Is It Really That Bad In North Korea?

Adrian Hong speaks on C-SPAN about North Korea. (C-SPAN)

It Really Is That Bad: A Powerful Speech On North Korea -- Max Fisher, Washington Post

It’s not easy to talk to people about North Korea. The story is so awful, and so static, what more is there to do, or even to say? This speech by Adrian Hong, a strategic consultant who also co-founded a U.S.-based NGO that assists North Korean escapees, starts with that question. His 10-minute speech, which you can view here, makes a powerful case for the moral urgency of the long-running North Korean crisis.

“One challenge I always have when I speak about North Korea is I run out of adjectives for how bad things are. And many of you that follow policy or human rights situations oftentimes get jaded with numbers,” Hong begins, speaking at an event for Melanie Kirkpatrick’s book Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad, sitting between Kirkpatrick and Joseph Kim, a young escapee whose journey her book chronicles.

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My Comment: When I read stories like the one above it reminds me of my father talking about the Ukraine famine and how hard life was for the family (they had just moved there from central Russia).... and impossible for his neighbors. Or how his best friend told me how at age 12 he saw his mom and dad picked up by the NKVD (Russian secret police) during the height of Stalin's purges .... and knew that it was the last time that he would ever see them. So yeah .... it really is that bad in that Stalinist country known as North Korea.