The Courageous but Perhaps Misguided Mr. Park

Man crosses over into North Korea on purpose. From the interview:

The North Korean human rights crisis by murder rate is the worst in the world. An estimated 1,000 people a day die by starvation and starvation is a murder case. North Korea has been sent more food aid than any nation in the world but the food has not gone to the people who need it. So this is murder.

But not only that, there are concentration camps in North Korea that are of the same brutality as in Nazi Germany.

Responsible governments are completely silent about the issue. The United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea have a huge responsibility to speak out about this because all these nations played a role the arbitrary division of the Koreas, where not a single Korean was consulted. Yet the lives of these people are of no issue to these governments. That is a crime. It is a huge crime.

Even if Mr. Park is wrong about his figures, which does not seem to be the case, North Korea is a truly and incomprehensibly horrific state. Mr. Park, despite anything else you might want to say about him, is absolutely right that all people—especially developed Western countries with a whole bunch of great things to say about due process, various freedoms, etc.—have a basic moral obligation to speak out against North Korea. Why are our leaders mum? (No, really, I don't know.) What's in it for them to play with kid gloves?

Mr. Park compares the situation to Nazi Germany. While there are some major differences that he is overlooking, he is right in that there are very real horrors being perpetrated against innocent human beings as we speak and we have an obligation to do all that we can to stop them. The conflict between North Korea and the United States, et al. is no mere minute ideological quibble. Call me old-fashioned but I am willing to put my foot down and say that tyranny (especially that based on mass-killing, starvation, and other human rights abuses) is totally unacceptable and is fundamentally wrong.

Torture

Today I stumbled across a fact that surprised me: England outlawed torture in 1640. But I suppose it isn't that surprising as they are complicit in the U.S. government's torture of "enemy combatants."

A map of countries that have ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture shows that the vast majority (142) of countries, England and the U.S. included, have ratified the convention.

The definition of torture according to the convention is:

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

I don't see any gray area here.