Planet Gulag - 15 (plus) who matter

Foreign Policy magazine yesterday, apparently in honor of the worldwide recognition of Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize posted Freedom House's list of imprisoned dissidents.

You can read it in full here.

A petition to allow Liu Xiaobo and/or his family to attend the Nobel Ceremony today remains available though the hour has already passed for any such action.

Seems that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made a special trip.

If only more conscientious, righteous leaders truly cared.

continuing . . .

Then they came for me

The National Post has this brief, but stirring account of Dr. Norbert Vollersten and his encounters with both North Korean (and South Korean) intransigence in the face of the continuing deprivation, starvation and spiritual destruction of the North Korean people.

"They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.


Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.


Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.


Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

                    ~ Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)


 The North Korean gulag and genocide must not be allowed to continue.

The transcript of a  October 14, 2003 appearance by Vollersten on Capitol Hill can be read here as well as his account (elsewhere on the same site here) noting that "South Korea is infiltrated by Pyongyang's agents."

Finally, as Vollersten says in the The National Post article, still haunted and apparently motivated:

"Some day, I'll go back. That is my goal: I will be a doctor in North Korea again."


continuing . . .