International

Twisted Solidarity

Eric the Unread reminds us that taking the side of a brutal dictator who gasses his own people once might be considered politically unfortunate but that doing so twice is evidence of something else.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre reports:

Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such “crimes” as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from “official ideology of the state.”

Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: “I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.”

Check out Eric’s site to read the thoughts of two leaders of the Stop the War Coalition if you can stomach it.