Even considering the solar-plexus-crunching poignancy of Shin Dong-hyok's account of his birth-to-escape "life" in North Korea's Camp 14 (via ROK Drop), these summary graphs finished me off:

Now in Seoul, he said he sometimes finds life "more burdensome than the hardest labor in the prison camp, where I only had to do what I was told." His limited vocabulary has caused him to fail twice the written driver's license test. And there is his struggle to reconcile with his dead mother.

"However I try, I can't forgive her," he said. "She and my brother severely hurt me and my father by trying to escape. Didn't she think what would happen to us?"

Shin said he sometimes wished he could return to the time before he learned about the greater world, "without knowing that we were in a prison camp, without knowing that there was a place called South Korea."

It's accounts like these, that reaffirms for me a deep-seated skepticism. This goes beyond the political and the partisan. Surely, the human animal is not the sacred center of Creation, merely the victim of an incredible series of genetic adaptations forced by sado-masochistic visions of morality.

Check out GI Korea's Google Earth pics, too!