That report Kathryn posted on the appalling awfulness of the North Korean regime demonstrates once
again a thing that has occurred to me often when talking with liberals and
lefties about communism. Why were so many decent, well-read people in
Western countries such suckers for the old USSR, for Mao’s China, for
Castro’s Cuba, etc.? A great deal of it is just wishful thinking combined
with failure of imagination. They can’t imagine these horrors, except
in terms of things they know more immediately. Thus, they will grudgingly
concede that the Gulag was awful: “…but look at conditions in our own
prisons!” U.S. prison conditions leave much to be desired, but cannot
reasonably be compared to the mass arrests of tens of millions of perfectly
innocent non-criminal people, and their subsequent killing by starvation,
forced labor, and beating. Yet you hear this sort of thing all the time.
The truly depressing thing in that report you posted is that this kind of
blank failure of imagination occurs even among South Koreans–people just a
few miles away from the horrors, of the same nationality as the victims, and
speaking the same language. One sometimes gets the impression that most
human beings just sleep-walk through life. How difficult it is to get the
truth across!