"I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel."
- Antonin Scalia
"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."
- Benjamin Franklin
"If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."
- Alvin Toffler
I know I am a
broken record. BUu we must never forget the evil nature of the mafia-like crime family cult known as the Kim family regime. Kim Jong-un must deny the human rights of the Korean people living in the north in order to survive. It is a moral imperative and a national security issue that we must address the human rights situation in the north. Educating the Koreans in the north on their human rights has to be a foundational theme and message of an information and influence activities campaign.
Kim Jong-un's grim regime forces North Koreans to 'conform or face death camps'
People in
North Korea have good reason to fear rebelling against their totalitarian government, with the looming threat of gulag-inspired prison camps on their minds.
With the recent mysterious disappearance -
and then apparent reappearance - of Supreme Leader
Kim Jong-un, the eyes of the world are on the reclusive nation that has been accused of brutal human rights abuses.
One of North Korea's most distinctive qualities is its rigid enforcement of social conformity. This ranges from personal aesthetic choices around hair and clothing, to falling in line politically and never questioning the state.
Blue jeans are banned in North Korea as they are considered a symbol of American imperialism.
North Korean men and women are only allowed to have certain state-approved hairstyles
Because of very limited access to the internet, many North Koreans likely have little knowledge of the rest of the world and therefore almost no context for how restrictive their own society really is.
They may not even know of the existence of prison camps, which have been well-documented by the United Nations and humanitarian groups.
There are two different kinds of camps: internment camps for political prisoners, and "re-education" camps for common criminals. However there's often overlap between the two kinds of offending, as those who make an enemy of an influential politician are often falsely accused of crimes and imprisoned.
Photos of North Korean camps are scarce, but this image is believed to show imprisoned children working(Image: Daily Mirror)
Those in internment camps have been accused of political disloyalty or unreliability, having demonstrated insufficient loyalty to the regime. It was once the policy that family members of political criminals were regarded as guilty by association and also imprisoned, however this has been largely abandoned since the 1990s.
Those accused of crimes are often tortured into a false confession, with former prisoners having been subjected to being blasted with icy cold water. A short show trial then follows before the person is convicted and given a long prison sentence that can see them spend decades or the rest of their life behind bars.
A photo of a long-term prison labour camp at Kangdong(Image: hrnk.org)
Once inside the camps, there's no guarantee a prisoner will ever leave alive. Regular beatings from heavily armed guards are common, as is torture that can turn fatal. Former prisoners have reported inmates being forced to dig their own graves.
Prisoners sleep in filthy cramped cells and are made to work tough manual labour jobs from 5am until late at night every day.
For those living in rural farmland where food can be scarce, prison might be seen as a relief from not knowing where the next meal is coming from - but sadly that's not the case.
A satellite image of the prisoner housing area and wall topped with barbed wire at Camp 25(Image: DigitalGlobe/Getty Images)
North Korean prisons have a high mortality rate because so many inmates die of starvation due to being denied food by guards while serving their sentences.
Other prisoners simply drop dead from exhaustion from working 18-hour days, although official data on deaths is often deliberately left off the public record.
"When Kim Jong-un came to power, he questioned the officials that oversaw the labour education camps about the high death rates," one former prisoner told Daily NK.
Some prisoners starve to death inside the camps while others simply drop dead from exhaustion(Image: Daily Mirror)
"The result was that prison officials were instructed not to record the deaths of overworked prisoners."
Kang Cheol-hwan, a North Korean defector who was imprisoned in a political prison camp as a child after his family criticised the Kim dynasty, says he remembers watching a man being executed by hanging.
"It was not only the hanging itself, but the fact that the guards forced prisoners to throw rocks at the body and left it hanging there for a week until the birds had pecked at it so much it was beyond recognition," he told South Africa's Independent Online.
One former prisoner says he watched a man being hanged, and his body was left there for a week(Image: hrnk.org)
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), a Washington-based organisation dedicated to exposing the cruelties of the North Korean regime, says there are four known political prison camps and more than 20 labour camps in the country.
"Kim Il-sung, North Korea's first leader, modeled the prison camps on the Soviet gulags, and over the past six decades, North Korea's prison system has grown tremendously," HRNK says.
"Today it is estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 people are imprisoned in these camps."
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
