So, the other day, a report came out about atrocities committed by the government of North Korea on a scale not seen since the last days of World War II.
Here's the thing: I certainly do not want to sound skeptical, because such things are very much within the realm of possibility. Since the first echoes of "Never Again!" following the revelations of the horrors of the Holocaust, there have been comparable episodes of mass genocides in the former Soviet Union, in Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution, Nigeria, in Cambodia, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Darfur, in Syria, and now, most recently, in the Central African Republic. Some of those were outright ethnic cleansings. Plus, we had one country, South Africa, impose a Nazi-like ideology of racial purity and white superiority, which lasted until just shy of twenty years ago as I write this. Hell, even in Israel, the people who suffered through the Holocaust, the Jews, are now the ones doing the oppressing, with tactics that have been compared to apartheid in South Africa.
So, no, it is not surprising that reports coming out of North Korea, a nation that nobody seems to know all that much about, suggest some horrific things are going on there. Some people seem to be shocked that such things can happen in this day and age, in the 21st century. Those kinds of sentiments seem to take a willfully blind eye to historical reality, however, and to me, they are echoes of the widespread sentiment leading up to the so-called "Great War" (also known as World War I) that that particular war would be the war to end all wars. Western civilization had reached heights never before seen, then, and the assumption was that we were far more civilized than we actually proved to be - that the excesses and horrors that man had committed against man would not be revisited on us again, because we had moved beyond that. Instead, World War I unleashed terror and brutality on a scale never before seen, and shook western civilization to it's core. We know, in hindsight, that it was a naive, and obviously overly idealistic sentiment, to hope that such a conflict would, indeed, be the final war of all time.
And we know, deep down, that horrors are still very common in our world. We still have slavery, although it might no longer be recognized by official governments these days. Yes, everything has been sanitized for us by a combination of government and corporations and media, so that our world is made to appear safer and more sane than it actually is. But the truth is that horrors happen, and with an alarming degree of frequency. Women in Africa still get their breasts cut off. Children are still abducted. People are kidnapped and forced into doing things that they obviously do not want. There are mass famines and poverty, and there are still the scourges of war, even if these, generally speaking, do not visit us here in the rich, industrialized societies as much as they do in other parts of the world.
Unfortunately, humanity has never progressed beyond these. It seems that our technological capacity has advanced at a far more rapid pace than our knowledge of how to sensibly handle these same. Our morals have not kept up with the greed that this greater power had given birth to. And so, yes, we see, and are still faced with, the same horrors that we have known throughout history.
Still, perhaps the scale of what has happened in North Korea is indeed beyond anything since the Nazis still held power in Europe. The only reason that I am even remotely skeptical about this is something that I have already mentioned: the comfortable collusion of the government, the corporations, and the media, who tell us, collectively, that everything is okay. That "problems" exist "over there", meaning elsewhere, in places that we are led to believe are far less civilized than our own nations. When we see smoke hovering over Kiev or Caracas, or when we see images of violent clashes between protestors and police in Thailand or the Ukraine more generally, it makes headlines, and will get press coverage. But they remain distant from us. Or, so we convince ourselves.
This is all the more relevant in the case of North Korea, where we do not even get the press coverage. Indeed, unlike Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine, which i understand dominated the news in the lead-up to the war, we hardly ever hear about North Korea. Other than the leader, we never really hear about other prominent figures, the generals or other top staff. If there are indeed butchers like Himmler, Eichmann, or Barbie in North Korea today, we do not know their names or faces. Indeed, we know little to nothing about them.
I remember someone else being compared to Hitler, though. You might remember, too. Saddam Hussein. That's right. In the lead-up to the first Gulf War, he was compared to Hitler. But Hitler was not defeated after 100 hours of active ground forces being deployed against him. Hitler never had a "no fly zone" in his country, although to be fair, the Rhineland was demilitarized, until he marched in there just a few years after first taking power. We heard about one other famous monster in Iraq, who's given name was "Chemical Ali". Yes, we heard all about those strikes that he and his dictator were responsible for, although left out in those reports, rather conveniently, is that the weapons that were used were provided by the United States. Also, even more conveniently, we did not hear about how the United States continued to supply Iraq with these kinds of weapons, even after reports were confirmed that they had been used against their own people.
