Kim Jong Un Orders Nuclear Weapons Readied

[queenlily]

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his country to be ready to use its nuclear weapons at any time and the military to be in "pre-emptive attack" mode in the face of growing threats from its enemies, state media said on Friday

Comments

[fenchurchly]

Honestly, it's about time we start talking about North Korea. They've been easily ignored until now because they haven't been a militaristic threat, but the humanitarian crisis there is extreme. The only reason no one has gone in and shutdown all the concentration camps is because the world doesn't know what to do with the resulting millions of refugees - neither China nor South Korea want them. It's an incredibly tragic situation.

If you're interested, Lisa Ling did a great National Geographic doc there:

My favorite books on the topic are The Aquariums of Pyongyang and Nothing to Envy.

A hard but important read is the testimony from a UN report in 2014, it is summarized here (warning, graphic drawings): http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/world/asia/north-korea-un-report/

[queenlily]

That report is horrifying. Who would be brave enough to speak out once they'd escaped, knowing that their family could be imprisoned in retribution?

[fenchurchly]

It's horrible. Basically everyone who escapes knows full well they are damning their families (up to three generations, IIRC) to life in a death or work camp. In Nothing to Envy they follow different defectors and talk about how they justify it and what they did to try to convince people to come with them etc. In one case a woman leaves her boyfriend, not even daring to tell him despite really loving him, for fear he'd turn her in. As it turns out, he was planning to defect too and they end up meeting again in South Korea 20 years (or so, I can't remember) later. It's heartbreaking.

[nesmith]

I read the book Nothing to Envy about NK a while ago and I realized halfway through that this is what you get when a bunch of insane people deciee the Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was a how-to manual.