Once upon a time, America was split in two by slavery. We fought a Civil War over it. Our martyred president, Abraham Lincoln, died for the cause of reunifying America and freeing enslaved Americans for all time. But Lincoln was not only a martyr: He was also a prophet.

In the gathering crisis before our Civil War, he warned his countrymen that “a house divided cannot stand”—that America “could not endure, permanently half slave and half free.” Schoolchildren are still familiar with those ringing words. But that same speech contains an ominous message, less well attended in some free societies. When Lincoln foresaw that America’s house would ultimately “cease to be divided,” by that he meant America would ultimately “become all one thing, or all the other”—that slavery would ultimately be driven to extinction in the American house, or that slavery would instead finally be accepted everywhere. The least likely outcome, in his foretelling, was an unstable balance in which people were fully free in only one part.

For three long generations, Korea has been a house divided. Part of the peninsula enjoys great freedoms; the other part is wholly enslaved. For many in the South, the current status quo has proved to be a workable order. South Koreans can go about seeking their own modern comforts, engaging in their own pursuit of happiness, without worrying too much about the unending suffering endured by their cousins and compatriots just across the DMZ.

For those who accept the status quo, this relative indifference to human rights in the North may be unfortunate, or unseemly, but it is nonetheless an entirely manageable course of action.

This view—the consensus opinion in South Korea today—constitutes a fateful miscalculation.

Never mind its morality: From a purely practical, purely selfish standpoint, this indifference to human rights in the North places at risk human rights in the South.

Korea’s freedom is an indivisible quantity. If regarded instead by the public as a blessing bestowed only on some Koreans but withheld from others, it will remain a fragile blossom. Before too long, those who are unwilling to make the principled case for the defense of these human freedoms for their brethren on the other side of the peninsula will find their own freedoms endangered, too.

Abraham Lincoln was right about this. And the hour of reckoning for the divided house of Korea could be upon South Koreans with unexpected celerity.

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The condition of enslaved Americans before their liberation and of North Korean subjects can and should be spoken of in the same breath. But the human rights situation actually looks less favorable for North Koreans today than for black slaves on American plantations in the 1850s.

It is true that North Koreans today, unlike U.S. slaves long ago, are allowed by their masters to learn to read and write. And some heinous slaver practices, such as tearing children from parents for profit, may have no direct counterpart in the North.

Yet in so many other respects, the human rights situation is worse for Pyongyang’s subjects than it was for slaves on U.S. plantations—vastly worse.

Consider:

• American slaves were allowed freedom of worship—that is the origin of America’s unique strain of gospel music. North Korea, by contrast, enforces endless idolatry of the Kim family regime. Although Pyongyang was once known as the “Jerusalem of the East,” the cradle of Korean Presbyterian Christianity, all genuine worship there is banned today, with grave punishments for anyone who dares keep the faith.
• Where American slaves were forcibly separated into two intrinsically degrading categories—“house” and “field”—North Korea’s official songbun system reduces each human being into one of 50-some assigned political classes that permanently decide their fate, raising state discrimination against the individual to exquisite, almost scientific, perfection.
• The logic of the North Korean state, furthermore, decrees that those with the lowest songbun are “hostile classes”: enemies of the state, officially regarded almost as if insects, with lives of no consequence—lives possibly even valued at less than zero.
  • That is why the North Korean regime was so strangely unperturbed by Kim Jong II’s Great Famine in the 1990s, in which untold hundreds of thousands perished. This multitude of victims was culled overwhelmingly from the “hostile classes.” From the Dear Leader’s perspective, North Korea was better off without them: In his eyes, they were fit for extermination.
  • In classical slave societies of old, where enslaved persons were treated as the property of others, nothing like the Dear Leader’s famine could have taken place—if only because it would have been too expensive.
• So, too, the distinction between the enforced terror of whippings and beatings on plantations and the industrial scale of incarceration and killing in North Korean political prison camps: Some minimal consideration for preservation of human life was accorded on the plantation, if only due to financial incentive.
• One last point. Over the course of America’s stained history of slavery, up to 100,000 enslaved people escaped to the North and to Canada. Given the size of the U.S. slave population—roughly 4 million in 1860—that would mean more than 2 percent of all enslaved persons at the time successfully sought freedom as escapees in the generations before our Civil War. That percentage looks to be orders of magnitude higher than the share of North Korean refugees who have made it to the South.

We should ask: Why?

In part, the differential attests to the more serious “barriers to exit” in totalitarian North Korea. In part, it speaks to what economists would call “differentials in demand.” There are fewer active networks facilitating escape, and fewer welcoming venues for the escapees—differences that in themselves might well invite some reflection on the part of South Koreans.

But part of that differential is also explained by the much more limited “supply” of escapees. Pyongyang’s odious system of “guilt-by-association” (yeon-jwa-jae) sanctions up to three generations of the same family for the perceived trespasses of one individual.

North Korea’s would-be escapees know very well that the Kim regime makes it policy to punish family members—wives, children, parents, even uncles, aunts and cousins—for political crimes of any given individual. And defecting from the Kim family’s paradise is most assuredly a political crime.

