Posted on 10/26/2005 5:34:41 PM PDT by sionnsar
Frank Griswold is on a roll. Visiting Korea, the Presiding Bishop once again has some advice for the United States:
I have learned from you about hopeful contacts between the governments of the north and south. I note that both sides have made a commitment to reunification, called the Sunshine Policy, and a number of exchange visits have now taken place allowing families to make contacts and build positive relations for the future. Plans for rail and road links to increase communication are also hopeful signs. But I know much hard work remains to be done.
During these past years, the Episcopal Church in the United States has been a partner in supporting this process of reunification. At our General Convention in 2003, your sister Church in the United States adopted a resolution in support of reunification. It is my intention now to emphasize my Church’s commitment to reunification by bringing before the United States government several concerns.
I will urge my own government to reject the policy of preemption that heightens tensions and threatens the well being of peoples both in the north and south. As the two Koreas move forward towards the goal of reunification, I will urge the United States to take the following further steps:support and promote a nonaggression pact that will move all parties toward a comprehensive peace formally ending the "state of war" that has existed since 1953 by following through in the current negotiations to pledge not to preemptively attack the DPRK in exchange for the DPRK’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons program
refrain from demonization of the DPRK in favor of supporting the building of relations between the north and south which hold the promise of peace and reunification
make every effort to invite the DPRK into the international community as a full member so that the country can develop and pursue internationally recognized norms and standards for its people to enjoy, specifically to provide humanitarian relief and development assistance to the DPRK including poverty alleviation, food aid, energy development and transportation
I am heartened at what appears to be a breakthrough in the impasse between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the United States and strongly urge both sides to find common ground on which to build future relations. The end of the Cold War has not yet produced the peace dividend that both peoples in North and South Korea deserve. My prayer is that the ongoing climate of hostility and the continuing division of the country will give way to a new day of cooperation, peace building and ultimate reconciliation.
Rather than immediately comment on Frank's suggestions, I should like to direct your attention to this article in that apotheosis of British reactionary journalism, the Observer:
In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea’s largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.
Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.
Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il’s North Korean regime.
Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC’s This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.
’I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ’The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. ’An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,’ she said. ’One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.’
Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped ’top secret’ and ’transfer letter’ is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: ’The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.’
Kim Sang-hun, a North Korean human rights worker, says the document is genuine. He said: ’It carries a North Korean format, the quality of paper is North Korean and it has an official stamp of agencies involved with this human experimentation. A stamp they cannot deny. And it carries names of the victim and where and why and how these people were experimented [on].’
The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000.
Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
This one in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers.
This is not the story of an age of slavery from centuries past or of a survivor of Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. It is what is happening at this moment inside the gulags of North Korea. The stories of gulag survivors are often too horrible to believe for the citizens of civilized countries. If one were to have the opportunity to speak with a survivor of a North Korean gulag, what they would reveal might be well beyond the threshold of the listener’s imagination.
Chul Hwan Kang became the first of many defectors to follow when he arrived in South Korea in 1992 having survived detention in living hell. He served in the labor camp for political prisoners called "Yoduk" from the age of 9 to 19 for the sole reason that his grandfather was accused of criticizing the North Korean regime.
Kang recounts his experience as a young person in the camps stating that children would spend the day beginning at 6 o’clock in the morning working hard manual labor. The failure to accomplish the work quota may result in reduced food rations. At age 17, he was less than 150 centimeters tall (5 feet) and weighed about 40 kilograms (88 pounds). In fact, Kang’s size was characteristic of all detained children, whose growth was universally retarded by continuous malnutrition and brutality. Girls were no taller than 145 centimeters by their late teens and were never cleaner than boys. With unkempt hair and lacking the nutrition critical to adolescent development, they did not look like girls, forced to become part of an androgynous and anonymous prison population.The testimonies on forced abortions and baby killings are numerous, and derive from acts witnessed in ordinary detention facilities as well as the gulags. According to "The Hidden Gulag," a report by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, eight people testified to witnessing such acts.
Yong Hwa Choi assisted in the delivery of babies, three of whom, he reported, were promptly killed at the Sinuiju provincial detention center in mid-2000. Chun Sik You also reported that four pregnant women at the National Security Agency’s police station in Sinuiju was the site of many forced abortions in mid-2000.The most striking feature of the gulag system is the philosophy of "guilt by familial association" or "collective responsibility" whereby whole families within three generations are imprisoned. This policy has been practiced since 1972 when Kim Il Sung, the founder of communist North Korea, stated "Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations."
Another characteristic of this oppressive policy is that those arrested are not detained, charged or tried in any sort of judicial procedure. The victim, along with his immediate family, is shipped off in the early hours of the morning to an interrogation facility. He is only permitted to bring the clothes on his back. The presumed offender is then tortured in order to make him "confess" before being sent to the political penal-labor colony. On arrival at the camp, the victim is issued a pick and shovel, simple cooking utensils and a used army blanket. All contact with the outside world is blocked: he is now a non-person; no question will be asked about him by friends or relatives.
Prisoners are provided just enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. They are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, as well as plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes and anything remotely edible. In committing such desperate acts driven by acute hunger the prisoners simultaneously incur the extreme risk of being detected by an angry security guard and subjected to a brutal, on-the-spot execution.
Not surprisingly, the prisoners are quickly reduced to walking skeletons after their arrival. All gulag survivors said they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the inmates they saw upon arriving at the gulag. These descriptions parallel those provided by survivors of the Holocaust in infamous camps like Auschwitz.
