Hypocrisy is not exclusive to the left or the right political spectrum, but South Korea’s leftist are really pushing the envelope to the point of absurdity.

Starving North Koreans

Typically, if are a human rights activist, it’s pretty easy to pick which side your on. The easiest targets are brutal regimes supported by the United States.

But what happens if there is a brutal regime that is at odds with the U.S.and/or conservatives within your own country? Who do you go with? In your mind, which is the greater evil? A nepotistic dictatorship so vile that it’s people are about a foot shorter than those of counties around them due solely to the chronic food shortages you’ve subjected them to (and who’ve also have public executions for political crimes, no free press, nuclear weapons program, etc.). Or do you oppose a Democratically elected government that while you may not agree with them at least their populace isn’t starving by the millions?

This quandary is why you don’t hear human rights activists up in arms over rights abuses in Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine, Iran, etc. (at least unless one of them gets a Nike factory).

Normally Human rights activists are able to skirt this issue by falling back on the “cultural” differences that we must respect (or in the case of Africa that Western colonialism is the culprit). But neither of these apply to North Korea since until recently it shares the exact same culture as South Korea–a country that has not killed millions of its citizens. The only difference as been the form of governments and the people running the two countries since the forties.

So stripped of their normal methods of rights abuse obsfucation, is it possible that North Korea would be the one government in the world that we could all agree is fundamentally evil?

Nope. This is from a blogger in South Korea:

Mr. Park, “a devoted human rights activist in Seoul.” …defends [the] silence on rights abuses in the North:

[Mr. Park] also contends that the conservatives here are under U.S. influence, saying that Washington has made a “political offensive” of North Korea’s human rights record. He is adamant in using the term “offensive.”“We should remind ourselves,” he said, “that Washington has played a role in bringing about the human right infringements in the North, such as the food shortages, by imposing sanctions.”

In other words we should not criticize a government that has no money to buy food for its people but maintains one of the largest standing armies in the world. A government that engages in heroine trafficking (in embassy pouches), counterfeiting, arms dealing, and whose populace is about a foot shorter than their neighbors due to chronic starvation.

It gets better:

He claims that North Korea is a special case. “There is a specific viewpoint needed for North Korean human rights,” he said, “different from that of the general human rights perspective. This is why it is wrong to gauge the North Korean situation by the general perspective.”

“My question here is ‘How verifiable and trustworthy is the information that we have now on the human rights infringements?’”

But because of his skepticism about the reality of such things as starvation and public executions in the North, Mr. Park did concede that there were some issues in North Korea that he would like to look into if he could. “Trans-genders’ and women’s rights,” Mr. Park said, “because there probably are such minorities in the North.”

Yes that’s right. Possibly the most despicable government in terms of human rights since Joseph Stalin and the strongest criticism a self-described human rights activist could come up with is to wonder how women and trans-genders are being treated. (Here’s a tip, probably not well along with everyone else in the country except the political elite.) Mr. Park questions or ignores the testimonials of hundreds of defectors and that of pretty much every legitimate commission set up to study the matter and openly questions the existence of mass starvation.

Pretty sad actually.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 11:37 am by Insider and is filed under Politically Correct ... and stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.