North Korean Concentration Camp

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Life in a North Korean Concentration Camp | MetaFilter

North Korea's concentration camps reportedly contain over half a million citizens, and is possibly one of the worst cases of systematic human rights abuses occurring in the world today. Ahn Myong Chol, an ex-prison guard, describes the conditions of the inmates of Camp 22, in objective and chilling detail.

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Behaviors of this nature are often called inhuman. Incorrect. Very human. In fact, only human -- no animal tortures another. Animals will eat one another, they'll establish dominion if they're pack animals, a pecking order, and you'll get put back in place instantly if you try to upset that order. So there is that.

But people. Ah, people. We are the ones who torture one another. We sanction it, desensitize ourselves to it, we train for it, we're told it's the right thing to do and we believe it, and we do it, and we do it with a will, we do it with vigor, we do it for our country and our god, we do it with joy in our hearts.

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While I am fully aware of the human capacity for incredible and unnecessary cruelty - the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, for example - I think it would be better to view this with some skepticism.

In the days leading up to the American liberation of Kuwait, there were stories of Iraqi soldiers entering the hospitals and yanking babies from incubators, killing them. There was a widely disseminated and compelling video of a woman crying about her family being killed. Turns out the stories about the babies were complete lies, and the crying woman was recognized as the daughter of a Kuwaiti diplomat, whose family lived in London and was in no danger whatsoever.

This video could be the real deal, and the truth may be worse than this. However, any time political tensions increase, beware the appearance of media that demonizes the imminent enemy, or media that dredges up sympathy from the past. Besides, if the North Koreans are capable of these horrible atrocities, the South Koreans are capable of lying about it. They aren't in this to lose.

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to me is one of the most compelling problems of the modern era. Propaganda and disinformation have long been one of the most powerful mechanisms of social and political coercion available to both state and non-state actors, only now its effectiveness has increased exponentially, with to the development of new channels that allow information to be disseminated widely and rapidly.

So bullshit (if you'll allow me to employ the technical term) has become so ubiquitous and widespread, that it's all but impossible to know what isn't bullshit anymore. Reality, for most people, whether they realize it or not, is effectively a world made of bullshit. And even the most careful critical thinkers, too--those who realize the scale of the problem--really can't find their way out from under all the great, steaming heaps of it to see the sun light.

So in the absence of any remaining critical basis for distinguishing truth from bullshit, we rely on our intuitions, we trust our guts. Unfortunately, that means more often than not, we fall back on our prejudices and easy knee-jerk cultural assumptions. We judge truth based on our sense of "what seems right," or based on how much correlating information we can find, trusting that if we can only pile bullshit up high enough, it will become a mountain of evidence, and then we'll have something to build a real argument on.