Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

L’Affaire Sony NORK

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

December 22, 2014

If festivals of hypocrisy were to be compared with the riotous celebrations that are actually already on the calendar, L’Affaire Sony NORK would have to rank right up there with the Mardi Gras in Rio.

Let us recap and without any snorting. Sony made what I have no doubt was a perfectly appalling movie called The Interview. The movie is a comedy about the assassination of Kim Jong-un, the Dear Leader of an electrically challenged portion of the globe. North Korea didn’t like it at all, and no doubt with the help of other regional commies, hacked into Sony’s computer systems and released all the juicy info they found down there to the interwebs.

At this point, Western journalists — major privacy advocates all, provided we are talking about the NSA — couldn’t resist the chance to dish on Angelina, and responded to this particular North Korean dinner gong by getting all four feet in the trough.
As a consequence, we discovered all kinds of festive things, like major Sony liberal Democrat execs having fun to yucking it up at Obama’s expense with various race-chortle-jokes. And then, as a result of the controversy, theater chains got nervous and started bailing, and so Sony halted the release to the movie theaters, while maintaining they hadn’t caved. We will see. If they release it in other ways after renegotiating all the contracts related to it, then they might have a point. If they don’t, then what they just did was fold like a three-dollar tent in a typhoon.

And then, just after the nick of time, Obama weighed in by saying that he thinks Sony made a mistake here, trying not very hard to not get any race-chortle-joke-schadenfreude on the lectern. They should have called me, he said. We were talking to the White House, they said, whaddaya mean call you? But Obama was already on a higher plane. You can’t let these political leaders bully movie makers, said the man who had blamed the Benghazi fiasco on a by-standing movie maker who then had to spend a year in jail for it. Still with me?

At a certain point, however, however macabre your sensibilities are, the whole thing stops being funny. The reason it stops being funny is that the episode highlights a major security threat — cyber attacks — for which there is currently no adequate preventative solution at all. There will be suggested preventative solutions, which will all mysteriously grow the power of our government over our lives, but they will be a farce like all the rest of it.

“The means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home.” James Madison

What North Korea did to Sony could in principle be done to nuclear power plants, to U.S. Bank, to public utilities, and the international headquarters of Ben & Jerry’s. The point has already been made — and it is accurate as far as it goes — that the NSA exists in part to guard against this kind of thing. A private corporation like Sony shouldn’t have to protect itself against the malevolent resources of a nation-state. One of the reasons governments exist is to protect us from attack, including this kind of attack. A private business in America should not have to pay for the kind of security it would take to guard against what a country could mount against them.

But . . . here it comes. It will be pointed out by those people still willing to defend NSA snoopervision that it is not possible to defend private business against such attacks without our protecting government also gaining access to the data they are protecting. And so, after an appropriate amount of throat-clearing, the suggestion will finally be made. “You will just have to trust us. We want to keep you safe . . .” Now I grant that we may require the kind of cyber defense that only you can provide, but if we give them that position, then it turns out that we will have no defense at all . . . against them.

So the answer is no. I don’t trust them. Not only do I not have any good reason to trust them, I have compelling reasons not to. Remember the point made just above about the maker of the Muhammad movie who had nothing whatever to do with all that unrest in the Middle East, but which was blamed on him nonetheless? The most powerful people in the world declared that they would hold him responsible, which they did, and so he spent a year in the slammer. That was a vile business right there. And then the man responsible for it stands up a couple years later and lectures incendiary movie makers on how to stand up to threats from tyrants?

Obama first got elected to the Senate because the sealed divorce records of his opponent got themselves unsealed. He is from Chicago. This is what he does.

The reason Obama has been against the Keystone pipeline is that he needed to use the piping material as a conduit between the IRS and the Washington political operatives who needed dirt on their opponents. This is what he does.

Not only does he do this kind of thing, but the fact that he does is openly known. Despite this, he continues on, and so I will continue on with wanting my government to know as little about me as possible. That is, I only want them to know what I am willing to tell them directly, and in public. Central to what I am willing to tell the government in public is the fact that I do not trust the government. This is good a priori policy for any government, but it is especially necessary with a government that has been as guilty of abusing information as our has.

James Madison summed up my feelings nicely. “The means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home.”

