Yesterday, Ace spent some time mocking Frederic Rich, a novelist who wants us all to be very afraid that a Christian theocracy could spring up here in the United States. In the book, this happens after President Sarah Palin declares martial law. According to a review at USA Today, “the Air Force bombs the Castro neighborhood, killing 12,000 people, mostly gay men.” At some point the book may also recount a civil war between the Christian right and the secular residents of Manhattan.
There is a kind of cosmic irony to the timing of Rich’s book. Even as he envisions this fascist nightmare which he attributes to real politicians in a kind of book length violation of Godwin’s law, there is an actual nightmare being visited upon Christians in Egypt, one which is inspiring comparisons to Kristallnacht.
Even more striking is the fact that there is at least one genuinely murderous autocracy on the planet right now and it is decidedly not run by right-wing Christians. Today Reuters reports on a U.N. panel which heard testimony about the gulag system in socialist North Korea:
Jee Heon-a, 34, told the Commission that from the first day of her
incarceration in 1999, she discovered that salted frogs were one of the
few things to eat.“Everyone’s eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals. Frogs
were hung from the buttons of their clothes, put in a plastic bag and
their skins peeled off,” she said. “They ate salted frogs and so did I.”Speaking softly, she took a deep breath when describing in detail how a mother was forced to kill her own baby.
I’ll spare you the details but suffice it to say that–in addition to murder, torture and starvation–post-birth abortion is a reality in North Korean gulags. This should interest Frederic Rich who is very concerned about attempts to restrict abortion in Texas to 20 weeks. This law, since passed and signed, makes Texas nearly as conservative as France. Indeed, as Carly Fiorina noted recently, the US is only one of four countries that allows abortion after 20 weeks. North Korea is one of the other three.
Even outside the camps, North Korea has been judged the least free place on earth. An examination of the remainder of the world’s most repressive regimes turns up a curious coincidence. Nearly all of them are ruled either by Communists or Islamists. Christians are distinctly underrepresented. You might think would play into the left’s calculus when deciding which ideology is most likely to spawn a dictatorial regime.
Ultimately, Christian Nation is only a novel. If the progressive left feels the need for an atheist version of Left Behind, so be it. Whatever the market will bear.
Back in the real world, Shin Dong-hyuk also testified to the U.N panel. He is the most well known prisoner to escape the North Korean camps. If you’re in the mood for a horrifying tale of government dictatorship, reality always outdoes fiction.
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