Into The Ice: Robert Park

Robert Park

Victor Herman's story, Coming Out of the Ice has been highlighted here previously. Now along comes Robert Park, a Christian missionary activist, whose story may or may not be immortalized someday.

On Christmas Day, Mr. Park,  brazenly crossed the frozen Tumen River that separates North Korea from China; into the ice, so to speak.

The Washington Post today notes that Park's "Christianity" itself may be [seen by] the North Korean regime as the real instigator or danger here. Though North Korea's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, in reality the government severely restricts religious observance, allowing only worship at sanctioned churches.

Underground worship and distribution of Bibles [often] mean[s] banishment to a labor camp or even execution, according to defectors and activists. Still, according to such sources, more than 30,000 North Koreans are practicing Christianity in hiding.
[Data on other religious practice in North Korea is even less available or known, apparently.]

Mr. Park's crossing also comes just months after the country freed two U.S. journalists, who were arrested along the Tumen and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for trespassing and "hostile acts." They were released to former President Bill Clinton on a visit to the isolated country in August. (North Korea and the United States do not have diplomatic relations).

And it likely goes without saying further, but this small act "could complicate Washington's efforts to coax North Korea back to negotiations aimed at its nuclear disarmament."

Park had an exclusive interview with Reuters last week before starting on his journey. The following are excerpts from that conversation.

Robert Park: The North Korean human rights crisis by murder rate is the worst in the world. An estimated 1,000 people a day die by starvation and starvation is a murder case. North Korea has been sent more food aid than any nation in the world but the food has not gone to the people who need it. So this is murder.

But not only that, there are concentration camps in North Korea that are of the same brutality as in Nazi Germany.

Responsible governments are completely silent about the issue. The United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea have a huge responsibility to speak out about this because all these nations played a role the arbitrary division of the Koreas, where not a single Korean was consulted. Yet the lives of these people are of no issue to these governments. That is a crime.
It is a huge crime.

What is happening in North Korea is genocide. We know there are legitimate fears about what could happen through nuclear weapons. But a nation that runs concentration camps, a nation that kills men, women and children without any kind of restraint can never be trusted.
We believe the resolution to this whole crisis is simply addressing North Korea honestly about this has to change.

We do not hate people. I am Christian, but I do have to say that this is not a legitimate government. We cannot talk to North Korea as if it is a legitimate government, but we need to liberate North Korea. We need to have a vision for the unification of Korea. It has to happen immediately because people are dying by the thousands every single day.

More of his comments can be found here.

One person can make a difference as Christ taught and all religion generally extols.

It remains to be seen whether Robert Park shall become a martyr or merely one more lost and forgotten soul among the millions.

Let the New Year begin in prayer for them (and us) all.

Albert Camus to the Pantheon, please

 Albert Camus

"In an effort to strengthen the French national identity president Nicholas Sarkozy has named writer Albert Camus to the Pantheon, the final resting place for social and intellectual heroes of the Republic.

In speeches and articles he [Camus] called out human rights abuses and labor camps in the Soviet Union long before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was smuggled out."

 

 The Panthéon in Paris

And so what of Sartre?

Sartre's and de Beauvoir's grave

"Albert Camus is part of the French cultural patrimony and he belongs in the Pantheon. Sarkozy would be remiss if, as president, he does not redouble his efforts to put him there. As for the French left, they ought to realize it's time to tone down the culture of complaint. The next time they gain power they can start a Twitter campaign to put Sartre in the Pantheon and see if it goes viral..."

Left and right swings the eternal pendulum of man's folly, God's elusiveness.

Camus says:

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."

Sartre says:

"God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead."

Read more of Eric Erhmann's musings on the virtues and travails of Camus here.

Monument to Victims Sought in Ottawa

In an interview with Frontpagemag.com, Alide Forstmanis shares her vision for a memorial to the Victims of Communist Crimes.  The goal for completion is November 2010.

