NORTH KOREA'S GAS CHAMBERS

NRO - The Corner ^ | 2/5/04 | John Derbyshire

[swilhelm73]

On Sunday the BBC broadcast a documentary about North Korea, featuring testimony from defectors and refugees. They tell, among other things, about the testing of poison gas on live subjects, including whole families. (In NK, when you are arrested for a political "crime," your whole family is arrested, too. See Kang Chol-hwan's book for details.) Jay Nordlinger brought this to my attention. It's a column by Anne Applebaum in today's Washington Post.

As Anne says, it's a pity it had to be the scandal-plagued BBC that broadcast this stuff, as the allegations about torture and poison gas are almost certainly true. Defector and refugee accounts generally are. We first learned this in 1949, when Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko blew the lid off Stalin's gulag. A French communist newspaper pooh-poohed Kravchenko's claims, saying it had all been made up by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA). Kravchenko sued, and won. It didn't change any minds on the Left, of course -- nothing does THAT! I recall that when the Khmer Rouge horrors first came out via refugee sources, the Left mocked it all -- "American propaganda." Same with the Vietnamese Boat People of the late 1970s -- "Drug lords and prostitutes," my lefty friends told me. It never ends. One day we shall go into the North Korean camps and see for ourselves... but no sooner will that happen, of course, than the Left will be telling us to "move on."

Robert Conquest got it right. After years of research he published a book, The Great Terror, about the horrors of Stalin's purges. The Left jeered at that, too -- it was all made up, the numbers were inflated, where was the evidence?, yada yada. After the USSR fell, the files were opened, and it all turned out to be just as Conquest had described it, his publisher re-issued The Great Terror. They asked the author if he wanted to change the title to something else. Conquest: "How about 'I Told You So, You Popping Fools!'?"

[Burkeman1]

"The Black Book of Communism" has a chapter on North Korea that sent shivers down my spine. The only chapter worse in that book was the one on Cambodia and that nation's descent into utter evil and depravity.

[swilhelm73]

One of the things that amazes me - the left was completely and utterly wrong about the Cold War and the various communist states. From denying holocaust after holocaust to excusing said holocausts later on the grounds that utopia was just around the corner, leftist thought should be held universally as morally bankrupt, much like fascism.

However, it simply reinvents history when it can, and its past when it has too. It really is mindboggling when you stop to think about it.

[Burkeman1]

The Left thinks they are God. Seriously. They think they can "remake Man" and "perfect" him. The Right knows there will never be utopia and that man is and always will be imperfect and sinful.

And thus Left can dismiss all the corpses it has produced in the last two centuries as just "mistakes" on the path to Utopia!

Sickening.

[thinktwice]

Speaking of shivers, I went to my copy of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" for inspiration in commenting on this article. Therein I found (on pp page 214) a story about Estonian elderly intellectuals in 1944 Tallinn that ... "discussed how they might break out of that iron ring ... " in which they were trapped between Germany and Russia.

As Solzhenitsyn writes it: " ... all those dreamers were siezed in their Tallinn apartments. Fifteen of them were imprisoned in various cells of the Moscow Lubyanka, one in each, and were charged under Article 58-2 with the criminal desire for national self-determination."

And now, we have the Russian empire carved up into supposedly independent nations.

I find it hard to believe that those controlling the USSR -- the Politburo -- would give national independence back (in violation of that Article 58-2) without massive bloodshed.