Christian Right and North Korea

I have a knee-jerk opposition to just about anything the Christian right is up to that doesn't involve them praying in their own churches, but this may not be such a bad idea:

"Tens of thousands of fans of all ages gathered over the weekend for the annual three-day Rock the Desert Christian music festival screamed for hit bands like Mercy Me and Pillar and kicked Hacky Sacks by a creek renamed the Jordan River and a small pond called the Dead Sea.

Between the Prayer Tent and an abstinence-promotion booth, however, worshipful revelers also stumbled into a more sobering pavilion, the North Korea Genocide Exhibit.

Inside, Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean defector recently summoned to meet President Bush, signed copies of his memoir of 10 years in a prison camp. Drawings by defectors depicted the torture of North Korean Christians. A video, available free on DVD, showed shaky, grainy footage of two public executions.

In another exhibition, based on a defector's account of a deadly medical experiment, a bloody mannequin and baby doll leaned against the walls of a mock gas chamber made from a shower stall that at one point was filled with sulfurous yellow gas.

The displays were part of a growing movement by conservative Christian groups to press the White House on human rights in North Korea, much the way they drew attention to the civil war in Sudan and kept pressure on Mr. Bush after his first days in office."

I think this is an excellent counter-balance to the ongoing discussion of North Korea's nuclear weapons. It's important to remember that though the North Korean government does pose some threat to us in their possession of nukes, it poses the greatest threat to it's own people, who are again running the risk of starving by the millions without food aid, and who live in the most incompetent and ruthless tyranny that has probably ever existed. There are some of us on the left who I fear have played up North Korea simply as a criticism of Bush's focus on Iraq, and it would do us well to remember that of the members of the purported "Axis of Evil", at least one of them is actually evil. Whatever we do to maintain our own security against North Korea, we need to stay focused on continuing engagement with North Korea after any agreement and the eventual goal of undoing this horrible dictatorship.