I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
This is some 1984-level shit right here, except it’s worse, because it’s not fiction. Shin Dong-Huyk escaped from one of North Korea’s “re-education camps” — the only person known to have done so — and then to China, and then to South Korea. Now he works with U.S. human-rights organization Liberty in North Korea, sharing his firsthand experience of the worst totalitarian practices of the secretive regime with anyone who will listen. He shares them here, in a documentary by German filmmaker Marc Wiese, and the more he talks, the deeper the descent into real-life, human-afflicted horror. It’s not even the worst thing we learn from Shin that he committed no crime, not even one of the absurdly minor ones that could get someone branded a political dissident, like neglecting to add a particular honorific when discussing Dear Leader. No: Shin was born in the camp, the child of prisoners. (It’s not even the worst thing we learn that the camp is more like a slave town, with 20 to 30 thousand inmates-for-life.) His first memory is of going to a public execution with his mother when he was perhaps four years old. He was doing forced labor in the camp’s coal mine from the age of six. Gray, dismal animation accompanies Shin’s stories about life in the camp, and Wiese expands on Shin’s perspective — and removes all doubt that Shin is telling the truth — with interviews with former camp guards, one of whom smuggled out footage of an interrogation. If it’s “exhausting” for Shin to talk about his experience, so it is for us, too: mentally and emotional. How can people be so awful to one another? Wiese develops a motif that suggests that the guards were nearly as much prisoners, and certainly were victims of psychological conditioning, too… but someone is in charge, and the attitudes and ideas that prop up a culture like the one that gives birth to such nightmares as children being taught to rat out their parents come from somewhere. Wiese has no answers, which is no criticism of his effort to ask the questions. I originally wondered that Shin comes across as sane as he does… but now I wonder whether we all have to be a little insane to find ourselves not too terribly surprised by anything he has to tell us.
There seems to be some evidence that in the right sort of culture bad ideas can become orthodoxy simply because nobody dares to say “no, we don’t do stuff like this”. That seems to have been a big part of the Abu Ghraib culture of torture, for example.
It’s unbelievable to compare Abu Ghraib to the North Korean Gulags. You have no idea what is to live under a totalitarian tyranny and hope you never have to.
you’re right and we don’t want to. but if we continue to ignore abu gharaib and the culture it engenders, we will slowly, incrementally, and then very rapidly come to accept those conditions and treatments as normal and will accept it happening to our neighbors, or even relatives.
But American do now live in a nation where they can be imprisoned on the President’s say-so — or even executed — with no due process and no access to legal representation. Simply because this power has not yet been used on a mass scale doesn’t make it any less totalitarian.
Regarding the Iraqi prison, that was the act of idiotic soldiers, but what scares me is the superpower given to the government supposedly to protect the citizenship. You are right; that’s the way these people work, relentlessly, step by step and one day we will wake up under a totalitarian regime and will ask: What happened? You can see what happened in Boston. Police searching homes without a warrant and most people agreed, because they felt safer.
that’s sadly true.
ARE SERIOUSLY COMPARING NORTH KOREAN PRISON CAMPS TO AMERICA?!?!?!
Watch the freaking movie for god’s sake!
YES, it’s true that we in the free world must be vigilant to the dangers of tyranny, but to make this comparison is grotesque and damned offensive.
I think you need to develop your reading skills. I said no such thing.
I DID say that America is now a nation where citizens can be imprisoned on the President’s say-so — or even executed — with no due process and no access to legal representation. Are you saying this isn’t true?
Children being taught to rat out their parents is hardly a novel part of Communist culture. It happened in the Stalin-era Soviet Union all the time. Nor does the practice show any sign of vanishing from the Communist world — alas.