US Tort Law Facilitating Pyongyang Victory

Great Leader Strikes Again

It’s official.  The FBI has confirmed that the hack of Sony computers came from a foreign “power”, North Korea.  The psy-ops war has so far been a total victory for one of the nodes in Bush’s Axis of Evil.  Allegedly, a specialist hacking unit operating out of North Korea hacked into Sony’s computers and databases to “punish” the company for daring to make and planning to screen The Interview, a satirical comedy sending the North Korean dictator up the creek.  Sony could not have chosen a more fitting and worthy subject for a satirical roast. 

North Korea finally disclosed its hand when it threatening to bomb any movie theatre showing the film.  The language employed in the threat was eerily reminiscent of your average, every day fulminating eructation out of Pyongyang.  Ironically, in the long term, this would likely make the movie one of the great cult classics of all time.  Kim Jong Un would forever be remembered as a pompous idiot with no sense of humour (as well as a moral monster).  Watching the movie would become a delicious act of sedition against a petty tyrant; laughing at Dear Leader would become a political act, a blow for freedom.  Sony could never buy that much notoriety and publicity in their wildest dreams.  (We have no doubt that conspiracists will eventually claim that the Sony hacking was all an inside job to immortalise the movie.)

That is, unless Sony completely caves in.  There are signs that it will do so.
  The intended screening of the movie has been cancelled in movie theatres across the country.  Now, at first blush, this seems like an act of national cowardice.  It would appear that the cocky, self-aggrandizing  American bolshieness has ended not with a bang, but a whimper.  After all, it is the coward who talks the biggest game and runs at the first sign of danger. 

But there are deeper issues and worse villains at work, it seems.  Blogger Patterico, a district attorney, discusses the likely real reason movie theatres have refused to screen The Interview. 

Why is “The Interview” being pulled? Why was Steve Carell’s “Pyongyang” cancelled? In the first instance, you can blame the lawyers.  Once all the major movie chains decided not to show the film, that was the end. Why did they make this decision? I’m sure part of the reason is that they worried moviegoers would stay away from the theaters showing the movie, whether the patrons were there to see this film or not.

But I’d say one major reason the chains decided not to show the movie is that they worry about lawsuits if something happens. Ridiculous hyperbole? Nah. For example, the victims of the Aurora shooting are suing Cinemark over an act perpetrated by a lone gunman. The suit has survived summary judgment, meaning it will cost the chain millions whether there is a settlement or a jury trial. You think chains weren’t thinking about that case and similar litigation when they refused to show “The Interview”?

The apparent decision to forego streaming and DVD sales is also the work of lawyers, from what I have read. Apparently, to collect on insurance, Sony needs a total loss. I would think an insurance company would want them to mitigate their losses, but I don’t write the contracts.

Plus, once the company decides to pull the movie from theaters — a decision that will cost them as much as $200 million, some executive’s head is going to be on a platter. Probably the heads of a bunch of executives. They will be told they should have seen this coming. Now imagine being the guy who decides whether to do a DVD release. You can face the fate of those other executives, or play it safe and kill everything, pointing the finger at the people who are getting sacrificed anyway.

A similar thought process is going on with respect to any movie in development or being considered now: is there some madman or group of madmen who might make violent threats over this? If so, then the project is dead. Simple incentives at work.

Yes, there is a healthy dose of plain cowardice involved here too. (I understand many of you see this as a business decision, but I think you — and the chains — are taking the short-term view over the long-term.) But don’t discount the power of tort law to scare companies into doing ridiculous things. That, in large part, is what started the ball rolling.

Who would have thought that American tort law would have become such an effective weapon in the hands of the Great Leader?  

 

The Assyrian Has Come Down . . .

. . . Like a Wolf on the Fold

There are few slave states left on the earth at the present time.  North Korea most certainly is one such state–one of the worst in recent history. 

If ever the world needed an an object lesson in how limited government, the rule of law, and private property rights can lead to rising standards of living one needs only to compare the trajectories of North and South Korea after the cease-fire in 1953.  People of the same ethnicity, history and cultural background were divided by an artificial border.  The only substantial difference since that time has been  in political, economic and legal systems.  South Korea is today an economic powerhouse, with rapidly rising living standards, and its people both industrious and vivacious.  North Korea is grindingly poor, with a starving population, and a government maintained only by means of fear and enslavement. 

