North Korea ‘White Paper’ Labels U.S. a ‘Human Rights Desert’

Compared to the orderly workers’ paradise in North Korea, the United States is a nightmarish wasteland of democracy with a horrific social system based on “the law of the jungle and extreme individualism.”

That is the crux of a report released this week by the North Korean government’s Institute of International Studies, as reported in Rodong Sinmun, the newsletter of North Korea’s Communist Party.

“The U.S. is loud in its advocacy of ‘universal respect for human rights,’ publishing ‘annual reports’ that deal with the human rights situations in other countries. However, it can never cover up nor negate its own human rights situation that has been the subject of international criticism and condemnation,” Rodong reported.

In the paper, the authors question how the United States dares lecture North Korea for throwing dissidents in concentration camps or blowing inconvenient public officials to shreds with anti-aircraft guns when American dentists charge $500 for tooth extractions.

“The ‘health insurance’ has become a legal tool for emptying the people’s purses,” the paper declares, in a backhanded critique of Obamacare.

Officials supply further evidence for the white paper’s contention that the United States is “a human rights desert where even elementary human rights are not provided”:

In the U.S., in one week of December 2016, 275 000 persons joined the chronic contingent of the unemployed, numbering 7.9 million; 18.8 percent of the total number of the unemployed was young people.

Last year the number of persons without shelter exceeded 560 000, and 322 000 persons in 17 northern counties in Florida are maintaining a bare existence with the help of “charitable organizations.”

According to the statistics made public by economists jointly at the end of 2016, the average annual income of the wealthy people accounting for 1 percent of the total population was 81 times that of those under the middle class, a considerable increase from 27 times 36 years ago.

Over the past 25 years, school expenses skyrocketed to 440 percent. About 6 million young people less than 24 years old do not think about going to school, and 1.2 million high-school students give up further studies every year because of the exorbitant school expenses.

The authors picked up on the Obama administration’s favorite discredited factoid: “Though women occupy 57 percent of the workforce, their salary is 81 percent of that of their male counterparts, and it is 69 percent and 58 percent for the Afro-American and Hispanic women.”

The “white paper” seems to be a grab bag of political arguments and bits of bad news researchers” pulled off the news wires, with attempts made to hit what the North Koreans see as social pressure points in the U.S., such as income inequality and black-vs.-white crime statistics.

The core theme of the report, as with all collectivist propaganda, is that social problems do not exist in North Korea because the government runs everything, providing “free” housing, food, healthcare, education, and so forth. Such arguments are hardly foreign to U.S. politics. The North Koreans simply exaggerate them to a grotesque degree.