Stupid Is...As Stupid Does...

Harsh Reality Alert: If You Feel at ALL Sorry For THIS Guy, You May Be as Stupid as HE Is!...

Or as Cappy Cap (http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/) puts it, “The price of ignorance is this”:

"I am fool."

That self-assessment comes from Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean economist who moved to North Korea a quarter-century ago, dragging along his unhappy wife and two teenage daughters (pictured above in N Korean Prison Camp). He then defected to the West, leaving his family stranded in a country his wife had called "a living hell."

Oh lives alone now in a fusty, computer-filled apartment in the capital of South Korea. At 68, he is retired as a researcher for a government-funded think tank. He says he drinks too much rice wine and dwells too much on what might have been...

...His wife and daughters - if alive – are believed to be prisoners in Camp No. 15, one of several sprawling political prisons in the mountains of North Korea.

The self-acknowledged foolishness of Oh began in Germany in 1985. He was married with two young daughters and studying for a doctoral degree in economics at the University of Tuebingen. He was also an outspoken and left-leaning opponent of the  authoritarian government then running South Korea.

His activism attracted the attention of North Korean agents, who approached Oh and offered help with a family medical problem.

His wife, Shin Sook-ja, a South Korean nurse, was sick with hepatitis. The North Koreans convinced Oh that she would get free first-class treatment in Pyongyang and that he would get a good government job.

"My wife did not want to go," Oh said. "I ignored her objections."

Via East Germany and Moscow, the family
arrived in Pyongyang on Dec. 3, 1985, Oh
said, and was immediately taken to nearby
mountains for indoctrination at a military
camp.

"The moment we stepped into that camp, I knew my wife was right and I had made the wrong decision," Oh said.

His wife received no treatment for hepatitis.

Instead, she and her husband spent several months studying the teachings of Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader" and founding dictator of North Korea. He died in 1994 and was replaced by his son, Kim Jong Il, who continues to run what is often called the
most repressive state on Earth.

Oh and his wife were given jobs working in a radio station broadcasting propaganda to South Korea. Soon, though, authorities ordered Oh to return to Germany and recruit more South Korean students to live in North Korea. His wife and daughters, he was told, could not go along...

...Oh recalls that he and his wife argued bitterly about what he should do.

"She hit me in the face when I said I would come back with some South Koreans," Oh said. "She said I could not have that on my conscience. She told me to leave North Korea and never come back. She told me to think of her and our daughters as being dead from a car accident."

Shortly after Oh defected, his wife and daughters were detained in Pyongyang and taken to Camp 15, a former North Korean prisoner told Amnesty International. Two years later, according to another former prisoner, the three were moved from a "rehabilitation" section of the camp, where prisoners are sometimes released, to a "complete control district," where they work until they die.

There has been no further information about Oh's wife and daughters since then.

In the early 1990s, Oh wrote a book, "Please Return My Wife and Daughters, Kim Il Sung." It did not occasion a response from North Korea.

Oh said he sometimes believes his family is still alive, and sometimes he is convinced that they are dead. Either way, he blames himself.

http://www.startribune.com/world/85009842.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUss

Yes it’s a sad story, left-wing dupe falls for the leftist lies of some leftist tyrant and he and his family are subjected to a concentration camp life as “the worker’s paradise” he’d been promised. Then the pathetic left-wing dupe re-defects, leaving his helpless wife and teenaged daughters in that hell hole...and then spends the rest of his miserable life whining about how much HE lost!

Oh Kil-nam isn’t much more insipid than any of the hordes of other Western Leftists who pine away for a “socialist utopia,” who shout inane slogans like, “The people and their needs must be above the demands of markets,”

No reasonable, rational person can have any sympathy at all for a cowardly fool like Oh Kil-nam, after all, the ONLY true “victims” in all of this are his wife and daughters. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a MARONE!”