As a child of Latvian parents she was "lucky to grow up in Sweden" as [of the many] of her relatives [who] stayed in Latvia, "some were also sent to Siberia."

As she says,

"A monument like this will be a recognition by Canada of the determination of millions to come to a country like ours that celebrates liberty and opposes the oppression of totalitarian communism. This recognition will also help us remember the suffering that many of those Canadians endured, as well as the suffering of the millions who couldn’t come, and of the many millions that perished in the Gulag."

Noteworthy:

"According to [the] 2006 Census almost 9 million of Canada’s 33 million inhabitants come from either former or current communist led countries. This is close to a third of the Canadian population."

To support the project and follow its progress visit (and bookmark) the site Tribute to Liberty.

Unfinished Journey: Herta Müller

Discovered a compelling essay today from writer Lyn Marven about this year's Nobel Prize for Literature winner (written in October shortly after the announcement).

You can read it here.

Herta Müller in Oslo

Meanwhile, the Prize has indeed been handed to Herta Müller

She was born on August 17, 1953 in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf in Banat, Romania. Her parents were members of the German-speaking minority in Romania. Her father had served in the Waffen SS during World War II. Many German Romanians were deported to the Soviet Union in 1945, including Müller's mother who spent five years in a work camp (gulag) in present-day Ukraine.

Many years later, in Atemschaukel (2009), Müller was to depict the exile of the German Romanians in the Soviet Union. From 1973 to 1976, Müller studied German and Romanian literature at the university in Timişoara (Temeswar). During this period, she was associated with Aktionsgruppe Banat, a circle of young German-speaking authors who, in opposition to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, sought freedom of speech.

After completing her studies, she worked as a translator at a machine factory from 1977 to 1979. She was dismissed when she refused to be an informant for the secret police. After her dismissal, she was harassed by Securitate. Müller made her debut with the collection of short stories Niederungen (1982), which was censored in Romania. Two years later, she published the uncensored version in Germany and, in the same year, Drückender Tango in Romania.

As Ms.Müller shared in remarks surrounded by nobles, notables and the "undeserving" in Oslo, yesterday (December 10th), "Romania remains dominated by the henchmen of Nicolae Ceausescu" more than 20 years after that infamous public execution.

Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu December 25, 1989

Known to be a "reticent speaker," Ms.Müller noted piercingly (condensed version):

"There is a legacy in Romania, a legacy of dictatorship. The former Securitate and the former party nomenclature are very closely networked in Romania and through privatization they have managed to occupy almost all the key positions in society. What Romania needs is a civil society, but a civil society has to evolve and to do that it needs the right conditions. Romania does not have those conditions.
“The new secret service … took on 40 percent of the old secret service. The people in that apparatus have acquired a second life. [In Romania], “you can’t see who did what. No responsibility has been taken."

And what of other regimes?

Müller pulls no punches.

"There is this great discrepancy as far as China is concerned. It claims to be to be on the road to democracy, but it is not even a half, not even a quarter, not even a tenth true. It has got nothing to do with democracy. Human rights have been cast aside. If there were less acceptance in the West then the rulers in China would have to think a little bit about how to change."

Coincidentally, and perhaps presciently, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, said at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair (where China just happened to be the guest of honor):

    "Books have great potential to liberate."

As these are times yet demanding (great) change, may such change be of "great potential."

And may great books be our guides within our own "unfinished journeys" toward greater, fuller and even total liberation.

Herta Müller's Nobel Lecture, "Every word knows something of a vicious circle" can be read here.

UPDATE: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic - The Gulag Archipelago

Story First Posted Here: September 10, 2009

This from The Moscow Times today:

Natalya Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's widow, has cut his landmark book “The Gulag Archipelago” by 80 percent to fit Russian school curriculum according to an interview published December 10th in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

She said she condensed the three-volume work at the request of her late husband, and the project started last summer.