Chol Hwan Kang recollects in his memoir "Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag":
"As prisoners eat rats in the camp, rats were almost depleted and became harder to find. The surviving rats are wary. Rat tastes strange and somehow unpleasant at first. The revolting taste, however, soon disappears. The children never lost opportunities to catch rats, as they watch so many other prisoners dying of undernourishment and pellagra. Rat is the only source of meat for prisoners for 10 or 20 years."In the 1990s, imprisonment befell some North Korean students and diplomats who had been studying or posted in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe and had been exposed to the collapse of socialist rule. According to Yong Kim, he saw some old white men in his gulag who he believed were American POWs from the Korean war of early 1950s. Also believed to have been placed in the prison system were a large number of South Koreans, including many fishermen, captured or abducted by North Korea over the years.
And this Jeff Jacoby column from the Boston Globe:
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country’s largest concentration camp. His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."
Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by what he saw. "I felt that they throroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."
Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.
"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."
Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea’s crimes before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers before we cry out "never again!" -- and mean it?
Here are some satellite photographs of the camps as well as links to even more testimonies of North Korean bestiality.
I've had a good deal of fun at Frank's expense over the years and I suspect that I'll have even more in the future. I even collected a lot of that fun into a book. But I cannot, indeed I must
not, have fun with this. For Frank's suggestions are some of the most morally-bankrupt and monstrous ideas I've ever read anywhere, particularly so since they came out of the mouth of an alleged "Christian."
The United States must "refrain from demonization" of North Korea, Frank? Considering the testimonies related here and hundreds of other places on the Web, one wonders why this country started "demonizing" Pyongyang in the first place. Ain't nobody here but us social democrats. Frank's airheaded indifference to the well-documented atrocities of the North Korean regime means that he never again ought to be listened to about anything.
And I'm confused about something, Frank. Why should it be an American responsibility to "make every effort to invite the DPRK into the international community as a full member so that the country can develop and pursue internationally recognized norms and standards for its people to enjoy?" Are you implying that they don't have them now? That maybe Pyongyang is not as nice as all that? That maybe some of that "demonization" you deplore is entirely warranted?
With statements like, "I am heartened at what appears to be a breakthrough in the impasse between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the United States and strongly urge both sides to find common ground on which to build future relations," Frank takes his contempt for the United States to a whole new level. Implied throughout is the assumption that the United States shares the blame for the "hostility" between it and North Korea and that North Korea would become a paradise on earth if the US would only "find common ground on which to build future relations."
Know what, Frank? If you seriously believe that this country has any "common ground" at all with a neo-Nazi abomination like North Korea, you are quite literally evil and you seriously need to acquaint yourself with the Christian religion. Before it's too late.
"...you are quite literally evil and you seriously need to acquaint yourself with the Christian religion. Before it's too late."
The heresiarch Griswold is indeed an evil, evil man. Evil is not of God, but of the Devil. Do Episcopalians see what this man is doing? The great Father of The Church, +John Chrysostomos, knew what Griswoldian followers of the Evil One were up to. They existed even in his day and his warnings about them are as valid and true today as they were more than 1700 years ago:
"The whole essence and effort of the devil is to separate and remove our attention from God and entice it toward worldly concerns and pleasures. He works interiorly, in the heart, suggesting good works and resolutions and reasonable, or rather unreasonable, thoughts. We must not pay the slightest attention to these things. The spiritual combat consists in keeping the mind fixed on God, in not entertaining or approving impure thoughts, and in not paying any attention to the phantasms which the detestable, diabolic picture maker stirs up in our imagination."
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. "The whole essence and effort of the devil is to separate and remove our attention from God and entice it toward worldly concerns and pleasures. He works interiorly, in the heart, suggesting good works and resolutions and ["]reasonable["], or rather unreasonable, thoughts. We must not pay the slightest attention to these things. The spiritual combat consists in keeping the mind fixed on God, in not entertaining or approving impure thoughts, and in not paying any attention to the phantasms which the detestable, diabolic picture maker stirs up in our imagination."
St. John of the Golden Mouth indeed!
Indeed! But does anyone notice that what this great saint said cuts "both ways"? Don't the words of the heresiarch, for many here on FR, "entice it [the heart] towards worldly concerns" and away from God by engendering strife?
I think I may have mentioned before that much of what I have read on these threads concerns me in a sense other than that the Evil One has gotten hold of ECUSA (though that of course concerns me greatly). It concerns me that many, with the soundest, or at least most understandable, of reasons as the world reckons these matters, have indeed lost their focus on God and transfered it to a vitriol filled struggle over something, a revisionist ECUSA, which in the end will have little to do with their theosis, unless they stay in ECUSA or otherwise cut themselves off from The Church.
When The Church was One in fact, before the Great Schism and the Reformation, when heresy sprang up, usually somewhere near the top (The floor of Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops!), all anyone could do was stay and struggle within The Church. There was nowhere else to go. Today we are witnessing the dissolution of a constituent part of or perhaps even a particular Church within, The Church. To stay or wander off into an "ecclesial assembly" should be no choice because remaining within The Church is the same singular option today that it was before the Great Schism.
PM:
The writings of The Fathers are full of spiritual food, something which the greatest of Protestant thinkers recognized, at least centuries ago. The doctrine of sola scriptura cut so much of Christianity off from this well of knowledge and guidance, unnecessarily so, in my opinion. Imagine, my friend, what it must have been like to stand in a church in Antioch or Constantinople or Alexandria more than a millenium ago and actually hear +John Chrysostomos, or +Basil the Great, or +Maximos the Confessor or +Ignatius of Antioch or +Athanasius of Alexandria preach!
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