Grossly unfair. Arrogant. Inflammatory. These were among the adjectives that critics used to describe President Bush’s "axis of evil" moniker for Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. "I think we've got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind," said Senator Tom Daschle. Jimmy Carter said Bush’s words were "seriously disturbing" American relations with those countries. Madeleine Albright called Bush's comments "a big mistake," while Clinton national security staffer Antony Blinken said they were intended to draw public attention away from "things less comfortable, like the economy and the Enron scandal." Robert Einhorn, who helped negotiate Clinton’s disastrous 1994 deal with Pyongyang, claimed that Bush’s "tough rhetoric" left the North Koreans "unnerved" and bound to react defiantly. A Los Angeles Times piece accused Bush of concocting a "rationale for a grossly expanded military budget." Wake Forest University professor James Dunn said, "When that sort of ultimate certainty [Bush’s assertion that some regimes are evil] comes along, you have the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Puritan hangings."

Criticism from overseas also washed ashore in due time. French foreign minister Hubert Védrine called Bush’s comments "too simplistic." Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov questioned whether there was sufficient evidence to label the three regimes "evil." British foreign secretary Jack Straw saw Bush’s remarks as political whoring of the worst kind, "best understood by the fact that there are mid-term congressional elections coming up in November." The South Korean press was flooded with cries that Bush was "undercutting years of diplomacy" with the Stalinist North.

If one believes that Bush was wrong to dub certain regimes "evil" – on the theory that all evil is relative and is differentially defined in different cultures – the joining implication is that the US has no moral authority to dictate which nations should be allowed to develop the great equalizer, nuclear weaponry. This view is passionately espoused by "peace" advocates like Ramsey Clark and members of the group Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism. This past Saturday thousands of such activists staged a rally in Washington, DC. While their most immediate concern involved the possibility of US military action in Iraq, the current tensions with North Korea clearly raise similar political dilemmas. Lampooning the "arrogant" American demand that Iraq and North Korea submit to unfettered weapons inspections, many of the demonstrators portrayed UN weapons inspectors and symbolically demanded access to the White House and the Washington Naval Yard to search for weapons of mass destruction.

It would be fascinating to eavesdrop on a conversation where critics like these might speak to one of the thousands of tortured, long-forgotten political prisoners in Saddam’s Iraq. It would be equally absorbing to hear such critics ask a gentleman named Ahn Myong Chol what he thinks of their notions about good, evil, and moral relativism. Chol spent several years as a guard at a vast North Korean slave labor camp in Haengyong. Encircled by a ten-foot-high electrified barbed-wire fence accompanied by minefields and mantraps, this camp holds some 50,000 inmates who, according to Chol, "provide slave labor for the [nearby] farms and factories [and a coal mine where] many die of exhaustion, their energy sapped by pitifully small rations, or by vicious beatings from guards." South Korean intelligence sources estimate that 210,000 people are imprisoned in 10 such camps around North Korea. According to the Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights, at least 400,000 prisoners have died agonizing deaths in these camps since they were established by the late dictator Kim Il Sung in 1972.

Most of the inmates were imprisoned for somehow offending either Sung or his son, the current president Kim Jong Il. Their offenses may have been as trivial as tearing up a newspaper photo of one of these tyrants, uttering a negative comment about the Communist Party, or listening to a foreign radio broadcast. Once incarcerated, the prisoners are generally never seen or heard from again outside the camps. Moreover, Kim’s policy demands that three generations of every prisoner’s family should be wiped out to "cleanse" his socialist haven. Thus if a man is pronounced guilty of one of the aforementioned "crimes," his parents and children are sent to the labor camp along with him – for the sole purpose of slow, tortured extermination.

After speaking with Mr. Chol, perhaps the "peace" advocates who flocked to Washington might enjoy a chat with Soon Ok Lee, a former prisoner who told a US Senate committee of grisly biological and chemical weapons experiments that are regularly performed on the North Korean inmates; of gruesome tortures performed with electricity and water; of guards who use prisoners as targets when practicing their martial arts maneuvers; of frequent public executions of "anti-party elements"; and of people burned to death for believing in Christianity.