The shortened version of the 64-chapter (672 pages in the English version) “The Gulag Archipelago” (about  135 pages in Russian) will become compulsory reading in high school literature classes.

The Rape of Nanking

Just in case one has not viewed this yet, it is currently available online.

"Nanking," the 2007 HBO documentary film about the 1937 Nanking Massacre committed by the Japanese army in the former capital city Nanjing, China draws on letters, diaries and archival footage from the era. Most striking and importantly, as well, are interviews with surviving victims as well as a few actual perpetrators of the massacre. 

Particular attention (with contemporary actors playing the roles) is paid to John Rabe (also in a 2009 major motion picture), a German merchant (and Nazi who used his clout), Robert O. Wilson, an intrepid surgeon, and Minnie Vautrin, a missionary educator who together with a handful of other foreigners present at the time organized the Nanking Safety Zone which saved over 250,000 lives.

Be prepared and forewarned.

About the 6 week onslaught, known (by most of the civilized world today) as "The Rape of Nanking":

• 260,000 died (source: International Military Tribunal of the Far East) ~most, including children, were bayoneted and/or shot in the back; women after acts of rape
  
  
• 20,000-80,000 rapes were committed by Japanese soldiers

After viewing the documentary, the story behind it and, in particular, the story behind the bestselling 1997 book, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" by Iris Chang may be of interest (begin here).

"Controversial," seems to put it mildly.

And no matter whether one tends toward being revisionist or not,
the story and recounting of this horror, as usual, remains instructive and important.

"This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past." ~Agathon

A Quiet "Fighter for Peace" Passes

The passing of George Miller-Kurakin has been noted recently, primarily in the British press.

Notable among the tributes, one composed by Julian Lewis, concludes succinctly:

George Miller-Kurakin, anti-Soviet campaigner: born Santiago, Chile 25 April 1955; married 1986 Lilia Zielke (one son, one daughter); died London 23 October 2009.

Anti-Soviet campaigner?

Yes.

Reading over Mr. Lewis' account of Miller-Kurakin's life (and the others), it becomes clear that he was much, much more than that.

"Intellectual and visionary, liberal and anti-Communist, George Miller inspired a generation of Conservative activists in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union seemed impregnable. His operations were so extensive that few of his associates knew the full picture."

The Adam Smith Institute notes his passing this way:

"[ASI] . . . recently lost a great friend and a heroic fighter for freedom. George Miller-Kurakin was an anti-communist activist who during the 1980s was not only a close associate of the ASI but in orchestrating a wide range of direct actions behind the Iron curtain
he inspired a generation of young freedom fighters
during what turned out to be the latter decade of the cold war.

A larger than life character with a great sense of humour, George was thoughtful, generous and staunch. Strategic, visionary and an outstanding executioner of field-craft and tactics
he always believed that Communism would eventually collapse
under the weight of its own manifest contradictions.
How right he was.
Rest in peace."

Miller-Kurakin, far left, and colleagues stage a protest

at the Soviet-backed Copenhagen Peace Congress in 1986

Who or how many truly remember(s) that time?

As Lewis recounts it:

Miller never sought personal publicity, but never minded taking a lead. With the Coalition for Peace Through Security, he spent a year planning a lively reception for the 1986 Copenhagen "Peace Congress" – the first set-piece effort in a Nato country by the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council (WPC) since its abortive Sheffield Congress of November 1950.

The USSR spent a great deal of hard currency staging the Copenhagen event. It opened with Miller and two others unfolding a giant banner on the platform which declared: "This is the KGB's 'Peace' Congress". On the second day, pictures of him being roughly handled dominated the Danish press. On the final day, dozens of his activists (who had somehow acquired delegates' credentials) mounted a protest against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
The ensuing mayhem achieved worldwide media coverage, throwing new light on the WPC's favourite catch-phrase – "The Fight for Peace".

We remember . . .

George Miller-Kurakin