The UN stirs into life

WHAT? The United Nations has a Human Rights Council that’s concerned with human rights? Instead of one packed with representatives of the usual repressive regimes, Third World caudillos, and distinguished terrorists? Who knew?

But apparently the UN does have such a council, for this week it issued a report detailing various crimes against humanity in Kim Jong Un’s private gulag of a country, aka the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a purely formal appellation. Because its every word is a swindle. For the Kims’ wholly owned family subsidiary is neither Democratic nor a Republic, it certainly isn’t the people’s, and its minions control only half of the Korean peninsula, which remains half-slave, half-free.

And you know what happens to a house divided against itself. Americans should certainly know, for Mr. Lincoln tried to tell us long ago, and his words proved all too prophetic. Now, as North Korea’s sealed-off regime hears the bell toll for it, it grows only more desperate and barbaric, even lunatic. For whom the gods would destroy, to quote another trustworthy source, they first make mad.

North Korea’s time is coming, just as its time came for the old Soviet Union and its stooges in the once captive nations of eastern Europe, formerly known as the Soviet bloc. Dear Leader must feel the same forces that toppled those tyrannies closing in on his. And he won’t go gently.

THIS remarkable report-out of the United Nations of all places-constitutes a multi-count indictment (36 pages plus a 372-page appendix) of Kim Jong Un’s regime and Kim Jong Un himself. Page after page recounts the public executions, “disappearances,” kidnappings and other outrages used to “terrorize the population into submission.” It could be a section torn out of the Black Book of Communism, the encyclopedic account of Red terror published in 1997, or, if the prose were more poetic, a segment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume Gulag Archipelago, which was smuggled out of Russia and published in 1973.

Nothing seems to have changed in the Korean version of Communism, for this report is one long J’accuse! complete with accounts of extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, rape, persecution . . . in short, the usual. At least for a Communist regime. All of which have been met with the world’s usual lack of interest.

It’s par for the sad course. Just as the West, “led” by the likes of Barack Obama and John Kerry, mainly wrings its hands, while Syria’s people are murdered, displaced, and generally crucified by Bashar Assad & Co.-with the customary support from Czar Vladimir’s Russia and still Communist China. And with the tacit consent of Western governments that mainly just look on as these crimes are committed.

Edmund Burke is still right: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil in this world is that good men do nothing. Or as this report notes, North Korea’s decades-long record of “crimes that shock the conscience of humanity . . . raises questions about the inadequacy of the international community.” To call the world’s reaction to these crimes “inadequate” may be the understatement of the century.

NOW THE world has been warned (again). And so has Kim Jong Un. Those with any memory of history will wonder what might have happened if the leaders of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan had been given such a warning by the international community in their ill-fated time. Maybe a few more souls might have been saved from the death camps and death marches, and all that came out at the Nuremberg Trials might not have been such a shock.

Now it will be interesting to see what happens at the UN’s Security Council, for it must approve any action on this report by the International Court of Justice-but something tells us neither Russia (Bashar Assad’s great patron) nor Red China (Kim Jong Un’s) will let this case, however convincing, ever proceed to trial.

But wouldn’t it be something if it did? And while we were wondering, wouldn’t it be something if, before he proves mortal at last, Fidel Castro, El Comandante himself, had to face justice in this world, too?

The UN’s will, what there is of it, can doubtless be safely ignored, but there is a higher Authority that never will be. Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

All of which leaves only one more question for this editorial to raise: How do you say that in Korean?