Ms. Lee describes how the unborn babies of female prisoners are often killed by "inserting salts and salt liquids into the wombs." She tells of pregnant women forced to deliver their babies "on the cement floor without blankets [while] the prison doctor kick[ed] the . . . women with his boots. When a baby was born, the doctor shouted, ‘Kill it quickly. How can a criminal expect to have a baby? Kill it.’ The women covered their faces with their hands and wept. . . . The prisoner-nurses . . . squeezed the babies’ necks to kill them."

Lee further explains how, for thirteen years in a labor camp, she was literally robbed of her humanity, relentlessly tortured into confessing to a crime (embezzlement) she did not commit. The flesh on her face was torn from her lip halfway to her ear. "They frequently poured cold water on my body and left me outside in freezing winter nights," she says. "Once I was left on the floor unconscious for many hours and woke up to find worms in my wounds. . . . I was kicked for every movement from one location to another. I was no longer a human but a beast."

Or perhaps the champions of "nuclear self-determination," who are squeamish about terms like "evil," might like to converse with the sick, starved, and exhausted inmates who are forced to participate in worship services honoring Kim Jong Il, and are then forced to study for competitions in which they must recite Kim’s purportedly eloquent New Year’s Address by heart. Under pain of death, these same slave laborers manufacture a host of export items (such as clothing, table mats, and ashtrays) that Kim’s communist system is too inefficient to produce. As Ms. Lee explains, "The work begins at 5:30 in the morning and closes at 11:00 at night. . . . [T]he slightest mistake . . . could be cause for severe punishment, even killing . . . "You can go to the toilet only twice a day . . . at fixed times. There is only one toilet for every 300 prisoners. Eighty to ninety prisoners share a floor space of 5 meters by 6 meters. Sleeping there was torture in itself."

Thirty-year-old Chul-Hwan Kang, imprisoned with his family at the age of nine and held for ten years, has similar tales of horror to tell. "There was nothing I did not eat," he recounts. "Snakes, rats, frogs, whatever I could lay my hands on. Some of us would find worms in the ground or from the river. Some could not do this. Those who could not eat anything just perished."

Maybe the hordes of well-fed American "peace" activists with pristine fingernails should speak with Li Sun Ok, who recently told a New York Times reporter of her old friend Chae Wal Ryung, a mother of two who was forced to take over the workload of her incarcerated husband after he died in a mining accident. When the starving Ms. Ryung "stopped on her way home and stole a beet root from a field, she was arrested on the spot, and she was never allowed to go home or see her children again. . . . She had images of her children starving to death. But the guards accused her of being reactionary, of not having faith in the Party to care for her children. So she was shot."

Li Sun Ok was herself falsely accused of embezzlement, and was tortured and sexually abused for months. Sometimes she was tied up and forced to drink huge amounts of water from the long spout of a kettle. The only way to avoid drowning was to drink, and when her belly was filled to capacity, the guards would stomp on her abdomen until she vomited.

In Li’s slave camp, those who did not work hard enough were locked in a pitch-dark, coffin-sized punishment cell and starved. Others were executed more swiftly. Li recalls her friend Suh Young Soon, a young woman who was tied to an iron pole, gagged, and shot for accidentally tearing some fabric on a nylon dress she was sewing. Prisoners caught trying to escape, says Li, "were hanged slowly from a gallows so that it took them a long time to die, And while they were dying, the guards made us inmates line up and throw stones at them." The arbitrary nature of this satanic cruelty is demonstrated by the fact that Li herself achieved freedom only because of a whimsical 1992 amnesty marking the 80th birthday of Kim Il Sung.

