Well, I don't know WHAT the hell is wrong with me -- or, for that matter, with my blog: the archives have disappeared, the "current" posts are not coming up, I can't put spaces between the address and other junk in the description column on the left, and you know, I think I need a big, fat reality check. Shaka buku, anyone?

Actually, I did receive a swift kick to the head earlier this afternoon, when I read on msnbc.com today about the labor camps where the North Korean government (i.e., Kim Jong-il) puts political dissidents. Personal accounts from former prisoners and guards made my blood run cold.

In North Korea, if you make any kind of remark that could be construed as critical of the regime, not only you, but three generations of your family can be imprisoned. The camps are huge: at least two are bigger in area than the District of Columbia. A total of about 200,000 North Koreans are estimated to be imprisoned.

In one camp, Camp 22, as many as 20 to 25 percent of the inmates die every year. How do they die? Take your pick: harsh conditions and enforced labor, biological and chemical experiments, enforced abortions all take place there. Kang Chol-Hwan, now a journalist with a South Korean newspaper, was sent to camp when he was 9 years old, because his grandfather made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism. (His recent book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang," is the first memoir of a North Korean political prisoner.) Pregnant women, even 8 or 9 months along, are injected with salt water to kill the fetus; if a baby is born, it is kicked to death by guards. A former guard said that if a guard killed someone who was trying to escape, that guard was entitled to a college education.

I know there are human rights abuses all over the world. And I know there shouldn't be any difference as to where it happens or who it happens to. But for some reason, this article has shaken me more than any other account has.

Maybe it's just as simple as: it could be me. My father's father was originally from a town in now-North Korea. After the Korean War started, he never saw his family again. Who knows where they are? If any of them survived?

I'm no fan of President Bush, but I have to wholeheartedly agree with something he told Bob Woodward last year during an interview for Woodward's book: "I loathe Kim Jong Il ... I've got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps -- they're huge -- that he uses to break up families and to torture people."

I'm not a violent person, but I think it would do the world a great service if Kim Jong-il -- a man who was Hennessy's largest single cognac buyer in 1993 and 1994, who ordered 200 Mercedes Benzes at $100K a pop in 1998, who is singularly responsible for the deaths of 2 million people from starvation in the last decade -- was taken from his palace and shot point blank. And then shot again, to make sure he's dead, and then once more for good measure, and then perhaps beheaded and drawn and quartered, just to be absolutely certain. The existence of this man proves -- as if we needed more evidence -- that evil lives on this earth.

Sources:
"Death, terror in N. Korea gulag," Robert Windrem, Jan. 15, 2003, http://www.msnbc.com/news/859191.asp;
"Women, Wine and Weapons," Evan Thomas, Jan. 13, 2003, http://www.msnbc.com/news/855119.asp