WaPo Finally ‘Discovers’ Concentration Camps in North Korea
I submit that any man so morally retarded that he would utter the statement quoted below is not qualified to represent the values or interests of the United States abroad.
And South Korea isn’t alone in tuning out the horrors. The United States is more concerned with containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The State Department’s stunning lack of urgency was captured in a recent statement from its assistant secretary for Asia, Christopher R. Hill: “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.” Japan is focused on Japanese citizens abducted forcibly to North Korea. China doesn’t want instability across its border. [Washington Post Editorial]
Is it any wonder why Hill and Lorin Maazel hit it off so well? The the mendacious Christopher Hill, we now know, is a man who will say anything at any given moment to advance his personal ambitions. To that end, Hill has excised the discussion of North Korea’s atrocities from his talks with the North Koreans, and his minions have tried to airbrush it out of State Department reports. How ironic that the Washington Post, whose correspondent Glenn Kessler has studiously avoided discussion of the human rights story and missed no chance to give Hill a tongue bath (see update), now picks him up and shakes him like a chew toy. One can only hope that this further dims Hill’s chances of joining the Obama Administration. Certainly his record of diplomatic accomplishment isn’t much of a qualification.
Mr. Hill’s larger point is that the United States should be practical in relations with the north and not simply denounce abuses so that America can feel good about itself. We support his efforts to negotiate with the regime. It’s worth noting, though, that last week the north yet again backtracked on a nuclear-related agreement it had made and Mr. Hill had vouched for. It will continue to honor such agreements, or not, based on a reading of its own interests, not on whether its negotiating partners do or don’t speak honestly. We think there’s an inverse relationship between a regime’s trustworthiness on any subject and its propensity to abuse its own people. We also believe that it should not be left to the lone escapee from North Korea’s gulag to speak out about its horror.
High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.
Maybe the Post is equally mindful that one day, its readers will wonder why it almost never covered this story, even though dozens of camp survivors and witnesses now live in Seoul, where the Post has a correspondent. Nearly all of their stories are more readily corroborated than Shin Dong Hyuk’s. More than any other major American newspaper, the Post has viewed the North Korea story through a soda straw that points only to Yongbyon. (By contrast, the L.A. Times and the British press in general have covered the story far better). One day, the Post may cite this token editorial as slender shield of absolution against the charge that for so many years, it ignored the bigger story of North Korea, thus depriving its coverage of the essential context to which it now awakens.