Matthew Yglesias has used the North Korean prison sentences of Laura Ling and Euna Lee to make a political attack on the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Yglesias' post is "Hard Labor in North Korea." After a long discussion of forced labor in totalitarian societies, Yglesias concludes with this:
I don't have much to add.As in the Soviet Union during the high tide of the Gulag, it appears that the forced labor camps are important to the regime not just as a mechanism of repression ....
Needless to say, it’s easy to recognize this sort of barbarism as the torture that it is when you read about it being done by North Korea (it appears that the Bush administration and the DPRK were both modeling themselves on the Chinese Communist tactics from the Korean War). And it is being done, and on a massive scale. Meanwhile, a related angle to this is that many of the people in the prison camps are people who actually escaped from North Korea and then wound up getting apprehended in China and deported back. In terms of practical things that could be done to help the population of North Korea, getting the Chinese to stop doing this.
If radical leftists today really think the Bush administration's detention policies - which were the product of a national, bipartisan, and democratic consensus on the clear and present dangers following 9/11 - are coequal to the policies of not only Kim Jong Il, but to Joseph Stalin's Gulag Archipeligo, than we really have reached the Rubicon of partisan polarization in American politics today.
Words. Utterly. Fail.
Matthew Yglesias is just a sick, awful man.
My thoughts and prayers go out the families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. And I'm praying for their safe return home.
There's more commentary at Memeorandum. Senator Jim DeMint's statement on North Korean terrorism, at Red State, is also worth a look.
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Added: It's not just Yglesias. Check out Spencer Ackerman as well, "What Laura Ling And Euna Lee Will Endure."
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