Heroines of the Month: Pissed off Korean Ladies

This is the first open dissent in North Korea that I have seen. A good sign, even if too late for thousands.

North Korea's Exports: Nuclear Fearmongering, Holocausts, Light Beer

A country that is doing its best to outstrip the nightmares of Auschwitz and Tuol Seng is now trying to sell you beer - with bad commercials. Do not touch their products. You'd be supporting one of the worst dictatorships in history.

Did you see Mike Kim on the Daily Show?

Here. Jon Stewart interviews Kim about his new book, Escaping North Korea. Just as I was filled with admiration that there are human beings out there with the heart (and cajones) to do this, I made the mistake of reading the associated comments. There were a couple predictable ones from North Korean online propaganda trolls (that's a full-time job for a lot of people, along with the CCP and Scientologists) along with a few clueless posts by people who probably think they're progressive.

Look: whatever Mike Kim's motivations, whether his NGO is faith-based or not, I fully support him and admire what he's doing. One suspects from these verbal knee-jerks that anything that appears to result from a) the free exercise of religion (especially Christian) or b) the rejection of collectivist tyranny is suspicious to this crowd. This is how people who call themselves tolerant and progressive end up looking the other way when confronted with constant, nightmarish human rights violations like those in North Korea, because it doesn't sit well with their "America and Christianity is the root of all evil" morally-superior-out-of-insecurity back-patting.

What makes my little rant different from others you may have read? Because I'm an ardent atheist, that's why, and my defense of Kim and his colleagues is based on a morality that any thinking human being has access to. I'm not impressed with any country that disallows free inquiry and whose official history claims their leader's birth was heralded by a special star. I'm really not impressed with people who live in free countries and are ready to jump to the defense of totalitarian states, and to attack people who are putting their lives on the line to make a difference and defending human life. Kim is supporting people's right to worship as they choose. So do I, along with (I hope) every other citizen of the world's democracies.

Check out the homepage for the book here, and Mike Kim's Facebook group here.

North Korea: A Reminder

"14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp's torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.

"Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.

'Before she was executed, my mother looked at me,' Shin said in a recent interview. 'I don't know if she wanted to say something, because she was bound and gagged. But I avoided her eyes.'"

This what happens inside Yodok Gulag in North Korea. Full article here.

Here is a satellite picture of the camp itself, which is humming right along while you read this:



Want to read more about Yodok? Start at Wikipedia, or better yet read The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

You can also view the crayon drawings of a child who escaped from North Korea. Here is one of them:



If that's not enough, here is U.S. Senate testimony from another North Korean escapee.

This is the government that is holding two American journalists.

This is a government with nuclear weapons, that is about to launch a missile.