Perhaps the "status quo" crowd that convened in Washington could chat with the bereaved relatives of Kim Chul-min, a starving prisoner who was shot dead by a guard for trying to eat some fallen chestnuts. Or maybe they could converse with the heartbroken survivors of Kal Li-yong, an inmate who was executed for boiling and eating a guard’s whip. Or possibly they could listen to the haunting memories of other former prisoners who recall seeing fellow inmates "picking through cow dung to find bits of corn to eat and also to eat the fleas feeding there"; the accounts of eyewitnesses describing the secret executions carried out in cramped compression chambers, wherein prisoners are subjected to lethal extremes of alternately hot and frigid temperatures.

Then there are tales of misery from outside the prison camps as well – tales like that of 40-year-old Sohn In Kuk, who watched his mother, father, brother, wife, and daughter all die of starvation in President Kim’s Korea, where the army is well fed while everyone else goes hungry. Having lost everyone he loved in this world, the wretched Mr. Kuk tried to flee to China to save himself, but was caught by border guards and beaten to death with a steel pipe. His crime: "crossing the border."

The current North Korean famine – triggered in 1995 by a series of floods and droughts, and exacerbated by the country’s inefficient socialist economy – has already killed between two and three million people. Earmarking fully one-fourth of the nation’s gross domestic product for military purposes, Kim’s government cares not a whit about the dying masses under its rule. If not for the US, which is the world’s largest food donor to North Korea, the situation would be even worse. According to a Congressional report, America now feeds one-third of all North Koreans. Yet Pyongyang continues to reject US requests for monitors to oversee its food aid distribution sites, 90 percent of which have never been monitored. Defectors tell of food being distributed exclusively to government and military personnel. Consistent with such reports, a US Congressional delegation that visited North Korea in 1998 also saw donated food in the army’s possession. A year earlier, cans of donated food were found in a North Korean submarine that ran aground off South Korea. More recently, the US-based charity World Concern reported that 689 boxes of food, intended for hospitals and orphanages, had mysteriously "vanished."

Because of such abominations by Kim’s government, millions of famished North Koreans are reduced to eating wild plants, tree bark, poisonous mushrooms, and indigestible grasses and cornstalks. These items have almost no nutritional value and can cause severe digestive problems and hemorrhaging, which ultimately kill many people. Some, who can only be described as walking corpses, have resorted in desperation to murdering vagrant children and selling their flesh at open markets. Children everywhere can be seen picking through cow dung for undigested grain, eating noodles off the ground, digging through rubbish for food, sucking on stripped fish bones, and drinking water from sewage drains.

An October 2002 Washington Post piece reports that, according to the most conservative estimates, Kim Jong Il "is directly murdering 42 North Koreans every day in his political prisoner camps and indirectly murdering 391 North Koreans every day by starving them to death." Utterly unaffected by such realities, Kim never fails to authorize the festivities of "National Day," a massive display of military pomp and pageantry honoring the purported glories of his socialist paradise.

Is none of this objectively evil? Are such moral monstrosities really "relative?" Are they in any way comparable to the imperfections that exist in American life? Can anyone honestly believe that such a regime – which has a great deal in common with Saddam Hussein’s – is morally fit for self-determination in the nuclear arena? What would prevent a tyrant like Kim, who has literally no regard for the sanctity of human life, from someday – perhaps in a paranoid or bellicose fit – launching one or more nuclear missiles at American cities? The Cold War deterrence of Mutually Assured Destruction clearly does not apply here, for Kim simply wouldn’t care if such an attack would guarantee retaliatory death to every living person in North Korea. More likely, he would relish the prospect of achieving a martyr’s death and everlasting fame for bringing down a mighty nation.

What if, hypothetically, Kim becomes terminally ill and thus sees his reign of earthly terror drawing to a close? What then would stop him from launching such an attack to take his hated enemies to the netherworld with him? And where would we stand then, utterly helpless without a missile defense system that the "peace" movement has so fervently opposed? Or are such cheerless possibilities too messy for that heads-in-the-sand crowd to contemplate?