North Korea: Skeleton in the closet – elephant in the room.

Ho, peaceful persons.

**an important note afterward

Being in the both the column of ‘nothing new’ and ‘of great importance’, this piece of news struck me UN report on North Korea finds ‘atrocities like WW2’.

I speak of peace and togetherness (as I’m sure you do), but there come times when love must take a form other than turning the other cheek, and be love all the same.

If a child is face-down in the water, you drop what you’re doing, and immediately intervene; you pull the child out, you seek help, and you do what you can at the moment to save that budding life.

Questions of ethics, or morality, of what grounds the former and whose is to be respected in the latter go out the window when we see these things… because there are certain rights and wrongs out there which require not debate but action, resolution.

Further, if we may draw this example closer to the situation at hand, and we imagine a grown man being attacked. If there does not exist such an apparent existential threat which would surely end us as him, then we are compelled to action by that within us that is common to him and his inner experience, and by our knowledge of this knowledge where from guilt of inaction in the face of injustice comes.

Taking this and the former hyperbolic example, we are able to face of the atrocious hyperbole which is a modern day concentration camp.

Yes, there are many terrible things happening near and far, all the time… and to pick and choose is to pick winners and losers via the entitled seat of certainty by our particular (geo/temporal) ideology.

The question of whether or not Iraqi men should be able to marry 9 year old girls seems pretty fucking simple (IE no, they ought not to want or to be able to impose adulthood onto these prepubescent children), but there still exists divides large enough in the varied cultures of the Earth that perhaps a discussion would best handle that… conversely, the existence of concentration camps is a clear indication not of a misunderstanding of what is right, but of vile and sick intent to become and to create a reality of what is evoked by the term evil.

These exist, today, on this tiny and exposed planet.

Here are one of the drawings done by those persons so damned to witness, and so blessed to escape with their lives.

No dignity is given to the prisoners, they are as rodents, and their captors are barbed beasts in a land otherwise filled with the malnourished masses yearning for food, access to information, and (for those that can conceive of it) brotherhood with the rest of humanity.

Click for stomach-turning drawings of NK concentration camps.

I am usually the first to spring to attention when the drums of war are beat. I stand to say ‘put down your arms’, because the media informs as it distorts, and states protect as they feed big business, and so we can never really be too sure of what we want, war especially.

You may wake one day to want product X, but do you want it? People with vested interests make plans, and spend money, and run many campaigns to plant seeds within our heads. One morning we wake, and those thoughts that were once of advertising executives are suddenly budding in the soil of our own minds. These ideas feel like our own.

War is no different; it is a product, it has a manufacturer, and it is sold to people who never knew that they were even in the market until out of their own mouths come cries for war, and on their refrigerator grocery list below milk and meat, one morning they write human blood.

So, perhaps I ought to shut up.

Perhaps.

A pile of non-humans lay in holes dug by better people. Is this ever truth?

I am here saying sometimes violence, sometimes war is better than that kind of peace, that disquieting silence, that too-comfortable serenity that fills the air when people are systematically lessened, terrorized, and destroyed as unwanted cattle, and the rest of us continue on our merry and empty lives.

So, though I come with a compelling argument of emotion, feel free to tell me to shut up for wanting blood, whatever the rationale.

Surely something could be done. Yes, dangers exist for Seoul (South Korea), and there are diplomatic problems with China and Russia… but in WWII those Germans who “didn’t know” the nightmares occurring in their backyard camps did not have our internet’s instant access to information. Wir tun, we do.

Remove Persuade the leadership to see reason, destroy the offensive weapons, liberate the camps.

Then, with China, the world can pour into NK food and knowledge and basic infrastructure such that those people can be their own people, and not to simply continue through history as a stunted people, of marionettes set in a twisted fiction brought on as a natural response to the rape of the region by the Korean war.

I believe this is something that can be done. I only wish China could become the loudest voice of condemnation toward the NK regime. That would make everything so much simpler.

It is because I believe (in heart and in reason) that every human, and all life, is connected in a way as intimate as the connection of the self to the world that I want this for people that I will probably never see or hear.

Inaction is a kind of action, and I hope one day the world may rejoice in the eradication from Earth of such places, such ways, of such an unforgivable mentality.

Testimony of Ms. Soon Ok Lee

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Just some thoughts, this angst.

**edit: A further note,

This is not a call for war, I should note. This is a call to frame the situation as being as horrible as it really is. When WWII ended and American soldiers came across prisons that just worked humans down to nothing, where men and women and children were treated in ways that to even consider this, truly for a moment, of yourself and those you love, you would feel such a wave of anxiety and anger and sickness and…. it would pass; one, because it would feel terrible, and so you would push it from your mind, and two, because your imagining is so far from that dark reality, your conjecture conditioned only by stories and images, and not by losing your humanity, forgetting dignity, wanting food, and rest, and death, you could not properly imagine the horrors.

Freedom? How could you ever be free? Could you leave the camp? If you did, and if you found a nice quiet meadow to lay down in, could you listen to the wind, to the birds, to the silence? Would you ever feel serenity?

Knowing that place exists anywhere in the same universe as yourself, could you ever be free? Free from knowing what happens is happening. Free from knowing the feeling of grass between your toes, and knowing that elsewhere the terror continues unchallenged.

I haven’t been there, not in this life of mine. But what exactly is the difference between myself and someone in a concentration camp?

Better yet, what is the difference between you and I?

Is it that much? How much?

All things considered, all energy from the initial bang, all matter being of the same physical-chemical processes, all apparent biological life being of a single common ancestor, how different are you and I? Really.

Is the difference great enough that if I were to live in constant pain, terror, and hopelessness, as an animal in a cage awaiting known destruction, that what you are at your most basic foundation of existence, would you be certain that you would not be so affected too?

You had better be certain and correct that you are protected, or else your sitting on your ass not caring about the suffering of others is actually a sad instance of you failing yourself.

The blank stare into the television, if that face could be seen by the same man sitting in a bamboo cage looking into the raining sky, hoping for an aircraft to land and walk him out of there and into the world of healthy, wealthy, and happy people… to see that face of distracted, nihilistic apathy would make concrete the knowledge that the world is a hateful terrible place.

People in cages, unless they already are made to hate the world, surely look out at it with hope.

Hope.

Who can answer to hope, but those who have time and money and ability? Who? Unfortunately, the majority of those people ultimately go to waste in a useless life of  health, wealth, and blissful ignorance.

More people ought to care a whole lot more.

When it comes to pass that everyone is as loud as everyone else, and love is what we are loud about, then we will be able to take all the men, women, and children out of their cages, and with them make a better and more just world for us all.

– J

edit #2: the next post is a partly a rebuttal, partly a continuation