North Korea: The Nightmare Society

A new book highlights some of the extreme, awful crimes being committed in this day and age in North Korea. It talks of arbitrary, state sponsored murder. It talks about the murders of the disabled. It talks about eliminating others considered to be substandard by the state:

Even short people were not safe, Professor Kim says. The government gave out pamphlets to thousands of people in Pyongyang describing a wonder drug that would raise their height. Instead "they were sent away to different uninhabited islands in an attempt to end their 'substandard' genes from repeating in a new generation. Left for dead, none of the people made it back home."

Murdering people for being short sounds like satire; yet this is actually happening. We tut at America for Gitmo, we shake our heads at Russia for invading Georgia and yet there is a nation in Asia that is systematically destroying and utterly shaft their own population using a brutal and dictatorial regime. I haven't got the first clue about what can be done about North Korea - a society that is one of the most militarised in the world and may possess nuclear weapons. But the smell of pungent hypocrisy is overwhelming when you consider the ongoing talk about an "ethical foreign policy" against the godawful brutality of regimes like this.

H/T: Link emailed to me by the Moai.