Below is a summary of the UN indictment of the North Korean regime.  It charges the regime with “crimes against humanity” which means very little, except that when the regime finally collapses, as it inevitably will, North Koreans and others will be warranted sending their present tormentors to international courts for judgment. 

United Nations says North Korea should face ICC trial for crimes against humanity 

news.com.au

NORTH Korea’s leaders should be brought before an international court for a litany of crimes against humanity that include exterminating its population, the United Nations says.

A hard-hitting report on the nuclear-armed totalitarian state also strongly criticised its denial of basic freedoms of thought, expression and religion, and its abduction of citizens of neighbouring South Korea and Japan.

“Systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials,’’ said the report by the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea set up in March 2013 by the UN Human Rights Council.  “In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. These are not mere excesses of the state; they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded,’’ the report said.  “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations revealed a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.’’

Commission chair Michael Kirby said the world could no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for a failure to act.  “At the end of the Second World War, so many people said: If only we had known … Now the international community does know,’’ he said.  “There will be no excusing of failure of action because we didn’t know.’’ . . .

Kirby wrote to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — the third ruler of the communist dynasty founded by his grandfather in 1948 — to give him a last chance to put his country’s response.  In a January 20 letter, Kirby told Kim he could face justice personally for the crimes committed by the system he runs.  “Any official of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea who commits, orders, solicits or aids and abets crimes against humanity incurs criminal responsibility by international law and must be held accountable under that law,’’ Kirby wrote.

The report said options included the UN Security Council referring the country to the International Criminal Court or setting up an ad hoc tribunal. . . .

North Korea’s crimes against humanity entail “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,’’ the report said. It condemned a system of throwing generations of the same family into prison camps under guilt-by-association rules, given testimony from former guards, inmates and neighbours. . . .

North Koreans’ daily lives were marked by constant “surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment to preclude the expression of any dissent,’’ the report said.  It estimated 200,000 people from other countries had been abducted by North Korea or disappeared after going there willingly.  Most were South Koreans stuck after the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, and ethnic Koreans who arrived from Japan after 1959.  But hundreds of South Koreans, Japanese and nationals of countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Lebanon, Romania and France have also been pressganged as language teachers or even spouses.

North Korean defectors have also been kidnapped from countries including China, it said.  “These international enforced disappearances are unique in their intensity, scale and nature,’’ the report said.

Deja Vu

History’s Patterns

There is an eerie familiarity to what is playing out now in North Korea under the gentle beneficence of Kim Jong Un.  Kim has heard the divine call from himself to execute his former uncle and round up as many of his former relatives as he could find and either imprison them or execute them.

He shows all the symptoms of a tyro beating his chest, letting his country know who is boss.  This resonates with a time in Israel’s history when the young Rehoboam succeeded his father, Solomon.  We take up the narrative in I Kings 12: 3ff:

And they sent and called him, and Jeroboam and all the assembly of Israel came and said to Rehoboam,  “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke  on us, and we will serve you.”  He said to them, “Go away for three days, then come again to me.” So the people went away.
 
Then King Rehoboam took counsel with the old men, who had stood before Solomon his father while he was yet alive, saying, “How do you advise me to answer this people?”   And they said to him, “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever.” But he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him.  And he said to them, “What do you advise that we answer this people who have said to me, ‘Lighten the yoke that your father put on us’?”  And the young men who had grown up with him said to him, “Thus shall you speak to this people who said to you, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy, but you lighten it for us,’ thus shall you say to them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s thighs.  And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.’”

It is said that Kim Jong Un is systematically replacing the old yoke of power with his younger mates.  And he is showing signs of being much more draconian than his father (were that possible).  It is a young man’s disease.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been targeting relatives of his uncle and former advisor, Jang Song-thaek, who was executed recently. Hundreds of relatives have been imprisoned or executed. The Daily Telegraph reported that  the victims who are alive will be transported to slave labor camps, even though they are very distant relatives of Jang and possibly never met him,

The Daily NK newspaper, run by North Korean defectors, reported from a source: “At around 10 pm on the night of [December] 13, the day after Jang was executed, armed men from the Ministry of State Security arrived in the Pyongchon area of Pyongyang, where a lot of his relatives lived.”  Concurrently, Kim is being referred to in the state’s official newspaper as “great leader,” a title only used previously in reference to Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, according to Yonhap News Agency.

