Which country is worse?

[Frozzy]

Yes... I know it's NewsMax, but the facts stand for themselves.

North Korea by a ****ing long shot.

Women undergo forced abortions, newborn babies are beaten to death, children are used for slave labor, and thousands every year are brutally murdered or worked to death.The gulag is alive and well in North Korea, teeming with hundreds of thousands of brutalized human beings condemned to a blood-drenched existence so horrific it is almost impossible for civilized people to imagine.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famed Russian author, described the Soviet Union’s “Gulag Archipelago,” a vast collection of slave labor camps in frozen Siberia where the prisoners were routinely tortured, starved and forced to work under the most inhuman of conditions. That gulag vanished when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Today, another gulag – one perhaps far more brutal than its Soviet counterpart – exists in North Korea, where an estimated 200,000 political prisoners pay the terrible price for having offended the communist dictatorship in even the most minor of ways.
In an extraordinary exercise of investigative journalism, NBC News exposed the horrors of these torture and slaughter pens, interviewing former prisoners, guards and U.S. and South Korean officials. The network revealed “the horrifying conditions these people must endure — conditions that shock even those North Koreans accustomed to the near-famine conditions of Kim Jong-il’s realm.”

'Depravity'
“It's one of the worst, if not the worst, situation — human rights abuse situation — in the world today,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who held hearings on the camps last year.
“There are very few places that could compete with the level of depravity, the harshness of this regime in North Korea toward its own people.”
According to NBC News:

At one camp, Camp 22 in Haengyong, 50,000 prisoners toil each day in conditions that U.S. officials and former prisoners say result in the death of 20 percent to 25 percent of the prison population every year.

Shockingly, products made by prison laborers may wind up on U.S. store shelves, having been “washed” first through Chinese companies that serve as intermediaries.

Entire families, including grandchildren, are incarcerated for even the most bland political statements.

Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women so that another generation of political dissidents will be “eradicated.”

Inmates are used as human guinea pigs for testing biological and chemical agents, according to former prisoners and U.S. officials.

“All of North Korea is a gulag,” one senior U.S. official told NBC News, noting that as many as 2 million people have died of starvation while Kim has amassed the world’s largest collection of Daffy Duck cartoons.
“It’s just that these people [in the camps] are treated the worst. No one knows for sure how many people are in the camps, but 200,000 is consistent with our best guess. We don’t have a breakdown, but there are large numbers of both women and children.”

