https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-kim-and-the-boys-in-the-camps/
President Trump did an excellent thing at the State of the Union address last January. He honored Ji Seong-ho, an almost superhuman defector from North Korea. Ji escaped the country on crutches. I saw him at the Oslo Freedom Forum a couple of weeks ago. As I wrote, “he projects an air of ebullience. I can’t help thinking he is happy to be alive.”
Trump has said some shocking things in recent hours. For example, he said the following about Kim Jong-un: “He is very talented. Anybody who takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it, and run it tough. I don’t say he was nice or say anything about it. He ran it, few people at that age — you could take one out of 10,000, could not do it.”
It is unclear how old Kim is. Probably, he was 28 when he inherited the dictatorship. But that is a triviality.
He has certainly “run it tough,” if that’s the way you want to characterize Kim’s rule over North Korea. His father chose him for his dictatorial mettle. This apple did not fall very far from the tree. Kim Jong-il passed over his two older sons to anoint the youngest, Jong-un. (If you would like to read more about this, consult my 2015 book, Children of Monsters.)
Two years ago, I interviewed another North Korean defector, Jung Gwang-il. (All North Korean escapees are considered defectors, because all North Koreans are supposed to belong to the state, body and soul.) Jung was in the gulag, like so many of his countrymen. Let me give a paragraph from the piece I wrote about him. It is a horrible paragraph, and you may wish to skip it, but here it is, in the interest of truth:
In the winter, the prisoners were made to get wood from the mountain. Many were injured or killed, as the trees fell or the logs rolled down the mountain. Other prisoners would not pause to bury the dead. It would have taken too much energy in the frozen ground. They carried the bodies back to a shed next to a latrine. At night, when you went to the latrine, you could hear moaning from the shed — some weren’t dead yet. By the spring, they were all dead, of course. The bodies had formed a great gelatinous mass. And Jung and the others would have to break it apart, with shovels, and bury it.