The end result for Israel was rebellion and a divided kingdom.  We will see whether the pattern repeats in the case of North Korea.  One thing is sure: in the end the Lord will take vengeance upon those who have mercilessly and cruelly persecuted His people.  

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Fissures in the Ranks

Human Depravity

Last time we checked Kim Jong Un was a human being.  We presume he still is.  He is one of us.  As one of us he is demonstrating the relentless evil that lies in every human heart.  Relentless evil that can become regnant. 

Whilst most human beings will recoil in horror at the recent accounts of public executions in North Korea, we also have to acknowledge that Kim Jong Un is one of us.  He is not an animal.  He is not a demon.  He is blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh.  Either we must own him and his depravities, or we must implore the  King of kings to judge him speedily, in this life and the next. 

Public Mass Executions Carried Out in Seven North Korean Cities

PYONGYANG, North Korea, Nov. 12 (UPI) — Dozens of people were executed recently in seven North Korean cities in the first known mass executions in the Kim Jong Un regime, South Korean media reported.

The executions of about 80 people occurred Nov. 3 for relatively minor infractions, such as watching South Korean movies or distributing pornographic material, Korea Joongang Daily reported Monday.

People were executed in cities such as Wonsan, Chongjin, Sariwon and Pyongsong. No one was executed in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital.

In Wonsan, eight people tied to stakes at a local stadium with their heads covered were shot with a machine gun, a source told Korea Joongang Daily. Witnesses said Wonsan authorities brought about 10,000 people, including children, to the stadium and forced them to watch.

Twenty musicians, including Kim’s supposed former girlfriend Hyon Song Wol, were executed by a firing squad in August for allegedly making pornographic videos.

Media reports later alleged that Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, worked with the musicians before she married Kim, which has been denied. The official Korean Central News Agency said anyone who questioned North Korea’s “highest dignity” would be “mercilessly” punished.

North Korea and Potemkin Villages

Useful Idiots

One of the most cringe-inducing episodes in recent Western history was the infatuation of the majority of intellectuals in the first half of the last century with the Soviet Union.  Whilst Stalin was ravening his subjects with famine, Western intellectuals were praising the wonder of a socialist economy.  They did this, of course, because long ago they had become converted to socialist ideology.  The Soviet Union was the leading exemplar of the secular New Jerusalem.  The standard eschatology of the time was that capitalism and private property was going to fall apart under their own contradictions whilst the Soviet New Model Man would emerge superior and the way of the future.  The intellectual avante guard became willing dupes.

The constant procession of Western admirers was treated to all sorts of displays of the wonder of the New Model Economy.  They dutifully gooed and gahhed. Stalin even ordered New Model Towns to be made–subsequently labelled Potemkin Villages after a consort of the Russian Tsarina Catherine II–which were essentially like Hollywood movie sets.  Through these Western visitors were duty conducted, dutifully to return back home raving at the wonderful increase in housing quality and living standards being enjoyed in the Soviet Union.  Meanwhile, eastward, beyond the Urals, the Gulag camps were hard at work.

In recent weeks we have had our own Potemkin moment.
  One of our own, superannuated economist, Gareth Morgan recently was escorted through North Korea.  He marvelled at the splendour of the place. His findings included:

• it was fantastic
• The country is beautiful
• The country is just fantastic, the farms are perfect. They have no pollution.
• huge pride in their personal space
• those they witnessed were not malnourished or lacking in necessities in clothing or shelter
• poor, yes, but wonderfully engaged, well-dressed, fully employed and well informed
• what North Korea has achieved economically despite its lack of access to international money has been magnificent.
  Hat Tip: Kiwiblog

Presumably, Mr Morgan’s tour was conducted at night. We know that in the darkness of that land during the night, it is rather hard to see things properly.  Below is a satellite image of North Korea (outlined) at night.

Gareth has been visiting a giant Potemkin Village.  He has clearly forgotten the old saw about mushrooms being kept in the dark and fed horseshit. 

But jokes pale when the reality of life is exposed in that terrible place.  This, from The Guardian. 

