Moral Duty to Help North Koreans?

In an announcement that came as a shock to no one, after a year-long investigation, a United Nations panel that was headed by retired Australian judge Michael Donald Kirby found that the North Korean regime was responsible for crimes against humanity.

Now that the report is out, Kim Jong-un may be “personally held liable in court for crimes against humanity committed by state institutions and officials under his direct control.”

How wonderful. Now we can all sleep better at night.

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And what does the report accomplish? Absolutely nothing. As everyone knows, both China and Russia will use their veto power in the Security Council to prevent anything that could potentially destabilize the North Korean regime any more than it already is. This would be in accordance with what they had done in 2012 to prevent the passing of a harmless resolution that condemned the Syrian regime and called for President Bashar Assad to step down.

The United Nations, and the Security Council in particular, is indeed a toothless tiger; and each time one of those permanent member nations wields its veto power, it causes anyone in the world with any sense of moral values the urge to vomit blood.

However, as much as the Security Council may be an insipid cesspool, in this case, seeing how it is actively preventing nation states from being forced to accept moral responsibility for the rights of others, it’s a blessing that such a disease-ridden entity exists.

That is because at the heart of the UN report about the hellhole that is North Korea’s crimes against humanity is the underlying assumption that we, as in anyone who is not North Korean, have the moral responsibility to liberate the suffering North Korean people from the yoke of tyranny.

For example, Roboseyo wrote recently in his blog post about this same subject:

With North Korea, we knew. We knew and we knew, and we ignored it. And this is what haunts me about North Korea’s condition: that one day, the surviving North Koreans will confront the world, and ask, “Why didn’t you do anything?” The media used their country’s condition to sell newspapers and ad space, but ignored mass starvation and concentration camps. South Korean politicians cynically used North Koreans' lives as a political wedge issue. No apology will be enough. With Auschwitz not even gone from living memory, we have let this happen again, to our shame as a species.

With all due respect to Roboseyo, this sense of shame and feeling of responsibility is one that I have never accepted nor will ever accept.

Frankly, though Christians may say otherwise, I am not my brother’s keeper. The North Koreans aren’t even my brothers for that matter. And that’s saying something seeing how I’m Korean.

Why is it immediately assumed that people have the duty to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher moral authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest? Why does the fact that some random strangers are suffering mean that they have the right to claim moral authority over me?

However, Roboseyo's statement that the question is not “What can the world do to help North Korea” but rather “How can the world empower North Koreans to demand a different kind of country for themselves” is at least somewhat reasonable.  On the other hand, there was the special brand of idiots from the Chosun Ilbo.

The opinion piece from The Chosun Ilbo which I am talking about stated:

There is no point denying that whatever support Seoul provides will eventually end up helping the regime and military. But if that is what it takes to feed the truly hungry, that is a price worth paying to make them feel that South Korea cares.

Firstly, have those idiots at the Chosun Ilbo forgotten that the de facto junta that Seoul’s support would eventually end up helping is run by the same people who were responsible for all this:

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Are South Korean taxpayers supposed to hand over their hard earned money to help pay to keep those thugs in power? Those very same thugs who have committed so many crimes against their own people as well as against South Koreans? Just so that North Koreans, strangers whom we have never met, may feel that “South Korea cares?”

Though the Chosun Ilbo has never been known for being particularly intelligent, this is a new low even for them.

There is without a doubt that North Korea is one of the worst dictatorships that the world has seen in modern times, and as such, it is an outlaw state. Any free(ish) nation in the world has the political, as well as moral, right to invade North Korea to liberate its people as well as dismantle the state apparatus.

However, no free nation in the world has the political or moral duty to invade outlaw nations. Whether a free nation chooses to invade an outlaw nation in order to dispense justice or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers or their suffering subjects. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses, depending on its goals, motives, desires and interests.

And to be blunt, regardless of the fact that some people may think that the reunification of the Korean peninsula would be a jackpot, invading North Korea to liberate its long suffering people is simply not in anyone’s interests – economically, socially, or politically.

What I do agree with Roboseyo about this is that when we think of North Korea (or Syria or Darfur or Rwanda or East Timor or Kurdistan or Kosovo) the phrase “Never Again” does ring hollow.

Personally, however, “Never Again” has always sounded much more meaningful when it came from Israelis themselves because I always took it to mean that they would never allow something like the Holocaust to happen to themselves ever again.

But as soon those words come from the mouths of anyone else, when it typically means “we cannot stand by and let such crimes occur in any god-forsaken corner of the world,” especially considering how many mass killings there have been since the Holocaust, “Never Again” has always been a meaningless phrase. And that is precisely because no country in the world, not even the United States with all of its supposed exceptionalism, acts against its own selfish interests.

But instead of being proud of being rational and refusing to give in to emotionalism, countries prefer to espouse a morality that none can truly practice for seemingly no other purpose than to wring one’s hands.

If the North Koreans ever overthrow their leaders, they will have my support. If the North Koreans then want to consider reunification with the South on South Korea’s terms (itself a fantasy), they will have my support. But their fate is theirs to make and I will not feel guilty for their suffering or envy for whatever glories they may or may not achieve.