Buried Under the Margin of Error

Park Seok-jin is a devoted human rights activist in Seoul, one who is not afraid to complain bitingly about infringements of basic civil rights in Korea or elsewhere. Mr. Park’s Sarangbang Group for Human Rights runs a Web site that deals with a wide range of concerns from Palestine to trans-gender issues. But there is one area where he is notably silent: infringements on human rights by the government of North Korea. He is one of many liberal or left-wing activists who seem to have given North Korea a pass on its human rights record.

If you can’t help but stare at this moral train wreck, there’s more here.  This is the moral blind spot that led South Korea’s Human Rights Commission to condemn the war in Iraq, only to say that it had no jurisdiction to condemn the  mass murder, rape, and slavery  of millions of Korean citizens (a point I had to raise, since the Joongang Ilbo didn’t).  Just in case you missed it, the Marmot had a similar head-shaker here, or maybe not, since it featured the leader of Hanchongryeon, an avowedly pro-North Korean organization.  And while it’s probably no stretch to surmise that some of those on the far left are listed on the North Korean Order of Battle, I tend to suspect that there’s a more elemental psychological explanation for most of the rank-and-file.

In any event, you can see a bright side in this piece, and it’s the fact that someone is finally  putting these  bloody-minded  stalinists  on the defensive.  Park and his  Kim  Jong ilk can’t really defend gulags, mass famine, racial infanticide, and gas chambers before a wider audience —   “There is a specific viewpoint needed for North Korean human rights … different from that of the general human rights perspective” — so he  dodges, crudely,  by  associating the condemnation of those things with evil Yankees and Chun Doo Hwan. 

Leave aside the fact that those criticisms don’t stick to groups like  Good Friends or authentic New Righters like Kyonggi Governor Kim Moon-Soo.   One  does not have to defend the excesses of Old Right rule to  see that even  the worst  of them would  would be  buried  under the statistical  margin of error  ofor North Korea’s toll.