Escapees from the gulag state that is North Korea ought not to be termed defectors. That would indicate a well-thought out ideological break with the cult of Pyongyang and a betrayal of Communist principles. I'm not convinced that's what's going on. I don't think anyone else is, either.

Certainly, as escaped refugees learn what the real world is like outside of the totalitarian state's borders, any lingering solidarity with the dynasty of Kim Il Sung will disappear. But the reason most people try to get out is because they're desperately hungry and fear being imprisoned and tortured for breaking arbitrary rules like not crying enough at the Dear Leader's recent funeral. They're not traitors; they are refugees hoping to escape with their lives and nothing else.

When China arrests these people and sends them back to meet their lethal fate at the hands of the North Korean prison camp guards, it is violating their human right to life. It's sort of like an escapee from Al Qaeda somehow managing to get to a consulate or airport and authorities deciding to hand them back to their former captors for a scheduled beheading. Or to put it another way, if a starving, scarred and penniless North Korean somehow managed to swim across the Pacific Ocean to the USA, how atrocious would it be for police to send him back?

Protests should not be confined to South Korea. China's leaders should know the world is watching.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist

Darn. After that great funereal show for Kim Jong Il, I was looking forward to another display of the totalitarian state's lush pageantry.

It seems Kim Jong Un is still around, very much able to treat himself to five-course meals while his population is reduced further into a civilization of malnourished dwarfs.

With the Russians now threatening to veto any more robust action against one of their biggest weapons-sales customers, it looks like there won't be any chance of a Libya-style intervention in Syria. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You decide. Take our poll and tell us what you think should happen.

If the only thing North Korea's new dictator Kim Jong Un has to do to consolidate power is improve the economy, that seems to be a very low benchmark.

NORTH KOREAN POLLSTER: How do you think our leader is doing on the economy?

NK CITIZEN: Last year, my family had one bag of rice between us. Now we have a bag of rice and a bottle of ketchup! Things really seem to be looking up. It's soooo much better than when that economic disaster Kim Jong Il was in charge.

NORTH KOREAN POLLSTER: Oh, really.

NK CITIZEN: No, wait!

NORTH KOREAN POLLSTER: Off to the gulag with you. And you can leave your ketchup on the table. You won't be needing it where you're going.

Whatever brief opportunity for North Korea's subject people's freedom existed in the wake of the death of the Dear Leader, the moment appears to have passed. The Great Successor has seized the reigns in Pyongyang with the blessing of the military.

Another generation of starvation, persecution and totalitarian control looms ahead for what may be the most unfree nation in modern history.

From Reason Magazine:

When journalist Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011 he was soon followed in the grave by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, a loathsome figure whose atrocities Hitchens spent a fair amount of time of documenting. Given the proximity in time of their deaths, Reason is happy to re-release this 2007 featuring Hitchens' dramatic reading of Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Song." Taped at Reason's DC headquarters before a crowd of about 150 people, Hitchens begins his performance with a peroration about one-party states in North Korea--and North America.

The best chicken fast food commercial in the history of the universe takes aim at a species in short-term decline: dictators. Brilliant.

H/T Boingboing

Iranian student activist Payman Aref wrote a letter to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the last election in Iran. That must have been some letter. He was sentenced to a year in prison and 74 lashes (One wonders how they came up with that particular number of strikes with a whip -- was it based on word count?).

Today, he was whipped by a representative of the Iranian regime as per the judge's sentence.

This echoes the punishment meted out to Somayeh Tohidlou. She was whipped 50 times while her hands and feet were chained together, as punishment for taking part in post-election demonstrations.

When Iran's Islamist state and justice system is described as medieval, this is no exaggeration.

The times they are a changin'.

But not in Bahrain. Doctors and medical personnel from the Salmaniya Medical Complex in Manama who treated protestors injured in spring demonstrations against the regime, have been sentenced to long prison sentences simply for doing the work they are mandated to do as healthcare workers, as reported in the New York Times this week:

The agency reported that eight people it identified as doctors who worked at a central hospital in the capital, Manama, received 15-year sentences. Other medical personnel at the hospital, the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital, were given terms of between 5 and 15 years.

The sentences were the latest sign that the country’s Sunni monarchy would continue to deal severely with those involved in widespread protests this year, mostly held by members of its repressed Shiite majority. Much of that effort has been focused on the doctors and nurses who treated demonstrators.

Even Saudi Arabia is feeling compelled these days to throw the people a bone: Women were granted the right to vote and run for office this month (though whether they can get to polling stations, not to mention schools and work places, without also being allowed to drive, is yet to be determined). But the oppressive state in Bahrain endures, as so well documented in Al Jazeera's documentary, Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark.

The atrocious behaviour of the Al Khalifa royals must be condemned unequivocally, and their place at the table of civilized nations shunned until the tyranny ends.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.

As Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares for another round of theatrics at the UN this week for the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, victims of his regime and others are routinely ignored, as Ben Cohen points out in yesterday's New York Post. It's a useful time to bring to shed light on of the Iranian regime's favoured means of crushing dissenters: institutionalized and systematic rape.

Beneath the outer horrors of repression in Iran—the scenes of brutal attacks by police and security forces against peaceful protestors witnessed in the streets of Tehran throughout 2009 and 2010—lie the underground horrors that those protestors and other political activists face once they find themselves inside Iran’s prison system. The preponderance of torture in Iran’s prisons is well documented by human rights organizations, and it’s long acknowledged that the Iranian justice system often denies detainees the right to legal representation, to a fair trial, and many are simply ‘disappeared’ within the prison system. However, rape as a form of torture is particularly prevalent as a tool used by the state to punish and debilitate dissenters. Read more