America’s slave states did not systematically punish the families of its runaways, but North Korea does—and that may tell you everything you need to know about the difference in human rights under those two oppressive “peculiar institutions.”

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For many years, I have been involved in the international movement for human rights in North Korea—and on the global chessboard, the greatest weakness for this cause has always been its lack of support from South Koreans themselves. Millions of Koreans in the South seem to have hardened their hearts to the piteous condition of the millions just across the DMZ—people who share their heritage, their language,
even their ancestry.

In Seoul these days, one encounters protests against human rights abuse all around the planet—the Middle East, Africa, even the United States. Everywhere, it seems, except a few miles north, where the worst human rights emergency on earth is taking place right now and is befalling fellow Koreans.

The elected government acts at times as if the systemic denial of human rights in the North is a matter of utter indifference. Rather than lift a finger in support of human rights in North Korea, Seoul not infrequently abstains even from voting in favor of North Korean human rights at the United Nations—not always, but at least eight times in recent memory. On those occasions, UN motions on human rights in North Korea were carried thanks only to the votes of other countries.

How do so many South Koreans manage to treat the human rights nightmare next door as mere background noise? Two civil wars are currently underway on the peninsula. The first is the contest between Seoul and Pyongyang. The other is unfolding within South Korea itself—between the left and what is sometimes called the right, between the intellectual children of Marx, Stalin, and Mao and those of Locke, Montesquieu, and Lincoln.

Obsessed with historical grievance, South Korea’s radical left cannot forgive their countrymen for “collaborating” with foreigners, even though some of those foreigners (the ones known as Americans) provided Koreans with the “breathing space” and the moral, legal, and intellectual architecture that made possible the construction of the first-ever limited constitutional democracy on Korean soil.

The left partisans in this internal struggle cannot bring themselves to criticize socialism in Korea—even in its grotesque, freakish manifestation in the North. Under the sway of Marxist-Leninist thought—sometimes the more merciless versions, sometimes the softer, more palatable variants—they maintain doctrinally that there can be no violations of human rights under socialism in Korea. For them, that is a theoretical impossibility—so that even talking about the human rights problem in North Korea is an illegitimate act, a sort of unwarranted provocation.

Their preferred alternative to our conception of human rights is “people’s rights.” But as we have learned once and again—from the Red Terror in the Soviet Union to the Mao-made famine in China to the attempted murder of an entire nation in Khmer Rouge Cambodia—“people’s rights” can never be divided into inviolable individual portions under totalitarian dictatorships. The Kim regime is just another case in point.

Leftist apologists for Pyongyang’s misrule cannot bring themselves to talk about the Kim family regime’s depredation of its captives. Instead, their agenda for advancing human right in North Korea is to send food and money to the North Korean government. Yes, their alternative is to help the dictators feed their human livestock—if and when their regime permits these human chattel to eat.

When the left comes to power in the South, as it does with some regularity under the ROK’s open and competitive democracy, its impoverished conception of North Korean human rights guides national policy.

What do we see then?

• We get diversionary human rights reports training their attention on forced haircuts—in South Korean schools!
• We get South Korean officials apologizing to the North for taking in too many escapees, promising this will not happen in the future.
• We get North-South “joint statements” in which the South Korean government promises to collaborate in tamping down criticism in the South of the Kim regime. I guess there is some “collaboration” the Korean left approves of, after all.
• And we can always be sure we will get the same shameful official silence in international fora about human rights in North Korea.

Though the left in South Korea despises the idea of fighting for North Korean human rights, the dictatorship in the North positively fears the possibility of such a fight. Despite three generations of relentless, never-ending indoctrination of its captive population, despite the countless hours of “Ten Principles of Monolithic Ideology” study forced on every North Korean, the regime has no confidence that it has won the hearts and minds of its own subject people.

If it did, why would the Respected Comrade (that’s Kim Jong Un) be working overtime to tighten his border controls even further? No one wants to move into his country. The only possible risk at the borders is that North Koreans, perhaps in growing numbers, want to escape his paradise.

Fear of human rights is hardly new to the Kim family regime. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the North Korean state has been sounding alarms about “ideological and cultural infiltration”—in other words, Western ideas and values.

The regime issued a memorable warning to its cadres in 1997: “‘Reform’ and ‘opening’ on the lips of the imperialists is honey-coated poison.” In the estimate of the dictators themselves, the dictatorship could not withstand this.

And in late 2023 and early 2024, Pyongyang announced an extraordinary policy U-turn. After nearly eight decades of militating for reunification of divided Korea, the Respected Comrade suddenly abandoned the unification doctrine of his father and grandfather, declaring instead that the two Koreas are “fixed” and “hostile states,” “irreconcilable.” No longer are the people of North and South deemed “consanguineous or homogeneous.” Instead, the Southerners are now officially held to be a “strange clan.” Conquest of the South, to be sure, is still explicitly on the agenda. But not unification.

