North Korea: Yodok concentration camp

SOURCE AND FULL ARTICLE: http://mantlethought.org/content/north-koreas-not-so-secret-prison-camps

RELATED ARTICLE: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/images-reveal-scale-north-korean-political-prison-camps-2011-05-03

What are your thoughts on this? To be honest, I just found out about this today after being led to North Korea for an unknown reason.

I found this article to be horrifying; mostly to what it says at the end of the first article: That the world's governments choose to do nothing about this despite knowing for years. It's disgusting.

Well you see it's mostly because world politics doesn't give a shit about North Korea, nor any other third-world country for that matter that doesn't have anything to offer them outside the intangible justification of morality.

China only cares about it because it acts as a puppet state/barrier from western influence, but a part from that it couldn't give two shits for the people who live there.

The world is a terrible terrible place and this sort of shit happens everywhere, you'd better get used to it.

What the hell? It's not that we don't want to do something about it, it's that we CAN'T do anything about it. The people there worship the family line of Kim Il-Sung like gods and know absolutely nothing about what life is outside the borders. They even think that Kim Jong-Il can control the weather. They are fed propaganda that America causes their famines and their poor quality of life; mothers sing rhymes to their children that go like, "Let's get America to kneel before us, let them beg for mercy and shoot them." If anyone doesn't believe this, they are sent to prison camps. This creates an environment in which you can't trust anyone to speak out against the government with because you won't know which side they are on and because of this they don't have the willingness to revolt against the government. They have no means of knowing how, no history to read from, no scientific knowledge to help them, no concepts of freedom.

Despite having an extremely low quality of life for it's people, the communist government invests most of its resources into having the 4th largest military in the world. They have recently gained use of nuclear weapons and threaten to launch it with ICBMs if anyone tries to interfere with their ways.

Faced with a people who hate us and an a very unstable threat to the world, what can we do? The Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in history backed by the Chinese. Unless we want to start WWIII, there is little we can do.

I find your opinion truly naive and frankly, I'm disgusted that you think America and its allies doesn't care for the rights of others. We care too much in fact, which made us involved in the Vietnam War and Korean War in the first place.

I do hope that those terrible shit will lessen. It pains me to know that injustices are still done in parts of the world.


Thread Starter, seems like your links have been removed. They are probably going to be traced by North Korean spies now and are gonna get killed. Just kidding.
North Korea isn't really included as part of the world, it's like another world there. I've been also wondering what's inside that place.
All I could think about was Sadness.

@Daedalus_

I apologize, but I fail to understand how the heads of the government, like Kim Jong-il, seem as though that all these crimes against humanity mean nothing. I can understand that he thinks it's "for the good of the state" because Sung said so, but doesn't he or anyone feel even the slightest bit of remorse for all this?'

@Yuuki

Fixed. Also, I doubt it will lessen. The article from Amnesty says that the camp is gradually growing and they the current population of 200,000 political prisoners will soon become the small number.

The next biggest non-North Korean prison camp still open is a camp in Myanmar of about 60,000 political prisoners.

You said how could the world's governments such as those not North Korean could allow this. Kim Jong-Il is just like any other dictator believing the universe revolves around them and thirst for power to control it.

Its because it won't benefit them at all. A country is only interested in anything that will benefit the country before anything else. For example the US supporting Dictators or other terrible leaders http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/31/americas_other_most_embarrassing_allies?page=0,0

Yeah, that is sad, but true. We only support or criticize any country that has oil...I guess that means since Gaddafi is gone, we'll be in Libya for a good amount of time and try to install a "democracy"?

And by "we" I mean the US. I don't mean to categorize anyone who is from the UK or any other country that visits this site.

Meh it's not exactly that we choose to do nothing, we just cannot do anything.Not only is war not supported by the public, but no one currently has enough political capital to challenge the armistice with North Korea. As such, we have no stance or hegemony within the political spectrum of North Korea, no matter how much we scream and yell at them.You truly feel disgusted?Fine then, pay for us to go to war and let's see how disgusted you truly are.

LOL ARE YOU SERIOUS? Hahahahahaha, you gave me a good laugh sir. I bet you believe that the US also invaded Libya because of humanitarian reasons. Oh lawd, American patriotism causes so much ignorance.

Read some history books because you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. America got involved in the Korean War and Vietnam because they were scared of Communism-spread (the domino effect) and wanted to propel their arms industry, not because they "care" about people.

