Dynamite Has Its Place
This passage from Robert Boynton’s piece on citizen journalists in North Korea grabbed me:
One of the Daily NK’s founders, Park In Ho, spends much of his time recruiting and training reporters on the North Korean border with China. Published in Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese, the site receives 150,000 visits a month. Like most of the other independent news organizations, it receives funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as other NGOs and private donors. The Daily NK, like its peers, pays its North Korean correspondents small monthly retainers (more for scoops), and additional funds that they can use to bribe their way out of difficult situations.
Park tells me about recruiting one of his reporters. “I met him in China through an NGO. He was a graduate of Kim Il Sung University, so was destined to become a member of the elite. The first thing he asked me was to help him get some dynamite, so that he could blow up Kim Jong Il. He thought that everything in North Korea would change if he killed him.” They spent three months together, talking and reading books about the history of Northeast Asia. “I wanted him to understand the situation in the region, and persuade him not only that terrorism was wrong, but that it wouldn’t change anything.”
Whether it would change anything is beyond my knowledge, but I neither think it is terrorism nor that it is morally wrong to kill planet earth’s most repressive dictator.
Amen. Terrorism involves the killing of innocents, and Kim Jong-Il is the opposite of that.
— PEG · Mar 10, 02:57 PM · #
Ah, Conor, if only you’d actually chase this rabbit down its hole.
— Freddie · Mar 10, 02:58 PM · #
nor that it is morally wrong to kill planet earth’s most repressive dictator.
Wrong. What’s morally wrong is to say it’s not morally wrong to kill an evil dictator. But it may also be morally wrong not to do it.
— The Reticulator · Mar 10, 05:51 PM · #
Sic semper tyrannis.
— MrMandias · Mar 10, 06:10 PM · #
I suppose I should explain myself a little better. My statement about the immorality of killing an evil dictators comes from the Apostle Paul, who probably got some of his information from his study of evolutionary biology and anthropology, or could have if those disciplines had existed back then. It’s the part where he said, “All our righteousness is as filthy rags.”
Based on that understanding, there are very few things about which we can safely say, “It is not morally wrong to do X.”
— The Reticulator · Mar 10, 08:14 PM · #
“… there are very few things about which we can safely say, “It is not morally wrong to do X.”
Agreed. And I’ve chosen a pretty extreme case!
— Conor Friedersdorf · Mar 11, 12:32 AM · #
So explore it. Get to know it a bit. Take it to places that you might not find particularly comfortable. Get past “I would only blow up the bad man.”
— Freddie · Mar 11, 03:57 AM · #
So explore it. Get to know it a bit. Take it to places that you might not find particularly comfortable. Get past “I would only blow up the bad man.”
Why? The example at hand merely relates to the bad man, in this case a monstrous dictator. And I’m pretty sure most people considering this possibility are well aware of the places it might take them to, but they are smart enough to know not to go there and to figure out it’s not necessary to.
— Mark in Houston · Mar 11, 05:09 AM · #
Maybe Conor could incorporate as Martyr Production, LLC.
— The Reticulator · Mar 11, 05:59 AM · #