There were concentration camps before Nazi Germany and of course there still is! Back in the American Civil War, my ancestor was imprisoned at Andersonville in Alabama. He endured concentration camp like life.

I originally posted this on my old blog, Thousandthdish:  http://thousandthdish.xanga.com/515113877/item/

I'm just going to replicate here:

*****

Today, I'm not writing about food.  Today, I'm writing about something much more important.  I know you come here looking for food.  I spend hours analyzing and making dishes, photographing them, and writing the simplified recipes for you.

Many of you are Korean.  And even if you are not, please read on.  Some of you know that there is a humanitarian crisis going on in North Korea, but most of you do not know of the scale of the crisis.  You may hear things here and there from people you know... your parents, people at your church, or friends... you might have even seen something on TV once.  I thought I knew the scale of the humanitarian crisis in North Korea, but until one week ago I had no idea of its sheer magnitude.

Here in the Western world, we don't hear of the mass starvation and the government sponsored atrocities on their own people.  The North Korean nuclear program and missile testing blinds us to what is happening internally within the country.

When we think of North Korea, we think of a brainwashed, backwards communist state as worthy of ridicule as its ludicrous leader.

We don't see the plight of the regular person who has to live there; and don't know that a large percentage of the population outside of Pyongyang is on the brink of starving to death or the 2 million people who have already starved to death.  After 1994, government rations were completely stopped.  Workers do not go to work.  Children do not go to school; instead, they go to the hills in their neighborhoods and try to fill their stomachs with grass.  Murders and the sale of human flesh in markets became no longer uncommon.

We don't see the hundreds of thousands held in Auschwitz-like concentration camps, like the infamous Camp-22, to be experimented on by their own government.  The former chief of management at Camp 22, who has defected to the west, recollects:

"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'"

His testimony is backed up by many other North Korean defectors with similar stories.

The South Korean government has refused to join international condemnation of human rights abuses in the North out of concern that such a move could rattle ties with Pyongyang, which considers any criticism of its human rights as deeply offensive.  South Korea has come under fire from human rights groups and some countries for abstaining in votes on U.N. measures to condemn the North's human rights record.  Seoul has also avoided the subject in bilateral talks with the North.

No place on Earth ever has been like this -- systematically starving, torturing and experimenting on its own people.  This is a situation the world has never seen.  Not in Rome at the height of its barbarism, not in the Dark Ages.

It wasn't this bad even in Nazi Germany, nor in China during the great purges, nor with Pol Pot nor in the Balkans, nor in Africa today.  All those places possessed elements of what is going on in North Korea right now, but not all at once...

(more on the original post)

Basically, we started a movement back in 2006 here on Xanga to educate people on this.  I had about 4000 subscribers at that point on my own, nevermind all the other people who moved on this.  That post I directed to ended up sitting at #1 for a very long time, and had literally, thousands of comments on it -- I think that to this day, that was probably one of the biggest posts on Xanga; and encouraged a lot of people to get involved with LiNK.

Thank you for making us aware again.  Please keep it up :)

@journalofsparkles@xanga - if you wanna know how to get involved, just send me a message or reply to this!

@Xx_IWannaWWIIRomance_xX@xanga -  wow, I didn't know that there were prison camps during the Civil War!

@FOXHOUND_HQ@xanga - thanks for sharing that! I have watched both videos! :) There are so many on Youtube!

@MDrabing83@xanga - yes the Confederacy had two POW camps Andersonville and Libby Prison, Libby was in Virginia and of course like I said Andersonville was in Alabama.

my mom lived through the Khmer Rouge Prison Camps in Cambodia from1976-1979. She watched people get murdered right in front of her eyes. She was literally almost starved to death and almost died of malaria. These camps will never stop existing unless stops being ignorant about the presence of these terrible camps.

Damn. That's so messed up. What can I do?

@AcrossTheRaspberryGalaxy@xanga - check out www.linkglobal.org or www.helpinghandskorea.org (i think) .... or you can contact a guy named tim peters who is a Christian activist....message me for more info!

@feelslikejuly@xanga - what camp was that & where was it? wow!

@PreciousOnyx@xanga - speaking from having spoken to NK refugees themselves, they don't really obey out of brainwashing or desire.....they in fact talk AGAINST the NK government whenever they're inside closed doors.....but everyone is like a personal spy for the government! If you tell even a family member sometimes something against the gov't, then you will be put in a camp or killed as a "traitor." amen - prayer is most effective!! God can do things we can't do....b/c for example, Americans can't go into NK right now, most foreigners can't, so the Gospel has to be generated from secret Christians! We can though give to NK refugees who sneak back over the border eevery day & we can give to missionaries/activists who help the NK's who are hiding in China! if you want more info let me know!

This is terrible.

this is absolutely horrible.

Thank you for this not being an ACORN/FEMA/birther thing.

The Holocaust was a big deal, nearly 11 million people died. But I still find it sad that other similar situations such as this are often ignored :(
I wish there was more we could do.