Camp 14: Total Control Zone is different. The German film-maker Marc Wiese’s film tells of horrors that could be happening as you read this, in North Korea, in prison camps so vast that they show up on Google Earth.

Some are “re-education” facilities, where the inmates can hope to be released after a period of hard labour and immersion in revolutionary doctrine. The “total control zone”, however, is a life sentence, with death the only exit. Other, that is, than escape. Shin Dong-hyuk was born in the camp and fled, aged 23, in 2005. Wiese’s film gives a harrowing account of life in a world where people like him are regarded as lower than worms or flies.

Wiese’s work has taken him from the Bosnian war to Palestine, Belfast and South Africa; he has talked to war criminals and people who have ordered suicide bombings. Even he was shocked, though, by Shin’s reply when, hoping to start the film with an upbeat story, he asked him for a memory from when he was four. “So he told me, ‘I have a memory; it was a public execution.’ I said, ‘Did your mother talk to you about that? Did she try to help you?’ He looked at me and was shaking his head, and he said, ‘No. For what? It was happening every week.’ And just for me, personally, I said, ‘Shin, what did your mother teach you?’ and he said, ‘Only one thing: how to survive.'”

Survival meant living by the rules, which included informing on anyone in breach of camp regulations. When Shin overhead his mother apparently plotting to help his brother escape, he told his teacher. Later, he had to watch as his mother was publicly hanged and his brother killed by firing squad. He felt nothing. If he hadn’t informed, he and his father would probably have been executed, he says. This revelation takes Camp 14: Total Control Zone into the area of Primo Levi’s “grey zone”, where the distinction between victim and perpetrator becomes disturbingly blurred. “For me, this was never a victim story,” says Wiese. “That would be, honestly, boring. Camp 14 is, for me, a film which is showing how a system is able to condition three people. In the beginning, Shin and the two guards are very opposite. But in the middle, as he is talking about his mother’s execution and they are talking about torture, they are very parallel. Shin is saying, ‘Well, she did something wrong.’ And the perpetrators are saying, ‘Well, of course we tortured. Of course we executed. They told us we have to, so we did.'”

Able to act with impunity, the guards beat, killed and raped prisoners on a whim. While Oh Yang-nam, a former secret service policeman also interviewed for the film, questions what he did, Hyuk Kwon, a former commander in camp 22, shows no remorse. “I’m convinced he has a sadistic side, because he’s smiling,” says Wiese. “He’s talking about rape. It’s impossible to smile. Around 50% of the material with him was simply not usable. It was too tough. It made a freak show out of Camp 14.” Still, it may yet serve a purpose: “If ever a human rights court is established for North Korea, they can have my raw material, and it’s enough to sentence them both.”

Ah, Gareth, you have been played like a fool.  What did Lenin allegedly call such?  Useful idiots. That will do.

Not a Pretty Sight

Totalitarianism, Bellicosity, and the West

Totalitarian political systems are on a constant war footing–against their own citizens.  Once totalitarian control has been asserted it must be institutionalised through secret police, informer networks, kangaroo courts, imprisonment and executions.  Totalitarian systems provide the only example of a nation erecting a wall to keep its citizens in. 

During the last century and into this present one Marxian thought produced the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which, naturally, manifested itself as totalitarian dictatorship by an elite.  Lenin, Stalin, the Ceaucsescus, Honecker all executed totalitarian control over their own citizens. 

Once the citizenry has been pacified and the regime’s idiotic economic mismanagement produces famine and destitution, the totalitarian state looks for scapegoats.
  Others come into the frame–other nations.  Allegations of nations interfering in domestic affairs become normal; the state puts itself on a perpetual war footing.  Before long, national pride demands a war. 

This has been the perpetual cycle of behaviour in North Korea now for over twenty years.  We are told that a military action of some sort against South Korea is imminent.  It may well escalate into full blown war between the two nations.  It’s what totalitarian states do. 

Recent Korean history reveals a sobering possibility: It may only be a matter of time before North Korea launches a sudden, deadly attack on the South. And perhaps more unsettling, Seoul has vowed that this time, it will respond with an even stronger blow.

Humiliated by past attacks, South Korea has promised – as recently as Tuesday – to hit back hard at the next assault from the North, opening up the prospect that a skirmish could turn into a wider war.  Lost in the headline-making North Korean bluster about nuclear strikes on Washington in response to U.N. sanctions is a single sentence in a North Korean army Supreme Command statement of March 5. It said North Korea “will make a strike of justice at any target anytime as it pleases without limit.”

