If you approached random wonks on Massachusetts Avenue, Washington's think tank row (and home to FP), and asked what concerns them in the world, you'd get a fairly standard response. In some order: Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Darfur, AIDS, and climate change. Before July 4th, North Korea wouldn't have instantly sprung to mind for most people, your correspondent included. But forget for a second Kim's nuclear ambitions and just think about what he does to his own people. Here's a regime so barbaric that people are burned at the stake with their own relatives lighting the fire. If that wasn't enough, it also tests chemical weapons on its own citizens detained in concentration camps.
There is, though, no public - or expert - clamor for intervention. It's true that there are no good options for dealing with North Korea, but as Anne Applebaum pointed out - two years ago - our collective indifference makes a mockery of our outrage at the appeasement of fascism in the '30s and the failure to nip genocide in the bud. It is not like our leaders are unaware of what's going on either. George W. Bush famously lost it discussing North Korea with Bob Woodward, roaring "I loathe Kim Jong Il!…I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people." Tony Blair has rightly called the failure to protest North Korea the "biggest scandal in progressive politics" today. The best you can say about these statements is that they at least show that Bush and Blair's moral compasses are pointing in the right direction.
In a few months, this current crisis will have simmered down and the Hermit Kingdom will return once more to the back of our minds. All of which makes one realize quite how hollow our recitation of the mantra "never again" really is. As Applebaum wrote, sixty years from now "no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act." The real tragedy of North Korea is that we only really think - or care - about it when Kim Jong-Il fires off one of his missiles.
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