The Power of Truth

Freedom rises over Korea, into the air over the most oppressed and darkened place on earth. The video clips that follow are from the BBC, Al Jazzeera, the Voice of America, and New Tang Dynasty Television.

The people who are launching these balloons are, in large part, North Koreans who could not live — or stand living — in their homeland, and who can find no other means to connect with those they left behind. Others are South Koreans whose loved ones were stolen from them by North Korean abductors. How emotionally stunted must one be not to consider, for an instant, the sorrow these people must feel? Who could fail to understand their need to somehow connect with those they love, but with whom ordinary means of communication could, if they were possible at all, be a death sentence for them?

The balloons are being launched from South Korean territory, and from South Korean waters — from a country that thousands of Americans soldiers who helped to defend it were told was free. The balloons also contain money that hungry people might use to buy food and seed a nascent underground economy, and that economy might feed even more people Kim Jong Il won’t by drawing smuggled food from across the Chinese border. The leaflets are non-violent expression. They could not possibly do harm to anything worth preserving. They do not so much as resemble anything harmful or dangerous, either to the eye or on a radar scope. For the starving and oppressed, these leaflets could carry the hope to live on, to fight on, and to stand for a future worth living in.

Someone please explain the downside of this. How easy and shallow a thing for those with something to live for to deny a future to those who have nothing.

But we must preserve relations with the North Koreans! (Which really means, with one of them.) And to what end? After billions in aid over more than a decade, engaging Kim Jong Il’s regime had accomplished what, exactly? Where is the measurable transformation of North Korea’s totalitarian system? How many North Koreans have seen their lives improved? Are there fewer North Korean guns pointed at South Korean cities? Is its system of government kinder, gentler, or more transparent? Is North Korea less of a nuclear danger to South Korea and the rest of the world? Have North Korea’s “expendable” people ceased to starve and die? Has the North reformed its economy? Can anyone point to a single tangible benefit the world has gained by prolonging this wretched regime, much less some benefit that outweighs all of the misery millions have experienced as it was prolonged?

Ah, but there are those lucky hand-picked 30,000 at the Kaesong Industrial Park. Though their wages were stolen by their oppressors and exchanged for short rations of food and goods, their exploiters would say that the lives of their rented slaves were at least a little better than those of their neighbors for a while. By this logic, a foreign pedophile who flies to Cambodia should be commended as long as he buys his victim a hot breakfast. In the unlikely event the leaflet balloons have played some part in ending this vile, regime-sustaining exploitation, all the better.

To support the balloon leaflet launches, please join me in contributing to the North Korean Freedom Coalition.

Update: of the balloon launches. More here and here at the BBC.