Those words have a chilling link to the recent past, when Pyongyang, angry over perceived slights, took its time before exacting revenge on rival South Korea. Vows of retaliation after naval clashes with South Korea in 1999 and 2009, for example, were followed by more bloodshed, including attacks blamed on North Korea that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.

An irony, however, in all of this is that Western democratic nations have been engaged in wars and military actions for about as long as modern totalitarian states.  Many of these wars have not been defensive in nature, but a positive offensive action to secure ideological goals: liberty, equality, and fraternity.  We in the West feel better about such wars because they are “noble”.  But to totalitarianistas their wars are equally noble in defence of an equally high principle: the eventual freedom of the working man, the wretched of the earth, from all forms of exploitation.  To Islamists their wars are in honour of the name of Allah, to establish his reign via the universal caliphate.  Equally ideological, equally driven by utopian, millenarian beliefs.

The political ideology of the Christian faith is profoundly different.  It is definitely millenarian in its focus and intent.  All the nations of the earth will be discipled.  But the reign of Christ comes without the sword, without force, without violence.  Its sword is the Word of God preached and proclaimed; its initial sphere is the transformation of the human heart, individual by individual.  Then, it extends to all that disciples of Christ do in this world: loving, serving, worshipping, giving, marrying, bearing and raising children, and so forth. 

Christianity has a doctrine of the military sword, but its only justification is armed defence of citizens: it is never to advance a cause, or an ideal.  The reason the West has become so bellicose in recent decades is due to its departure from Christianity.  Since it no longer believes in a millennium wrought by Christ in the hearts and minds of men, it begins to seek a utopia won by the sword.  At this point it comes increasingly to imitate the military doctrine of totalitarianism or of Islam. 

Not a pretty sight at all. 

Letter From China

 When Humour is Forbidden Strange Things Happen

We are all aware that The Onion plays it straight–at least as far as its face is concerned.  It recently awarded the new Korean Dictator the appellation “Sexist Man Alive”.  Read the spread here.

The kicker is at the end of the article, where we read: “UPDATE: For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.”

True.  The People’s Daily, which can never play it straight, illustrates how a steady diet of propaganda will eventually tie the bowels up in knots.  It assumed The Onion was playing right back down the wicket and decided to produce a stunning cover drive to the boundary.   It produced its own extensive spread of Kim Jong-Un cultish adoration, with not a funny bone in sight.

Political Correctness In the Dock

Norway on Trial

Anders Breivik  is on trial in Norway for mass murder.  The court will decide his guilt–which is a pretty straightforward affair, since Breivik admits setting off the car bomb which killed eight people, and executing a massacre of young campers, murdering sixty-nine.  The trial is supposed to last ten weeks.  Since his guilt is straightforward, the only other question is his sanity.  Ten weeks to determine the sanity of Anders Breivik.  How bizarre.

What has led Norway into such a fix?  We suspect it has something to do with political correctness.
  The Commentariat–the dominant axis of politicians, intellectuals and media–has a shared view of reality.  All that conforms to the group-think is considered rational, sane, normal.  Anything which is not politically correct–that is, all which fails to conform to group-think–is suspect.  Extreme violations of the “code” imply a person may well be insane. 

Clearly Breivik is not a babbling, incoherent idiot.  He is not delusional.  He does not think that trees talk Swahili to him.  He has a world view, which he has followed through with cold logic and a ruthless, deadly precision.  Is the Islamic terrorist mad?  Of course not.  By the lights of their perverted religious ideology they are perfectly rational and consistently sane.  Was Stalin mad?  Of course not.  Once again, by his ideological and political principles, he was the sanest man in the Soviet Union.  Utterly depraved, to be sure–but sane and rational, nonetheless. 

Norway’s problem is that the Commentariat is so oppressively powerful it has got to the point of thinking that anyone who does not likewise believe the Catechism of Political Correctness is mentally unstable and delusional.

