I dare not hope. But there in the corner of yet another article about the Six party talks in which the most powerful states on earth are"respectfully" trying to convince a genocidal regime to forgo (or at least to pretend to forgo as China continues to sell it WMD related goods) nuclear weapons, was a picture that lifted my spirit. It was a photo of South Korean burning"the pictures of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il and flags during an anti-North Korea campaign in Daegu, south of Seoul, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005. . . . The Korean letters read"Nuclear abolition and Improve human rights conditions in communist North Korea."

I tried to look for additional information about the demonstration but there were slim pickings. Why? I knew that South Korea considers the preservation of the Kim Jong Il regime a strategic and that comfortable and fearful South Korean denigrate any mention of Northern atrocities as right wing anti-Communists war mongering. But now I found an editorial stating:

The more inter-Korean exchanges increase, the more North Korean authorities try to intimidate the press in the South. It is now a daily occurrence for them to bar reporters from South Korean media outlets that have been critical of the regime.

On Monday I showed my students the documentary about North Korea entitled Access to evil." It is not easy to watch or digest. This time I was particularly struck by the following comments made by the defector, Kwon Hyuk about human experiments:

KH sync:"I watched the whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. Parents, one son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save their kids by doing mouth to mouth breathing. For the first time it hit me that even prisoners are capable of powerful human affection."

OIlenka question:"when you saw the experiment on the human beings what did you think what did you feel?"

KH sync :"At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because we were all led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea was their fault, that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country……. "

Olenka question :"What about the children Did you feel they deserved to die too?"

KH sync:"It would be a total lie for me to say I felt sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in that the time I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all. Night time Seoul.

North Korea is the ultimate example of a super empowered small state and the danger it poses to its own citizens and to the world around it. The ability of a tyranny to convince its subjects that all its failings originate from bad seeds growing amongst them demonstrates that it is not ethnic or religious differences that lead to the dehumanization of a group of people but the need of the regime for a scapegoat.

It reminds you of Ahmadinejad call to wipe Israel off the map? Quite. We are in the midst of appeasing little Hitlers and Stalins.