they would certainly feel, if only they focused on them.

The Third Reich is the perennial poster child for murderous regimes, but the twentieth century gave us so many others: the USSR of Lenin and Stalin, China during the Cultural Revolution, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. And horrifying human rights abuses continue, from Saudi Arabia to Zimbabwe to Cuba to…well, China (still). But these contemporary dictatorships are rank amateurs compared to North Korea.

Look, for example, at the international reaction to a documentary, aired last Sunday night on the BBC. It described atrocities committed in the concentration camps of contemporary North Korea, where, it was alleged, chemical weapons are tested on prisoners. Central to the film was the testimony of Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at a North Korean camp. “I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,” he said. “The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.” The documentary also included testimony from a former prisoner, who says she saw 50 women die after being deliberately fed poison. And it included documents smuggled out of the country that seemed to sentence a prisoner to a camp “for the purpose of human experimentation.” […]

Later — in 10 years, or in 60 — it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.

Here I must disagree with Ms. Applebaum. The only way to eradicate the North Korean gulag, and the mass starvation faced by so much of the population, is to destroy the regime. Diplomacy has never ended genocide—and even if it could in this case, deliverance would come too late for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the Dear Leader's victims.

And there are only two ways to end the North Korean government: war, or the complete cessation of aid to the regime. The human toll of either alternative would be staggering (and choosing the latter option would almost certainly give us the former also). But if we do not act decisively, then the judgement of history will be that we failed, just as two generations ago the West failed the victims of Auschwitz.

Cheers.

(Photo courtesy Lileks, who you should go read. Now.)

UPDATE: Here is the home page for the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. (Via The Corner.)