We have always found it particularly chilling to read of regimes (usually Communist) which consign their  malcontents to mental asylums, or re-education camps.  North Korea has, at present, thousands upon thousands of its citizens so incarcerated.  You will either learn to think as we do, or you will die: probably, for many victims, both will transpire.   Norway, apparently, has its own “soft” version of the same regime.  If you hold views which lead you to murder innocent people, you are probably insane.  Not wicked.  Not depraved.  Not degenerate.  Mad.  Not guilty by reason of insanity. 

Noway prides itself on its PC tolerance.  Evil is always environmentally and circumstantially caused in that country.  Total depravity and Adam’s sin skipped over that Scandinavian paradise.  The Commentariat insists upon it.  Evil is not native to the human soul.  Sweet love and tolerance will free people from the fleeting darkness of the human conscience.  No Conradian Heart of Darkness there. Dostoevsky would already be in the asylum in Breivik’s land.   It is part of what makes Norway so sophisticated, so enlightened, so European.

So, now Norway needs to take ten weeks to determine if Breivik is sane.  Either way, guilt and doubt will now leech through the Commentariat as never before. If Breivik is judged sane and guilty of his crimes, how could such evil seep from Norwegian society into his soul?  If he is judged insane, how could the system have failed this soul so comprehensively?

By the peculiar, stupid blindness of that place, it is not Breivik who is on trial–it is Norway itself.

Easy Tools

 The Consequences of Denying Human Depravity

We watched Hillary Clinton announce the “food for halting nuclear weapons development” deal with North Korea.  We listened to the public celebration of a supposedly enormous breakthrough and triumph by President Obama.  Incredulousness is the only appropriate response.

Here is a regime combining the bestial cunning of Stalin with the ghoulish psychopathy of Pol-Pot.  Its horrors, once revealed, will make future generations blanch.  It takes food from the West supposedly to relieve famine and uses it to feed its huge army.  The rest of the population are left to starve.
  It promises to halt its nuclear programme, with the caveat that it can reverse this decision at any time (i.e. once the food aid is delivered).  It leaves its plutonium project out of the agreement–meaning that it can keep on merrily nuking up. 

Repeatedly the United States has made these agreements with North Korea.  Repeatedly it has been duped, gulled, and deceived.  Mendacity is the hallmark of the absolute tyrant.  The US is such an easy tool.  It is so gullible.  The question is begged, Why?

Neither Clinton, nor Obama, nor the Commentariat in general believe in human depravity.  Their unrelenting view is that intrinsically every human being is holy, righteous, and good.  All evil is extrinsic: from the outside, from external circumstances, from the social and physical environment.  All people doing evil things can be reasoned with and appealed to and overcome with goodness if external pressures and temptations are relieved. 

Consequently, being nice to others makes them nice.  Being kind makes them kind.  Being reasonable encourages them to be and do the same.  Everyone agrees that the North Korean death-regime is paranoic (a common feature of all dictators): the West in its Unbelief assumes that being kind and proving its integrity and peaceful intentions will dissolve the paranoia.  Change the external temptations and provocations and the evil in North Korea will dissipate and sweet reasonableness and morality will break forth. 

This naive theological monstrosity makes the West an easy tool.  Regimes like North Korea and Iran  worked it out decades ago.  They play the West like a cheap ukulele.

Read now the epitaph of the West and the easy dupes who lead it:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At time, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Full of high sentence, but obtuse; at times the Fool.  So passes the Unbelieving West and its leaders who are such easy tools. 

He who does not acknowledge in his own depravity will end up inflicting great evil upon the world.

Chilling Revelations

 How Long, O Lord

Below are a series of clips manifesting the depth of depravity of the monstrous regime in North Korea.  They present testimony from defectors and escapees.  It’s a dirty secret that no-one likes to talk about in the West. 

Praying the Imprecatory Psalms on behalf of those suffering is by far and above the best and most potent response Christians in the West can make. 

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

They Are Only Christians

Complicit Silence of the West

We have been watching media commentary upon North Korea, post the death of Kim Jong Il.  The overarching, meta-narrative is that North Korea is a paranoid country, ridden with fear.  The sub-narrative is that no-one should do anything to make it more paranoid.

Several observations can be made on this pop-psychoanalysis of  North Korea’s regime.  Firstly, it is paternalistic.  Like much that passes for psychology these days, it looks down from a great height upon a lesser people, regarding them as children, immature, wilful, and troubled.  Secondly, it produces a “don’t scare the horses” approach to the regime.  But one thing tellingly missing is a clear statement that the regime is evil.  Such ethical categories don’t really fit in the polite salons of diplomacy, old boy.