Screaming Newborn Kicked to Death
One former gulag inmate, Soon Ok Lee, spent seven years at a camp near Kaechon in Pyungbuk province. She told the network: “I was in prison from 1987 till January 1993. [The women] were forced to abort their children. They put salty water into the pregnant women’s womb with a large syringe, in order to kill the baby even when the woman was eight months or nine months pregnant.
“And then, from time to time there a living infant is delivered. And then if someone delivers a live infant, then the guards kick the bloody baby and kill it. And I saw an infant who was crying with pain. I have to express this in words, that I witnessed such an inhumane hell.”
Soon watched 50 fellow prisoners dying excruciatingly painful deaths when they were used as human guinea pigs in biological warfare research.
“I saw so many poor victims,” she recalled. “Hundreds of people became victims of biochemical testing. I was imprisoned in 1987 and during the years of 1988 through ’93, when I was released, I saw the research supervisors — they were enjoying the effect of biochemical weapons, effective beyond their expectations — they were saying they were successful.”
Horrifying Experiments
Soon told NBC News about one instance when about 50 prisoners were taken to an auditorium and given a piece of boiled cabbage to eat. Within a half hour, they began vomiting blood and quickly died. “I saw that in 20 or 30 minutes they died like this in that place. Looking at that scene, I lost my mind. Was this reality or a nightmare? And then I screamed and was sent out of the auditorium.”
Kang Chol-Hwan, a journalist with Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s most important newspaper, and author of “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” the first memoir of a North Korean political prisoner, spent almost 10 years in the gulag. He was imprisoned because his grandfather had made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism.
He was just 9 years old when he arrived at the Yodok camp. His grandfather was never seen again, and prison conditions killed his father.
“When I was 10 years old,” Kang recalled, “we were put to work digging clay and constructing a building. And there were dozens of kids, and while digging the ground, it collapsed. And they died. And the bodies were crushed flat. And they buried the kids secretly, without showing their parents, even though the parents came.”
'Eyeballs Taken Out by Beating'
Ahn Myong Chol, a guard at the Haengyong camp from 1987 through 1994, told the network, “I heard many times that eyeballs were taken out by beating.”
“And I saw that by beating the person the muscle was damaged and the bone was exposed, outside, and they put salt on the wounded part. At the beginning I was frightened when I witnessed it, but it was repeated again and again, so my feelings were paralyzed.”
Beating and killing prisoners, Ahn said, was not only tolerated, it was encouraged and even rewarded.
“They trained me not to treat the prisoners as human beings. If someone is against socialism, if someone tries to escape from prison, then kill him. If there’s a record of killing any escapee, then the guard will be entitled to study in the college. Because of that, some guards kill innocent people.”
NBC’s investigation found that North Korea’s State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps, mainly in remote areas in the north.
“The worst are in the country’s far northeast. Some of them are gargantuan: At least two of the camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are larger in area than the District of Columbia, with Huaong being three times the size of the U.S. capital district,” the network explained.
Lim Young Sun, a former North Korean army officer who fled the North 10 years ago, told NBC News, “The degree of punishment has become more severe.”
Lim, director of investigations for the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, said: “Executions in public have decreased, but within labor camps it has increased. The situation especially within those camps is getting much worse.”

Evil Indeed
It was his knowledge of the gulag and its horrors that led President Bush to include North Korea in his “Axis of Evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.
“I loathe Kim Jong-il,” Bush told Bob Woodward during an interview for the author’s book “Bush at War.”
“I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps — they’re huge — that he uses to break up families and to torture people.”
The Bush administration is finally curbing Bill Clinton's disastrous policy of pandering to and providing massive aid to Pyongyang. The regime's theft of tens of millions of dollars in food aid, intended for the starving populace but diverted to the military and the political elites, prompted the U.S. on Tuesday to delay further aid.
The U.S. is "going to be darn sure that if we tell you where the food is supposed to be and you give it to someone else, then we're going to wait, and we're going to be darn sure that our food is getting through to the right people," said Tony Hall, U.S. ambassador to U.N. food agencies.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/arti...3/110824.shtml

[Lazerus]

Theres no France

China right now is on a knife edge, does it drop off and become the devil or does it reform and become the next best thing rising above the USA and keeping the world in order.
Currently though N.Korea is worst

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by sprucemoose3311
Korea is the most oppressive on the list but China is te biggest world threat.

China is the biggest threat to American hegemony, probably. But that is not equal to "world threat".

[Buck Birdseed]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
Almost any place in Africa, actually.

Have you ever even been to Africa, for ****'s sake? Most countries are far from oppressive, and nearly all of them are moving in the right directions. None of the worst set of human rights abusers in the world are in Africa... Although some collapsed countries, notably Sierra Leone, have conditions that are close to as bad, perpetrated by private interests instead of governments.

Re: death penalty in china:

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/deathpenalty_facts_eng

In 2002, 81 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran and the USA. In China, limited and incomplete records available to Amnesty International at the end of the year indicated that at least 1,060 people were executed, but the true figure was believed to be much higher. At least 113 executions were carried out in Iran. Seventy-one people were executed in the USA.

http://web.amnesty.org/web/ar2002.nsf/asa/china!Open

From April to early July, AI recorded 2,960 death sentences and 1,781 executions, a rate of executions not seen since a previous ''strike hard'' campaign in 1996. Executions were carried out for non-violent crimes such as bribery, pimping, embezzlement, tax fraud, selling harmful foods, as well as drug offences and violent crimes.

North Korea is extremely hard to assess the brutality of since the isolation/repression is so total. If they're really good à la 1984 they don't need to be particularly brutal at all... Although rest assured they are.