What explains this remarkable about-face? Perhaps the same considerations that prompted the regime to criminalize the use of South Korean slang and South Korean accents, and to punish Northerners caught with South Korean movies, or disseminating South Korean DVDs, with forced labor, the gulag, or even the firing squad. The unpardonable crime committed by these renegades? They want to be more like South Koreans. They yearn for what South Koreans already have.

Apparently the 2020 “Law on Rejecting Reactionary Thought and Culture” was not enough to stamp that hope out of North Korean hearts. So Pyongyang had to resort to formally, explicitly destroying the path to peaceful unification with the South. For the slaves don’t really love Master, after all. Instead, the “liberated masses” in the North look with longing at the lives of the “imperialist puppets” in the South.

The dictatorship in Pyongyang understands this all too well—much better, apparently, than its leftist sympathizers and collaborators in the South.

For South Koreans, the concern has always been that its hard-won freedoms would be threatened from without—by another military attack from Pyongyang or yet another attempt at unconditional reunification on Kim dynasty terms.

But at this late hour, we may now perceive that there is also a threat to South Korean freedoms from within. The very activists, intellectuals, and officials who seem more interested in the stability of the North’s totalitarian state than the well-being of the people it oppresses turn out to have a problem with human rights in the South as well.

And why wouldn’t they? To the radical leftist sensibility, formal guarantees of individual rights are nothing more than a storybook fiction—a tactical roadblock their opponents throw in their way to impede sweeping progress. The same people who have no use for human rights in the North are hardly more enamored of them in the South. With sufficient political power in their hands, they will aim to undo those rights, too.

Because South Koreans have been so complacent about the defense of North Koreans’ human rights, internalized defenses that should already exist against encroachments on the South’s human rights are just half built.

Lacking practice in standing up for human rights in North Korea, too many in the South lack the will, the know-how, and the readiness to do what may be needed to fight for their own. That same lack of muscle memory, furthermore, only emboldens those who would take advantage of it.

Historically, of course, human rights in Korea have come under assault from the right as well as the left. South Korea’s present open society and constitutional democracy evolved out of an authoritarian military government that many still remember firsthand. Just last year, a so-called conservative administration tried to declare martial law. But that foolhardy ploy was clownish, inept (it lasted just six hours), and inexcusable—and courts and voters did not excuse it.

Yet where the Korean right at times reprehensibly impinges on freedoms in practice, the Korean left does so in principle—because its worldview regards legal protections for the person as barriers to achieving its vision of “social justice.” So when admirers of Marx and fanboys of the CCP are in power, human rights are not safe at home.

Left-leaning governments have attempted to change the rules of South Korea’s democracy under recent administrations.

• A few years ago, a left-leaning administration began using what is now called “lawfare” to bankrupt and cripple its opponents—gaming South Korea’s loose libel laws to take critics to court for allegedly defamatory utterances. This wasn’t protection of individual rights—it was smash-mouth intimidation by official plaintiffs with unlimited resources to silence the little people. It had worked already for the government of authoritarian Singapore, and it succeeded here, too.
• Today, under a new left-leaning administration, Seoul is chilling free speech even further. With the inventive legal theory that burning the Chinese flag is “hate speech,” it is using police power to shut down protests against Beijing’s malign policies and practices: its crushing of the Uyghurs; its dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms; its growing menace to free Taiwan; and so much more. If hating the highly detestable CCP is illegal, what else is now off limits in the ostensibly free South Korea today?
• The new administration in Seoul has also used the martial law fiasco as pretext for a special prosecutor, investigating the supposed “insurrection” behind it. If that investigation should conclude that the opposition party was complicit in a “conspiracy,” the administration will be able to use its majority in the National Assembly to ban the opposition party from parliament—so that South Korea, like North Korea, would become a one-party state. At that point, its legislature would be in position to rubber-stamp any proposed constitutional amendments the ruling party fancies—potentially putting up for grabs the entire panoply of legal guarantees South Koreans now take for granted.
• And the new administration is proposing that the constitutional one-term limit to the presidency be tossed—possibly starting under the current president. They say they are asking only for a two-term presidency, which could mean an additional three years for the leader now in power. But what if this is just their opening bid?

Only practical exigency, not principle, will possibly spare South Koreans from a slide into left authoritarianism if the side that disdains the very notion of inviolable human rights in North Korea has its way.

Is there any doubt that a public more mindful of human rights violations against North Korean compatriots would also be more vigilant about protection of their own?

South Koreans who know their freedoms are at risk also know human rights are not some provisional gift from the state. These are not some theorem an intellectual came up with, 10,000 generations into our human story. Nor are they just a code of manners for polite governments to try to follow, when circumstances permit.

Human rights are inalienable natural rights: granted by the same creator who created our universe. They cannot be taken from us any more than our DNA, our breath, our ability to choose between right and wrong. They are part of our human nature. That is true today and ever shall be. And so here is Korea, half slave, half free. Which way will the story end?

Whether history will regard the Korean story as a triumph or a tragedy depends upon how free Koreans choose to act. If they act decisively, this much will be remembered long from now: that in standing up for North Koreans’ human rights, South Koreans were given the chance to save their own.

Photo: Getty Images

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