We are gratified to be able to reproduce this article from The Guardian/Observer newspaper.  This needs to be read.  You surely won’t find it being discussed in the chardonnay sipping soirees of the Commentariat.  this article was first published in 2004. 

Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea’s gulag

A series of shocking personal testimonies is now shedding light on Camp 22 – one of the country’s most horrific secrets

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.’

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’

He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. ‘At the time I felt that they thoroughly 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; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.  ‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. 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.’

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.

With North Korea trying to win concessions in return for axing its nuclear programme, campaigners want human rights to be a part of any deal. Richard Spring, Tory foreign affairs spokesman, is pushing for a House of Commons debate on human rights in North Korea.  ‘The situation is absolutely horrific,’ Spring said. ‘It is totally unacceptable by any norms of civilised society. It makes it even more urgent to convince the North Koreans that procuring weapons of mass destruction must end, not only for the security of the region but for the good of their own population.’

Mervyn Thomas, chief executive of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said: ‘For too long the horrendous suffering of the people of North Korea, especially those imprisoned in unspeakably barbaric prison camps, has been met with silence … It is imperative that the international community does not continue to turn a blind eye to these atrocities which should weigh heavily on the world’s conscience.’

Later today we will post a series of YouTube clips of interviews with regime defectors. 

>Evil Before Our Eyes, Glory From On High

>To the Ends of the Earth

The Associated Press has carried a story which is horrifying, to say the least. It is a story of man’s inhumanity to man, of evil, of what happens when sin is left unchecked, and when men set themselves up as the only and final reference point. Yet it is also a story of God’s love and grace to the world, mediated through His people. 

It concerns the Chinese and North Koreans trafficking in women. There is a shortage of women in China, due to the benighted One-Child policy causing abortion of girl babies (since women are less likely to be able to support their parents in old age–and remember the Chinese get only one shot at this, since they are officially allowed only one child). Chinese men are now buying North Korean women as chattel-wives.

Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner.

The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association. Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner. The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association, which offers aid to refugees, which offers aid to refugees.

Chinese bribe the border guards, who let the North Korean women in. A large number of them are then on-sold to Chinese men looking for a “wife”.

About 20-30 percent are destined for marriage and are resold to another broker for about 2,000 yuan. They are then sold to farmers, normally for 5,000-10,000 yuan, but the trafficking does not necessarily end there.

If the customer does not like his wife, he can resell her and add about 2,000 yuan to the original price. Some women are sold seven or eight times, Chun said.

The women rarely know what is in store for them, Chun said. “Most of the time, they are just told they will get a good job in China and will be able to earn a lot of money.”

Of course, the women cannot complain or they risk being sent back to North Korea where punishment and even death awaits them. Any children coming from such marriages are not recognised by the Chinese government. This leaves the child a refugee in the country of its birth.

Children fathered by Chinese men and North Korean women are the biggest problem, Chun said.

“The Chinese government does not recognise children whose mother is not registered. If the mother runs away or is taken back to North Korea, the children are left with nothing — no nationality, no parents and no identity.”

The children can be officially registered if the father pays a fine but most cannot afford this.

Some North Korean women are put to work in internet chat rooms for sexual voyeurism. Some South Koreans try to contact them, befriend them, and help rescue them by putting them in contact with missions such as Durihana.

We thank God for Durihana and similar Christian ministries. In the face of such terrible inhumanity and depravity, we see again the wonder and glory of Christ’s redeeming work.

Post Script: a history of the Durihana mission can be read here.

>North Korea: Expect the Worst

>Dwarves in Caverns

Christopher Hitchens has recently written a piece arguing that North Korea is much worse than most people think. It was published in Slate magazine and consisted of a review of a book recently published entitled, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, by B.R.Myers–which Hitchens calls “electrifying”.

The thesis is that North Korea has to be regarded as “pathologically right”–which resembles far more National Socialism than communism, references to which have been dropped by the North Korean government long ago.

The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

The implication is that the regime is not uttering “posturing” or “framing” statements of crass hyperbole when it speaks of making war: it means exactly what it says.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.

Hitchens concludes with these graphic observations:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.