On your list, why isn't Burma/Myanmar mentioned? Hardly a US ally you need to protect, but nevertheless a pretty damn ruthless regime, one of the nastiest in the world in fact. As for US-backed regimes, how about Colombia? 4000 non-combat civilian deaths a year at the hands of US-trained and army-supported paramilitaries is quite nasty.

[Q Classic]

buck, the reason myanmar isn't on the list is a) it's not infamous and b) far easier to troll when only infamous countries are on the list.

[ranskaldan]

From April to early July, AI recorded 2,960 death sentences and 1,781 executions, a rate of executions not seen since a previous ''strike hard'' campaign in 1996. Executions were carried out for non-violent crimes such as bribery, pimping, embezzlement, tax fraud, selling harmful foods, as well as drug offences and violent crimes.

If you read the Chinese press you'd notice that there are food poisoning outbreaks every week. And people die from this - dozens at a time in the worst cases. It is probably impossible to find untainted food in China nowadays. Industrial oils being passed off as food oils; rat poison laced into noodles; the list goes on. And all meat is injected with water. You can only hope it's not laundry water.

If McVeigh can be sentenced to death for Oklahoma, I don't see how this is any different.

As for corruption - I fail to see why Westerners complain all the time about rampant corruption in China, and then complain whenever anything is done about it.

[JCG]

North Korea. Probably not the most violent of the bunch, but certainly the most oppressive, from what our biased perspective can tell.

[Bereta_Eder]

wow USA 28 votes, second after N. Korea.

[Frankychan]

You should have just grouped all the fundamentalist nations under one heading.

I voted Iran. Islamic extremism is totally oppressive.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Frankychan
You should have just grouped all the fundamentalist nations under one heading.

I voted Iran. Islamic extremism is totally oppressive.

Which is why Iranian movies are regularly coming out unto the world market....

Iran is the only one of the states mentioned that regularly holds elections free of abuse and tampering (if not attempts by hard-liners to keep certain people off the ballot). Plus womne get a much better deal in Iran than in most of the rest of the ME.

[Drake Tungsten]

Iran is the only one of the states mentioned that regularly holds elections free of abuse and tampering

Jesus, GePap, not you too. The US is right there, so how can you say such a thing?

[Lord Merciless]

Where the hell is Saudi Arabia?

[Dis]

tip: don't put the U.S. in these kinds of polls. . The trolls cannot resist that kind of urge.

[JCG]

The USA must have been mistaken for the Banana option, evidently....

[Lazer]

I think, along with the US, Iran should be off the list.

It's funny, but while Iran is (foreign-policy wise) very very harsh, fundamentalist, actively supports terrorism, etc., domestically it isn't that bad. It's the Mid-East country (not counting Israel and Turkey) most likely to turn itself into a successful democracy. They have elections, and a tradition of voting for a wide variety of candidates. The "revolution" is now just (IIRC) the clerics can veto any laws they don't like. With a young, very pro-US and pro-reformist population, my biggest fear with Iran is that Bush will try to democratize it, while Iran without interference will probably democratize itself within a decade.

[Buck Birdseed]

I'd probably take Cuba off before Iran, to be honest. Certainly, the amount of execution/torture/arbitrary detention is higher in the latter state.

[EdwardTKing]

Originally posted by ranskaldan

As for corruption - I fail to see why Westerners complain all the time about rampant corruption in China, and then complain whenever anything is done about it.

Good Point - Some of us would cheerfully execute
CEOs who steal money from pension funds too.

[Az]

GePap: what's the point of having free election when women are treated like dirt?

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by EdwardTKing



Good Point - Some of us would cheerfully execute
CEOs who steal money from pension funds too.

If you're in danger of losing your entire economy to things like this, I'm sure you would.

[Oerdin]

Originally posted by GePap
Plus womne get a much better deal in Iran than in most of the rest of the ME.

Well, you know when you compare them to the worst of the worst (I.E. the rest of the ME) then even an Iatola begins to look good.