Lest We Forget

Persecution in North Korea

Christians Face Beatings, Rape, Torture for Professing Faith

Frances Martel
Breitbart News

Christian North Koreans who have escaped the brutal regime tell of outrageous human rights abuses against anyone suspected of professing the faith, including routine beatings and rapes and specialized torture for those involved in underground prayer.

In a report Wednesday, Fox News profiled North Korean defector Choi Kwanghyuk, who was arrested after founding an underground house church. Choi escaped a labor camp shortly before he believes the regime was ready to transfer him to a concentration camp to end his life.  Before he escaped, however, he asserted that he was tortured and witnessed the torture of many others.

“I decided to escape because I thought that once they sent me to the other camp, they could eventually send me to the concentration camp or kill me,” Choi told Fox News. “I was traveling back and forth between China and North Korea, but they kept searching for me, and I knew it could put my friends in danger too, so I left.”

According to Fox, Choi witnessed a wide variety of torture:

The World According to Scientific Socialism

Depraved and Demonic

Stalin's Gulag would seem to be a most extreme example of man's inhumanity to man.  It strikes the historian or observer as inconceivable.  On, the other hand, arguably it was inevitable, given the general perversity of man coupled with a dictatorship in the grip of demonic powers.

Imagine a country filled with slave labour camps--filled in the sense of being all over the country, from Moscow through the empty steppes of the central and eastern USSR.  Beavering away were Moscovian communist bureaucrats laying down administrative rules and regulations addressing every minute aspect of camp life.  The making of rules was without end.  Prisoners were allocated food servings per day down to the precise number of grams of bread each prisoner was to receive, clothes (to last two years or longer), minimum hours of sleep, and so forth.  But, at the same time, the production targets of the labour camps were steadily increased.  So, local camp commanders and their officers cut corners on slave provisions and required longer working hours, shorter breaks and meal times, and so forth.

Anne Applebaum's Gulag comprehensively documents the demonic horror of the camps.  It is too long, too involved, and too complex to summarise adequately.  We will quote just one example: