| Submit your comments on this article |
| China-Japan-Koreas |
| ‘Never Again’ in North Korea? Think Again |
| 2009-07-23 |
| Jonah Goldberg, National Review Perhaps it would be better if we simply vowed to never again say “never again” when it comes to the sort of slaughter and institutionalized cruelty we associate with the Holocaust. Then again, taking the sting out of hypocrisy wouldn’t do much for the people of North Korea. For decades now, we’ve known that what’s going on in North Korea is too terrible to contemplate. Even so, what once haunted us as an ill-defined and foreboding suspicion has clarified into the secure knowledge of broad and systemic evil.... Samantha Power, an Obama administration National Security Council official, wrote a moving book about America’s inability or unwillingness to stop genocidal slaughter. In A Problem From Hell, Power surveyed the cumulative horrors of the 1990s — in Bosnia and Rwanda — and was forced to ask, “Did ‘never again’ simply mean ‘never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945’?” If the answer to Power’s sardonic question is yes, then America and the West should be proud of their record. If we mean that when faced in our own time with the reality of such organized evil we will heed the “never again” lesson, then we have a lot to be ashamed of.... |
| Posted by:Mike |