July 29, 2005
Five North Korean Refugees In Danger Of Illegal Return To North Korea By China
I just received this email from Hiroshi Kato about five escapees from North Korea who have been captured by China while trying to claim asylum from deportation back to North Korea in a Japanese-embassy residential area in China. If any of you could write letters on their behalf, it could possibly save heir lives. A thought to diplomats and 'grass roots activists' who are looking for cosmetic 'solutions' to the human rights nightmares in North Korea - and elsewhere. Lets not let more real peoples lives be sacrificed on the altar of fake 'diplomacy'. Another thought. Lets speak out about human rights in North Korea and elsewhere because we really care, and not because we want to divert attention from problems closer to home. This is really important. Otherwise, we are in real danger of looking extremely hypocritical.
This is the reason why many liberals are reluctant to speak out on NK. Issues like the US's treatment of detainees in secret prisons make it difficult to gain the attention of all but the most politically naiive here in the US - because these issues are ones we need to deal with ourselves as well. I am not saying that the US runs concentration camps or anything comparable to the county-sized slave camps in North Korea. To the best of my knowledge, it still does not. Thank God. Lets make sure it never does. By speaking out against tyrrany and extreme indifference to human needs and lives - to pathological narcissism - wherever it is found.
North Korea can be our guide to JUST how terrible things can, and DO become in any nation that lets the power mad - the 'terrorists' - those who create impossible, unworkable situations, to create chaos, and destroy civil society, take control.
As Jesus said, 'BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YOU KNOW THEM'
They are the dividers, the thieves, the professional hope-killers.
They would sell their own children for some small pieces of silver.
They literally steal food out of the mouths of babies. Not that they need it..
Welcome to the world's Theatre of Cruelty
The Six-Party talks in Beijing to discuss the elimination of
nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula are dangerously
close to overshadowing the struggles of five North Korean
refugees, whose stories are being dwarfed and in danger of
being forgotten.
On July 27th, LFNKR received information regarding five
North Koreans now seeking to be declared refugees.
At 11:30 am on Wednesday, 27 July, 2005, a group of five
North Korean refugees entered a Japanese residential quarter
in Tentien, China, where a Japanese international school is
located. According to reports, the five climbed the fence
surrounding the compound but were arrested by Chinese
Security police 50 meters from the school. The five
refugees are now in the custody of Chinese Security Police
and are being investigated.
They are three North Korean women, ages 52, 48 and early
30s. Accompanying one of the women were her son, age 22 and
daughter age 14. The family of three had defected from North
Korea only a week earlier.
We hereby emphatically urge:
1. That UNHCR Beijing intervene in this matter to protect
and grant these five North Koreans the status of refugee,
and that the UNHCR head office actively supervise its
Beijing office as it carries out this assignment.
2. That the Chinese government respect the principle of non-
refoulement and refrain from repatriating these five to
North Korea where they face high probability of severe
punishment and persecution.
3. That the South Korean government immediately extend
acceptance of these five North Koreans and urge the Chinese
government to hand them over to the South Korean government.
Kato Hiroshi
Secretary General
Life Funds for North Korean Refugees
A-101 Nishi Kata Hyteru
2-2-8 Nishi Kata, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo, Japan 113-0024
Tel / Fax +81-3-3815-8127
http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/
July 20, 2005
US Apparently Subsidizing Sexual Apartheid And A New Theocracy In Iraq!!
I just read this article in the New York Times explaining that womens rights are taking a big step backwards in Iraq under the US occupation. A step that appears to be about to be enshrined into law. Is this victory for democracy? NO.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/international/middleeast/20women.html
This is insane..
I'm sorry, but Islamic law and the elimination of womens rights is NOT DEMOCRACY... NO..
Women represent more than half of Iraqs population!
July 19, 2005
Sixty Years After Hiroshima, The World Seems To Be Forgetting How Unthinkably Terrible Atomic Weapons Are
The Guardian is printing the story that John Hershey published in the New Yorker in 1945, the core of what would later become the book 'Hiroshima'.
