North Korea: "We don't have political prison camps because we don't have political divison."

CNN's recent interview with Park Yong Chol, a high ranking North Korean official, revealed a lot to the world about the mindset and condition of the mysterious dystopia. Every occasion in which a North Korean addresses the public, there is an undeniable eeriness to their thoughts and actions.

Park Yong Chol started off the interview by saying, rather frankly, that he did not like speaking with foreign media because he believed they spread "rumor and fabrication" about his country.

A sensitive matter was immediately danced upon when the topic of Kim Jong Un's personal orders of the execution of 15 officials earlier this year. Park said;

"Malicious slander! Especially as they try to link the allegations against to the august name of our Supreme Leader Marshall Kim Jong Un."

Despite the United Nation's reports about large scale human-rights abuse from North Korea, Park acknowledged that reform camps for regular criminals existed, however denied the existence of any political prison camps.

"Our society is a society without political strife or factions or political divisions -- as a result we don't have the term 'political prisoner.'"

Park went on to write off North Korean defectors as fleeing criminals and, overarchingly, slanderers. He explained that "so-called defectors" were plain criminals who had fled their country to avoid punishment. Now they stayed in South Korea and slandered the Northern government and fabricated nightmarish stories in order to avoid punishment furthermore.

Much of Park Yong Chol's words were, for lack of a better word, rather hollow and exactly what you would expect a high-class North Korean subject to say. However, Park did deliver a line which was undeniably interesting.

"If you talk about human rights in my country, I will talk about human rights in the United States," he said. "You have racial riots taking place in the wake of the killing of so many black people by the police. You have prisons full of inmates and new techniques of torture being used. The U.S. President and other high-ranking administration officials have acknowledged really severe forms of punishment on inmates in detention. If you talk about human rights in the DPRK, we will talk about human rights in the U.S."

As brainwashed as many of these officials may seem, and despite how easy it is to wipe this comment off as babbling from a devoted subject, there is a spine-chilling truth to this. The United States, and the Western world in general, are very quick to pass judgement about the treatment of people in other countries. However, we make little societal uproar in the midst of our own moral dilemmas.

That's all I have to say today, but I'll be back tomorrow. I added a large batch of new photos onto my Photography page, so please give it a look and feel free to comment and tell me your thoughts.

"No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." -Mary Wollstonecraft