‘Before she was executed, my mother looked at me.’

I’ve been blogging about stories like this for three years, and I still can’t believe human beings are capable of some of the things that my rational minds knows they’re fully capable of:

On Nov. 29, 1996, 14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp’s torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.

Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.

HT to the Marmot.  Camp 14 may have been the one propaganda-free zone in North Korea.  Shin had never even heard of America, Pyongyang, or Kim Jong Il.  The place was an enigma within an enigma. 

See also:

Sticking with our depressing theme of humanity at its worst and how  evil triumphs over good with the consent and invitation of the latter, here is the single most horrific, depraved thing  I’ve  ever heard, including everything I’ve read about Cambodia or Nazi Germany.  It  was done in the name of Islam, by al Qaeda.  My strong recommendation is that you give this  Michael Yon post a miss unless you have a very strong  stomach.  I wonder if this will draw the kind of outrage in the Middle East that Abu Ghraib drew.  Place your bets.  Coming (back) to a neighborhood near you, probably  sometime before  2010.