May 17, 2005
Quote of the Day: North Korea
"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... 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"-- South Korean human rights activist Young Howard, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
I often think that decades from now my children and grandchildren will look back at Kim Jong-il's North Korea, and in the same way that I've tried to comprehend the horror Hitler's Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union, simply ask "How did the world allow this to happen?"
At the minimum, we need to keep these atrocities front and center in the news so that they cannot be ignored by the public at large.
Hat Tip: OpinionJournal's Political Diary