U.S. cannot let another holocaust continue
North Korea is at it again. Buried under headlines concerning missing passenger planes and Russian peninsula-grabbing, the world’s most unstable nuclear state sent 10 short-ranged rockets toward the Sea of Japan.
This, of course is nothing new. The cloistered nature of the regime lends itself to these temper tantrums.
It’s not as if they’re getting attention for anything else.
Except, perhaps, their intentional famines. And their constant threat to East Asian regional stability. And their repeated and numerous crimes against humanity. And their repeated flaunting of international nuclear disarmament law. (You get the picture.)
All of these crimes were meticulously outlined in the recent U.N. report on that prison-state. Hundreds of pages in length, it has compiled some of the worst offenses and has lengthy and reputable testimony from the few refugees to escape that country.
While the breadth and detail of the report should be praised, especially concerning a country as insular as North Korea, almost none of this information is new, at least in content.
We have known for a long time that North Korea is one of the few states that has operational concentration camps.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Right now, as you breath South Carolina’s (relatively) clear March air, a concentration camp exists somewhere on earth. Satellite photos of these camps (there are many) show what appear to be crematories.
In the middle of World War II, when Europe’s undesirables were being systematically murdered on the orders of a chubby loser with a death wish, the United States and their allies stood by and did nothing to stop this culling. There was no coordinated effort to bomb rail lines to the camps, or to stop the mass transport of human beings to their death in any way.
In my opinion, the prominence of teaching the Holocaust in post-war U.S. education is a guilt-laden response for this failure to act. “Since we can’t change the past,” the line seems to go, “at least we can prevent these atrocities from happening in the future.”
So what does the U.S. say to the world when it shuffles its feet in the face of North Korea’s concentration camps?
That holocaust can go unpunished, in the right circumstances.
If the country is allowed to pursue and develop nuclear weapons, like North Korea was for such a long time, they can enact a holocaust without the possibility of retribution. Again and again, we are reminded that North Korea is capable of destroying Seoul, the South Korean capital, overnight with conventional weapons. Should war break out, that city, a bastion of democracy in East Asia, would be the first to be bombed.
So where does that leave us?
The simple fact is that the North Korean regime can’t last for very much longer. It relies too much on China for economic stability. It is run by a stone-faced old guard who would like nothing more than to stab each other in the back to secure their political power.
In short, their time is coming. The only difference is our choice: whether we play a part in its destruction, or relegate our role to teaching our children how we failed to act.
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