Ray9
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2016
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The sad case of Otto Warmbier raises some uncomfortable questions. The first and most important is: Are we responsible for our personal actions and individual decisions or are some of us victims of inadequate education and unscrupulous hucksters who capitalize on the gullibility of the young and inexperienced?
The North Korean government is a clinically paranoid state. It routinely arrests its own citizens for an endless array of seemingly minor infractions that end up as crimes against the North Korean regime. In many cases North Korean state authorities then round up and imprison all the members of the offenders’ families and throw them into prison as well. North Korea is the only country in the world that still operates concentration camps and often those who end there are never seen again.
The next question we must ask is: How did Otto Warmbier end up in a North Korean prison? Warmbier was an honor student in high school and a junior at the University of Virginia. He was traveling in China when he came upon advertisements for a company offering party trips to North Korea. Young Pioneer Tours sold itself to naïve, young westerners as “the place your parents don’t want you to go”.
It would be tempting to compare Otto to Nicholas Berg, the beheaded American who was kidnapped in 2004 while recklessly wandering around in an Iraqi war zone but Otto’s case is more similar to Natalee Holloway’s-an American in a strange place with too much festive alcohol in them. To any reasonable mind Otto didn’t deserve his fate any more than Natalee deserved hers. But we’re not talking about reasonable minds; we’re talking about the North Koreans who use mass starvation to keep their people in line.
It’s doubtful if anything meaningful can be done to address Otto’s horrible fate and there is plenty of blame to go around for how Otto wound up where he was. We need to tell our kids that the world is a real place with real consequences and just because someone is out of high school doesn’t mean they are prepared to deal with the real world.
In this age we are presented with threats like we have never seen before. We may have to treat our children as children a little longer and say no to the party. It’s not their fault, it’s not our fault. It’s just the way it is.
The North Korean government is a clinically paranoid state. It routinely arrests its own citizens for an endless array of seemingly minor infractions that end up as crimes against the North Korean regime. In many cases North Korean state authorities then round up and imprison all the members of the offenders’ families and throw them into prison as well. North Korea is the only country in the world that still operates concentration camps and often those who end there are never seen again.
The next question we must ask is: How did Otto Warmbier end up in a North Korean prison? Warmbier was an honor student in high school and a junior at the University of Virginia. He was traveling in China when he came upon advertisements for a company offering party trips to North Korea. Young Pioneer Tours sold itself to naïve, young westerners as “the place your parents don’t want you to go”.
It would be tempting to compare Otto to Nicholas Berg, the beheaded American who was kidnapped in 2004 while recklessly wandering around in an Iraqi war zone but Otto’s case is more similar to Natalee Holloway’s-an American in a strange place with too much festive alcohol in them. To any reasonable mind Otto didn’t deserve his fate any more than Natalee deserved hers. But we’re not talking about reasonable minds; we’re talking about the North Koreans who use mass starvation to keep their people in line.
It’s doubtful if anything meaningful can be done to address Otto’s horrible fate and there is plenty of blame to go around for how Otto wound up where he was. We need to tell our kids that the world is a real place with real consequences and just because someone is out of high school doesn’t mean they are prepared to deal with the real world.
In this age we are presented with threats like we have never seen before. We may have to treat our children as children a little longer and say no to the party. It’s not their fault, it’s not our fault. It’s just the way it is.
