Denying another Holocaust

The Ernst Zundels of the world insist that Nazi concentration camps were wonderful, happy places which catered to the inmates' every whim, and that we shouldn't be surprised that these uppity Jews are so ungrateful.

60 years later, North Korea is locking up people by the thousands. If recent reports are true, prisoners are even being gassed en masse and having medical experiments performed upon them. Entire extended families, spanning several generations, are imprisoned for the alleged crimes of one member.

And a writer for the New York Times uses that last fact to argue that things in the DPRDC (Democratic People's Republic of Death Camps) really aren't that bad.

I am not making this up. The Times got Stephen Kotkin, a history professor, to review Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country, a new book which argues that the DPRDC really isn't that bad. (Never mind Nazi Germany, try writing a book about Franco's Spain or Pinochet's Chile which makes such an argument.) Here's how Kotkin (who undoubtedly believes Guantanamo Bay is as bad as Auschwitz) deals with the inconvenient fact of entire families being shoved into the gulag:

Penal colonies hold 100,000 to 150,000 people, over half of them political prisoners, Cumings reports. But he deems the gulag both smaller than usually asserted and survivable, partly because detainees' families are incarcerated with them. [emphasis added]

Jaw, meet floor. I have no idea if this is Kotkin's opinion or Cumings's, but if the latter, Kotkin obviously doesn't have a problem with it.

In the early 1930s, the Times had Pulitzer Prize-winning Stalin apologist Walter Duranty on the payroll. Sometimes it seems like things haven't changed that much.

(via The Politburo)

Posted by damian at February 4, 2004 06:27 PM