When the drums of war sounded about Iraq in 2002-2003, Americans were led to believe by the Bush administration, and a very complacent press, by and large, here at home, that Saddam's Iraq was a virtual superpower. That he had a mass arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that he had 45-minute response time, and that he posed an immediate threat to world peace. Saddam's name was used interchangeably with the "war on terror", and with "Al Qaeda" and the 9/11 attacks, even though he actually had nothing to do with any of those things, and the Bush administration had to admit that much. Still, a majority of Americans believed that there was a link, which was a sad statement.
That level of exaggeration led to the tragedy of an unjust war where over 100,000 Iraqis died, and the nation, and on some level the region, were destabilized. There were glaringly obvious corporate scandals that revealed a massive conflict of interest, with names like Halliburton and Blackwater, and there was shock over the abuses in Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, Congress focused instead on renaming food in their cafeteria, censoring former names in favor, irony of ironies, of "freedom fries" and "freedom toast".
In other words, it was a clear cut case of propaganda, which the nation really should have learned from. Yet, a poll taken last year revealed that a slight majority of young people in the United States would do the same thing over again if the events played themselves out. That's right, young people, who often are viewed as the most activist and resistant to war, would today be in favor of the invasion of Iraq, even given all of these revelations that they easily could know about, if they bothered to lift a finger to try and find them out.
Lesson learned?
I think not.
Which is a perfect illustration, really, to why this report condemning North Korea is not surprising. The problem is that no one knows precisely what to believe anymore. That's the problem when we are given fluff for news. When we are so indoctrinated with self-righteous propaganda, here in the leading nation, supposedly, of the "free world". Here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where the possibility of Justin Bieber being deported gets people riled up, while most people shrug rather indifferently when a report comes out about such abuses in a faraway land.
Maybe, if you want people to care, you just have to tell them that we need to invade them. You don't even really have to give them a good reason, frankly. Anything will do, so long as you keep talking about our freedoms here at home. It worked in Vietnam, although that war became quite unpopular. It worked overnight with the invasion of Grenada, with very popular support for those actions domestically, despite a lack of concrete reasons for why we should so quickly and easily engage in a supposedly "last resort" measure. Ditto with the invasion of Panama some years later. Ditto with Iraq. So, maybe announcing that North Korea is next would be the solution.
The problem is that North Korea is a very powerful country, and would not likely be an easy war. And therein lies the next problem, because the United States is not likely to engage in a conflict there anytime soon. Nor is the United Nations. They may talk about the need to "take action", but I hardly think I'm alone in wondering what such strong action would be.
I discussed this with my family the other night, and my brother mentioned that he is tired of the United Nations, because it talks the good talk, but has proven remarkably incapable of stopping situations when they truly get out of hand. They failed to prevent genocides and ethnic cleansings in all of the places that I mentioned before, and that includes the Central African Republic today. The war in Syria rages on, and the situation in Sudan was not greatly improved because of the United Nations. Nor was it in Rwanda, for that matter.
So, questions still dominate at this point. Are the abuses and human rights violations on a scale as the report suggests in North Korea? And, if so, what's going to happen next? What will the United Nations, the United States, or other nations do about it?
Many questions, but so few answers. I can only venture guesses.
But about the only thing that I am sure of, is that either way, whether North Korea has reached a point in terms of atrocities where it can be compared, side by side, with Nazi Germany, or whether this is simply more hyped up propaganda, it is bad news.
Oh, and one other thing that I can say with certainty: we, meaning humanity, collectively, are most certainly not beyond such things in this world. Unfortunately. And so, not only does the 21st century follow the 20th century, which is considered to have been easily the bloodiest century in history, but it does so seamlessly, and in all the worst ways. I hate to be the cynic here, but in a world with explosive overpopulation, and increased competition over the diminishing resources, it can hardly be imagined that things are going to get better, let alone fool ourselves into believing that "in this day and age", we are beyond the horrors that we should be paying attention to on the nightly news and headlines. Far from it.
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