In December, after the death of hereditary dictator Kim Jong-Il, network and cable TV news programs replayed videos of North Korean citizens publicly weeping and wailing in mourning for the Dear Leader.\u00a0 Many Americans, starting with but not confined to news reporters, made fun of the North Koreans.<\/p>\n
I wrote a blog entry<\/a> at the time, saying we shouldn’t be so quick to laugh.\u00a0 “Those poor people have no choice in the matter,” I said.\u00a0 “They\u2019re crying for their careers, their families and loved ones, their very lives.”<\/p>\n Today my friend Martha at Western Sky Communications<\/a> alerted me to the latest news from the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea<\/a>: those who didn’t weep and wail loudly enough (or long enough, or convincingly enough) are being sent to prison camps.\u00a0 They were being watched, you see.\u00a0 When I wrote about it earlier, I said this: “We have no fucking idea what it is to live in a dictatorship.”<\/p>\n Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a dictatorship so severe that everything you do … your every word, your every move … is tracked and reported?\u00a0 Not just by agents of the government, but by your neighbors, co-workers, friends, even family members?\u00a0 I can’t.\u00a0 I don’t think you can either.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the vague shape of such a thing is beginning to form on the distant horizon with President Obama’s signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes the indefinite military detention of anyone accused of or suspected of terrorism, including American citizens at home in this country<\/em>, without due process, without a trial, without any opportunity for the accused to confront their accusers.\u00a0 If there’s a better recipe for prison camps, I don’t know of it.\u00a0 The ACLU is fighting it<\/a>, and needs our support.\u00a0 We have an ACLU.\u00a0 The North Koreans don’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In December, after the death of hereditary dictator Kim Jong-Il, network and cable TV news programs replayed videos of North Korean citizens publicly weeping and wailing in mourning for the Dear Leader.\u00a0 Many Americans, starting with but not confined to news reporters, made fun of the North Koreans. I wrote a blog entry at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,10,16],"tags":[290,515,513,514,90],"class_list":["post-8746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-current-events","category-media","tag-aclu","tag-indefinite-detention","tag-kim-jong-il","tag-ndaa","tag-north-korea"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8746"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8756,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8746\/revisions\/8756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}