On Sunday the BBC broadcast a documentary about North Korea, featuring
testimony from defectors and refugees. They tell, among other things, about
the testing of poison gas on live subjects, including whole families. (In
NK, when you are arrested for a political “crime,” your whole family is
arrested, too. See Kang Chol-hwan’s book for details.)
Jay
Nordlinger brought this to my
attention. It’s a column by Anne Applebaum in today’s Washington Post.
As Anne says, it’s a pity it had to be the scandal-plagued BBC that
broadcast this stuff, as the allegations about torture and poison gas are
almost certainly true. Defector and refugee accounts generally are. We
first learned this in 1949, when Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko blew
the lid off Stalin’s gulag. A French communist newspaper pooh-poohed
Kravchenko’s claims, saying it had all been made up by the OSS (forerunner
of the CIA). Kravchenko sued, and won. It didn’t change any minds on the
Left, of course — nothing does THAT! I recall that when the Khmer Rouge
horrors first came out via refugee sources, the Left mocked it all –
“American propaganda.” Same with the Vietnamese Boat People of the late
1970s — “Drug lords and prostitutes,” my lefty friends told me. It never
ends. One day we shall go into the North Korean camps and see for
ourselves… but no sooner will that happen, of course, than the Left will
be telling us to “move on.”
Robert Conquest got it right. After years of research he published a book,
The Great Terror, about the horrors of
Stalin’s purges. The Left jeered at that, too — it was all made up, the
numbers were inflated, where was the evidence?, yada yada. After the USSR
fell, the files were opened, and it all turned out to be just as Conquest
had described it, his publisher re-issued The Great Terror. They asked the
author if he wanted to change the title to something else. Conquest: “How
about ‘I Told You So, You Popping Fools!’?”