The Wisdom of Goethe, the BBC, and How the Human Rights Question Is Changing Washington’s View of North Korea Policy

Gateway Pundit has a must-see post, with BBC video, here, featuring Kang Chol-Hwan and Michael Horowitz. The British press has done a far better job of covering this issue than its American counterpart. I suspect that the Nelson Report is at least a partial explanation for this.

North Korea recognizes that talk about human rights is a mortal threat to the survival of its system; such talk has likely been responsible for its new flexibility on nuclear talks. There is a catch:

“We do not intend to possess nuclear weapons forever,” the North’s main state-run Rodong Sinmun daily wrote in a commentary. “If the U.S. nuclear threat to (North Korea) is removed and its hostile policy to ‘bring down the system’ of the latter is withdrawn, not a single nuclear weapon will be needed.”

Translation: stop criticizing us on human rights, stop broadcasting into our country, and (maybe) continue paring down your forces in South Korea. Or, as Mephistopheles said to Faust:

These are the arts that North Korea wants more time to exercise. Will Washington fall victim to its incantations? Only at the price of our values, and perhaps, another two million North Korean lives.

It would serve us well to remember that regimes that murder their own people always turn outward for more victims, and that regimes that maintain opacity also maintain secrets.

Update: Welcome, Gateway Pundit and Carnival of the Revolutions readers from Publius Pundit. Thanks to both bloggers for the links. Thanks to Barbara at Quid Nimis as well.

Update 2: I was also remiss in not extending my welcome to readers from Budaechigae II, which is one of the best (and least user-friendly) Korea blogs on the net (and still worth the effort to read, imho). Welcome also to readers from NKZone and The Marmot’s Hole. Say what you want; Shelton’s all right with me, and the man can definitely take a punch. Thanks for the links. Apparently, you like Goethe.

(Back to OneFreeKorea)

• Interview with Freedom House’s North Korea program manager, Prof. Jae Ku about his life, his influences, and FH’s July 19th conference on North Korea.
• Grafs from The American Enterprise‘s special edition on North Korea, and why the South Koreans were upset enough to cut off its funding to AEI.
• The L.A. Times exposes desperation and misery in Chongjin, North Korea.
• Runaway inflation in North Korea has spurred a black market in dollars.
• Fisking Hillary Clinton’s plan for North Korea.
• Kang Chol-Hwan, the North Korean gulag survivor who met President Bush, is coming out with a new edition to his book. The new introduction is here.
• OneFreeKorea debates WSJ op-ed author Won Joon Choe about the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance and anti-Americanism.
• How the “Nelson Report” exposes the bias of some journalists toward avoiding the topic of human rights in North Korea, and why its author may have violated federal law.
• The celibate life in the North Korean army.
• More troubling reports that North Korea is cooperating with Iran on nukes.
• Ordinary North Koreans find their voices as reporters, and maybe even as bloggers at this site.
• Please Join us for a demonstration for human rights for the North Korean people on August 20th, at the Chinese Embassy in Washington.