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Байка́ло-Аму́рский исправи́тельно-трудово́й ла́герь, Бамла́г

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Байка́ло-Аму́рский исправи́тельно-трудово́й ла́герь, Бамла́г

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Baikal Amur forced labor camp.

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The Bataan death march and the prisoner camps

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The Bataan death march and the prisoner camps

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The Bataan death march happened after the capture of US and Filipino soldiers by the Japanese after their surrender at the Battle of Bataan. They were sent to Camp O'Donnell where they were imprisoned and where many died. The Japanese did not follow the Geneva Convention and as a result, the majority of prisoners were in very poor condition when they were released.

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North Korean Politican detention/labor camps 

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North Korean Politican detention/labor camps 

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State department offers information about the North Korean regime and their imprisonment of political enemies in labor camps for up to three generations. Similar to how the regime in Gilead would send dissenters to work and eventually die in the colonies. https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2017/273647.htm

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The Kaechon political prison camp, also known as Camp 14, was established in 1959 and is located in the center of the country, approximately 40 miles north of Pyongyang, in South Pyongan Province. Situated on the north bank of the Taedong River, the camp is directly across the river from the Pukchang political prison camp (Camp 18) and near Mount Purok. The Kaechon political prison camp is located 12 miles to the southeast of the Kaechon reeducation labor camp. The DPRK government maintains different systems of labor camps - the kwan-li-so, or political prison camps, and the kwo-hwa-so, or reeducation labor camps - among other types of detention facilities.

Kaechon is approximately 60 square miles in area and is said to hold 15,000 prisoners, all serving life sentences. The camp appears to have been operating since at least the 1960s.

Like all political prison camps in North Korea, Kaechon is designed to segregate from the general prison population those considered "enemies of the State" and "unredeemable" because they have committed political crimes and to punish them for those crimes through unending hard labor. Those sent to the camp include officials perceived to have performed poorly in their job, people who have criticized the regime, and anyone suspected of engaging in anti-government activities. However, some Kaechon prisoners are victims of the regime's "three generations of punishment," in which three generations of a prisoner's family are also sent to the camp and may die there without having committed a crime themselves.

Kaechon is essentially one large total control zone, meaning all prisoners are serving life sentences. Economic activities that employ prisoners as slave labor include mining, textiles, farming, and raising livestock. Induced starvation is common among prisoners, who are driven to catch and eat rodents, frogs, and snakes.

The Yodok political prison camp, also known as Camp 15, is located 68 miles northeast of Pyongyang in Yodok County, South Hamgyong Province. Situated in a mountain valley formed by the Ipsok River, the camp is bordered by mountains on all sides. Yodok is approximately 145 square miles in area and is said to be surrounded by a 10-to-14-foot-tall barbed wire and electrified fence. 25-foot-tall watchtowers appear to be spaced at half-mile intervals. Reports suggest that 1,000 heavily armed guards and dogs patrol the camp. The only access to Yodok is through the Chaebong Pass. Reports emerged in 2014 suggesting that Yodok was being emptied and overhauled in order to create a model "prison" as part of a campaign to whitewash the regime's egregious human rights record.

Like all political prison camps in North Korea, Yodok is designed to segregate from the general prison population those "enemies of the State" that have committed political crimes and to punish them for those crimes through unending hard labor.

Yodok's total control zone includes two prison labor colonies, Pyongchang-ri and Yongpyong-ri, which hold North Koreans accused of crimes against the state or who are otherwise politically unreliable. While total control zone prisoners are never released, those held in Yodok's "revolutionizing zone" can be released after serving their sentences for political crimes deemed to be "less serious." Revolutionizing zone prisoners tend to come from privileged families. Other sections of the camp reportedly include Kouek, a secluded area reserved specifically for executions. Because prisoners have been released from Yodok's revolutionizing zone, many former prisoners have testified about the camp.

Prisoners are typically assigned to one of seven work groups within a work unit, which is overseen by a security guidance officer. Yodok includes a gypsum quarry and a gold mine, and many prisoners are killed or injured in mining operations. Other enterprises have included textile plants; a distillery for corn, acorn, and snake brandy; logging; and a coppersmith workshop.

Men found to have engaged in sexual activity are physically punished, and nearly all pregnancies discovered by guards are forcibly aborted.

