What's Right?

Read about Megumi Yokota (from the Wall Street Journal$):

Megumi, who was abducted in 1977, has become the symbol of the movement to free the abductees. She was 13 years old and on her way home from school when she was snatched off the streets of the western Japanese city of Niigata by North Korean agents. Imprisoned in the hold of a ship and taken to Pyongyang, she was forced to teach spies how to pass as Japanese. In 2002, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il admitted to kidnapping Megumi and 11 other Japanese citizens.

Their stories are equally heart-rending: A young couple disappear in Kagoshima Prefecture while on a date at a beach, where they had gone to watch the sunset. A 23-year-old woman vanishes in Europe; the last her parents hear from her is a postcard from Copenhagen. A mother and daughter go missing during a shopping trip in Niigata Prefecture. At the time, police who investigated these and other disappearances had no notion of North Korean involvement. In recent years, Japan has reopened many of the missing-persons files from the era but the scent has grown cold. There are only 17 people on the official list of abductees — the most recent was added in November — but officials say privately that the victims may number in the “hundreds.” South Korea, whose appeasement-minded government prefers not to talk about the kidnappings of its citizens, has 485 people on its list of abductees.

Pyongyang allowed five of the Japanese abductees to return home in 2002. (They were required to leave behind their Korean spouses and children as guarantees that they wouldn’t badmouth their captors.) It claimed the rest of the abductees had all died, but the causes of death they cited were so absurd as to be unbelievable — a 20-something young woman who dropped dead of a heart attack; a man who drowned while swimming in the ocean during a typhoon; and so forth. Megumi was reported to have hanged herself. But the DNA evidence provided by Pyongyang in her case and others proved to be fraudulent.

Can you imagine being the victim of such a kidnapping? Or the relative of one?

To my mind, this behavior all by itself is sufficient and compelling cause for the world to use all means necessary to remove crazy Kim and dismantle his evil government. At the very least, North Korea should be sealed off from the rest of the world until it collapses under its own incompetence — though certainly the effects of this would be awful for the North Korean people. An alternative would be a military effort from all directions: China, Russia, Japan, and the West — though certainly that would incur a substantial number of casualties amongst the military and civilians. In other words, of course this effort would be messy and would have consequences. But I can’t imagine how we (the world outside North Korea) can stand by and let this happen.

But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for over 50 years. And it’s not like we just figured out that Kim (and his father before him) was evil — this has been perfectly clear since the early 1950s.

As I ponder that reality — the world’s inaction against unambiguous, clear evil — the one piece of clarity that emerges is this: that the United Nations is completely useless as a way to control rogue governments. The UN wouldn’t stop another Hitler; in fact, it would probably send him aid.

Ain’t that a comfortable thought to start your day?