You can read it
here or in the extended entry - if the link doesnt work.
Atomic weapons are indiscriminate. They kill everybody. Is this an 'acceptable price to pay' for 'remaining in power'?
July 18, 2005
As Jobs Are Brought To China, Industry Taking Care Not To Also Allow Labor Unions There, Causing Conflict Over Terrible Working Conditions. Other Nations Studiously Discouraging Unprofitable Boycotts, However.
How can change, and an improvement of human rights for Chinese workers be brought about *without* boycotts of Chinese goods in this situation? It can't. That is why global corporations are squelching any mention of boycotts of their profitable Chinese operations, up till now, the only area in which strikes could reliably be squelched. Exploiting cheap - and high quality, Chinese labor - without the improvements in salaries that workers need, is simply too profitable. Plus, it postpones the inevitable modernizations in plant technology that otherwise would propel these industries into the modern age of automation, instead, they can use cheap Chinese labor as a crutch, like the Romans did with slaves in the latter days of the Roman Empire.
But, the Chinese workers, like any human beings crave a decent future, the ability to live normal lives, and their dignity. Low wages bring jobs, but they also bring social problems in normal countries as workers find that they need to earn more and more to maintain the same standard of living as the costs of necessities increase. So, wages must rise and emplyment must not stagnate, as it has here in the US. From the emplyers standpoint, the only reason he/she has set up in China is the low wage structure. Clearly, this will not be possible forever. Something must give. So factory owners pressure the government to crack down on labor unions wherever they are found. As they are doing here in the US as well. However, in China, the situation is much worse, with labor unions considered, as they are in fascist countries, as a form of subversive organization, organizing a union is sometimes punished as treason and the organizers sentenced to long prison terms or executed, with sometimes, their organs, such as their kidneys and corneas, being sold to bring the government hard foreign currency.
Then the family is billed for the bullet used to execute them. Such is the arrogance of the obsession with complete physical and mental domination typical of most totalitarian States.
A manufacturers paradise.. indeed.
But, clearly, this glaringly unequal situation cannot be allowed to last long, or it is already bringing social unrest in the West as millions lose 'their jobs' to offshoring.
This phenomenon of disappearing jobs is aggravated by the accellerated adoption globally of increasingly radical new, highly productive technologies that are reducing, and will, by design, eventually, almost eliminate the need for people, especially unskilled people, in the workplace.
But labor unions would be making their last hurrah in China, because one cannot have unions without jobs to justify them. Machines do not go on strike or protest long working hours or unsafe working conditions.
This begs the question - what then?
Ten or twenty years from now, there may no longer be any 'use' for the billions of unskilled former workers, and unemployment will reign supreme over the Earth as technology fulfills its long promise to free mankind from drudge labor. We may be manufacturing everything we need, and more, but nobody will be able to afford to buy any of it, it seems. The economics of scale and the processes of commoditization will also have obliterated the economic viability of most small businesses. They will have merged or failed. That is the nature of the free market economy.
Except for those of independent means.
Those who don't have to work.
(Of course, iin thetechnological reality, almost nobody will 'have to work')
What will happen then?
Nobody knows.
July 15, 2005
WiFi Geeks Using Chinese "Parabolic Cookware" Offer Some Interesting Possibilities for Would-Be North Korean Communicators
A group of WiFi enthusiasts in New Zealand have come up with some innovative telecommunications methods that could be of use to North Koreans trying to use Chinese cellphones to communicate through North Korea's totalitarian information blockade (using a hands-free headset, of course, and standing off to one side, to avoid frying one's brain with microwave radiation).
See photo below and check out this website for lots more of the same. Evidently Chinese noodle strainers make even better microwave dishes because of their near perfect parabolic shape. They could offer a significant gain advantage over a bare cellphone antenna or antenna /flat or corner reflector combo...
