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[PairOfFilthySocks]

Shit...

Damn this planet. Damn it to fuck.

 

[The_Darkest_Red]

Shit...

Damn this planet. Damn it to fuck.

I just finished the book. I'm kind of at a loss for words, it's hard to even express how it made me feel. It's almost like I constantly wanted to believe I was reading about something that happened during the 40's or 50's but the constant dates kept reminding me that this is happening right now. It's just so unbelievably tragic.

 

[Kenka]

I need this book.

 

[J-Rod]

I would support intervention in NK despite all the cost. I think we will be ashamed once everything that is going on there comes out in the open and we reflect on how no one stepped up to do anything about it.

I wonder how Shin is keeps his sanity. People who grow up in abuse tend to be abusive themselves, but Shin appears to not want to harm anybody. He even forgave his oppressors. That is amazing to me.

 

[K.Sabot]

Fuuuck, damn thread bump.

I want this book bad now.

 

[IAmtheFMan]

He was on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n

 

[DemiMatt]

Asides from these "camps" are there normal places people live in North Korea?

I don't know what normal would mean, but is the entire country military and camps or . . . . can people sorta just "be" there?

 

[TehOh]

Asides from these "camps" are there normal places people live in North Korea?

I don't know what normal would mean, but is the entire country military and camps or . . . . can people sorta just "be" there?

Read "Nothing to Envy". It's one of the best books about the lives of North Koreans.

Yes, a lot of people just live in apartments and have jobs teaching, farming, working in offices, etc. Just in a fucked up country where you have to be constantly careful about what you say.

 

[DemiMatt]

Read "Nothing to Envy". It's one of the best books about the lives of North Koreans.

Yes, a lot of people just live in apartments and have jobs teaching, farming, working in offices, etc. Just in a fucked up country where you have to be constantly careful about what you say.

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm on the fence about this book. The read from the OP is great, but I don't know how i'd feel after a whole book.

 

[Ezalc]

Jesus christ, read this for the first time today. It wasn't even the whole book and I can't express how I feel about what I just read.

 

[Enco]

Glad to see a bump to get this out more.

The book is the scariest thing I have ever read. The OP article is scary but the book is on another level.

NK is ran by pieces of subhuman scum. It's by far the scariest and most atrocious thing going on right now people completely ignore it.

If you have a weak stomach don't read the book.

 

[Zeke]

anyone ever get onto google maps and trying looking for these places?

 

[Enco]

anyone ever get onto google maps and trying looking for these places?

Pretty sure you can find them.

There was an article about them but I found it hard to identify them properly.

 

[Dark Schala]

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm on the fence about this book. The read from the OP is great, but I don't know how i'd feel after a whole book.

It's perhaps one of the best books I've read this year and I ended up reading Nothing to Envy because of it. I highly recommend both, just for the sake of getting an idea of how people need to watch what they say all the time and what the consequences are--even across generations!--if you don't.

My heart broke while reading the book quoted in the op.

 

[Zeke]

Pretty sure you can find them.

There was an article about them but I found it hard to identify them properly.

I'm looking at it now its just crazy that in this day and age we can see satellite pictures of these places and knowing there is some crazy shit going on there. I've been looking around all the farms and mountains.

 

[xbhaskarx]

He was on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n

I saw an ad for that and remembered this thread...

 

[More Fun To Compute]

North Korea is just ahead of the curve on that progressive new "scum village" idea.

 

[ICKE]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/feb/01/northkorea

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.'

He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.

'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.'

His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'

Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped 'top secret' and 'transfer letter' is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: 'The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.'

That's why the government needs to fear the citizens and not the other way around. Most people who crave for power are absolute psychopaths and control freaks, North Korea works as a good reminder why all these checks and balances are in place.

If only China hadn't interfered back in 1950. Historians can speculate whether MacArthur getting his wish through (USA using devastating force against Chinese invasion) had been a smaller human tragedy than what we have now. Pointless to second guess, but damn if reading these stories doesn't make one sad/annoyed.

 

[Phonomezer]

The testimony from people who have escaped the gulags is hard to read. I just can't imagine human beings "living" in those kinds of conditions.

David Hawk has put his book The Hidden Gulag on his website in pdf format. It's basically an index of testimonies from ex-prisoners and Kwon Hyuk who were lucky enough to escape from North Korea.

http://www.davidrhawk.com/HiddenGulag.pdf

 

[Hypnotoad]

The book is actually available in Chinese on the Mainland, though the publisher is in Taiwan. I will buy the English version today and prepare for a depressing read.

 

[Always-honest]

wow... what a fucking horrible backwards ass country.

 

[argon]

There's a documentary about his story called Camp 14: Total Control Zone available on Netflix Instant Watch. It also has accounts from former North Korean prison guards. I highly recommend it.

 

[Princess Viola]

I think what's worse than how terrible North Korea is is the fact that there are people living outside it, with full knowledge of how they torture and abuse their subjects, and yet still support them.