And your whole argument about the US having a "OMG WE DO CARE ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS WE JUST CAN'T DO ANYTHING" mentality is invalid. The Democratic Republic of Congo is currently in a war that has been going on for 30 years where over 5 million people have died and 45 000 die each month:

http://www.globalissues.org/article/87/the-democratic-republic-of-congo

Why hasn't the US done anything in an area they're more than capable of intervening in, if they care about human dignity and rights? I'll tell you why, it's because they don't. They're more than happy to jump into Libya, which coincidentally enough has a little something called oil.

North Korea is pretty scary, that news is not surprising.
They don't let much/many in nor out of the country.

I still find it impressive people are this selective about their memory on things. Yeah, there's oil in Libya, and yes the U.S. would love to get as much of it as we can. The world runs on oil, and it's quickly becoming a hot commodity.

On the other hand, look at what Gaddafi was doing to his people, and what he promised to do to the rebels once he caught them. It was going to be the next Rwandan genocide, but without the buffer of 'ethnic cleansing'. It was going to be a straight up bloodbath, and the world was going to watch it happen...again

For weeks on end, guess who pushed and pushed the U.N. and more specifically, the United States? That's right, the rest of the fucking world. We pushed back, because our press was already bad enough what with Iraq and told everyone else that if they wanted us in, they needed to help out. And then what happened? As soon as we go in people cry foul after about a month and say we're only in this for the oil. What, we can't have our cake and eat it too? We went in there and we helped those people, we didn't even send troops on the ground and still you demonize us for it?

Well world, we aren't too fond of you either, particularly when you pull crap like that on us. We can help people while advancing our own goals at the same time you know. We aren't the satan worshiping selfish pricks you make us out to be.

You know why the world pushes you into invading Libya? Propaganda, that's what.

Western countries use propaganda to pull support into motives that they want. Once they get public support for it, they can pull the "oh but you want us to invade card". The US always wanted to invade Libya, they just used propaganda to fool you into otherwise.

I'll give you evidence, Syria. Where's the media explosion or all the coverage over Syria? They're in exactly if not in a worse situation than Libya ever was, yet you don't see the amount of coverage on your televisions about it that Libya received. So what's the difference between Syria and Libya? Why did Libya get 24/7 coverage while Syria got largely ignored by prominent western media outlets? Oh that's right, Syria doesn't have oil while Libya does, what a coincidence.

I wonder if you could tell me exactly when you became an expert on U.S. foreign policy? As for Syria, it's my understanding that the rest of the Arabic world is attempting to handle it on it's own.

It's called common sense, looking at the facts and drawing rational conclusions.

I wonder if you could tell me when you became so deluded in ignoring that the US isn't all sunshine and ponies and are actually corrupt and act on self interests.

I am not deluded, and know damn well that we aren't made of rainbows and lolipops. I just don't focus on only the negative aspects of my country. I wonder if people are as quick to paint us black as they are to forget the good things we've done as well. Earthquake in Haiti? Tsunami recovery in Indonesia and India? What about that flood in Pakistan? Yeah, we are all heartless corrupt bastards huh?

I could make a well formed rebuttal to this but I feel no compulsion to do so when you act like a child, wrenching in disdain. If your post had merit then you soiled it with the way you type. This is not how civilized people communicate to each other.

Remind me to rep you guys for your posts...

And yes, sure we are sought as the asshole of the world, but here's a question: If we don't act as the recipient of the International Douchebag Award, who will?

As for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, yes, I do see how it is. The US utilizes a heavy ideology that social Darwinism applies to basically all their operations.

Boils down to people generally not caring imo, me included. If the leader of one country decides to invest money to help people suffering in another country without gaining anything that country will lose resources and the quality of life will drop. Which will most likely mean that he/she will have a snowballs chance in hell of being re-elected. "we had to raise the taxes" is more negative then "The people of xxx are now FREE!!!" is positive.

If you can't handle a bit of cynical and dissonant remarks, then it is perhaps you that is the child here. I'm not the one that is disregarding someone's entire opinion and points on the basis of my own prejudices. "Civilized" behaviour is just a half-hearted excuse of a justification; this is a hentai forum, not a meeting of the round-table.



I'm going to stop you there. Now you're just straw-manning an argument way out of proportion. I was just pointing out the double-standard cynical type of politics that the US and other nations delve into. This doesn't mean that i think they exclusively engage in such actions nor ever said everything they do is so either.

And just focusing on the positive aspects doesn't mean you can be completely ignorant and just disregard the negative aspects. It comes as a complete package of both sides, though propaganda and some people believe otherwise.