In 2014, it was confirmed that detainee housing and related support buildings were razed and the former revolutionizing zone is no longer used to house detainees. According to the testimonies of former prisoners and guards, "regular" farmers and miners from adjacent villages, not prisoners, now work in the camp. It is possible that the camp is still partially functioning and holding detainees.

There is little information available on the total control zone Camp No. 16 (Hwasong political prison camp). Located in Hwasong County, North Hamgyong Province, 385 kilometers northeast of the capital of Pyongyang, there are no known former prisoners or camp officials available to testify about conditions in the camp. The limited information about the facility has been drawn from testimony by local residents. Camp 16 is reported to be a total control zone divided into three sections for prisoners whose crimes differ in severity. Unconfirmed reports suggest prisoners may be used in the construction of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. This camp site also has hydropower capabilities and light agricultural and mining industrial activities along the waterway.

The National Human Rights Commission of [South] Korea has estimated there are approximately 20,000 prisoners in Camp 16. Some NGOs report that prisoners from Camp 22 may have been transferred to Camp 16 in 2012. Satellite imagery analysis does show some modest construction at Camp 16 around that time, but more information would be necessary to conclude whether the expansion was the result of a growing prisoner population.

Camp 18, also known as Pukchang political prison camp, was located on the other side of the Taedong River from Camp No. 14 in South Pyongan Province. Unlike the other camps, which are run by the Ministry of State Security, Camp 18 was administered by the Ministry of People's Security. Civilians from outside the camp were employed as administrators over various subsections of the facility. Defectors have reported the camp was approximately 28 square miles and could hold roughly 27,000-30,000 prisoners. The camp has reportedly been under construction since 2006, though it appears to continue to hold prisoners

Many Camp 18 detainees were relatives of prisoners of Camp 14. Prisoners were allowed to live together with family members and, in some instances, to marry and have children. Detainees were required to work in coal mining, brick making, cement making, and in a glass factory and distillery.

Large numbers of prisoners died of malnutrition, disease, and work accidents, and administrators ordered public executions for escape attempts. While the camp was fully operational, some prisoners were released from imprisonment but continued to reside at the camp where they had access to mail, local markets, and domestic travel permits. These individuals were separated from prisoners by an electrified barbed wire fence and were also granted access to small plots of land for personal farming.

Over the years, there were at least two large scale prisoner releases from Camp 18, resulting in a relatively large number of witnesses, both prisoners and guards, within the defector community.

NGOs report that the Hoeryong political prison camp, also known as Camp 22, held an estimated 50,000 prisoners at its peak in the 1990s. In mid-2012, sources inside North Korea reported that the camp had closed. Satellite imagery analysis conducted by NGOs surmised that the location remained inhabited and active, but defector consensus has concluded that Camp 22 is no longer operational. Media reports indicate that many of the camps prisoners were transferred to Camp 16 (Chongjin political prison camp), but several thousand prisoners remain unaccounted for.

There are no known former prisoners of the camp that have escaped from North Korea. The only testimonies about the camp have come from former guards and local residents who observed the camp operations from outside.

According to former camp guard Ahn Myong-chol, the camp was nearly 31 miles long and 25 miles wide. While Ahn was assigned to the camp in the early 90s, there were roughly 1,000 guards and 500-600 administrative agents. It is surrounded by an inner 3300-volt electric fence and an outer barbed wire fence. Public executions were held weekly in the camp until the 1990s, when camp administrators, allegedly fearing riots, moved the executions to a secret site known as "Sugol."

In his testimony about the camp, Ahn recalled his shock upon first arriving at the camp and observing prisoners that he likened to walking skeletons, "dwarfs," and "cripples" in rags. He estimated that between 1,500 and 2,000 prisoners, mostly children, died annually of malnutrition during his years there. Ahn also described brutal abuses committed in the camp's punishment chamber, which another former guard has described as "a prison inside the prison." In this chamber, prisoners were forced to sit on their knees for extended periods of time while being beaten by guards. Guards severely beat prisoners for even the slightest movements. Ahn noted that prisoners detained in the punishment chambers were often crippled after three months and dead within five months.

Ahn and other former guards have testified to the brutality that they were encouraged to demonstrate while punishing prisoners. Former guards have confessed that they were taught not to view prisoners as humans. However, the number of deaths from beating prisoners was so high that at one point, the guards were encouraged to be less violent.

The razing of guard posts and fences suggest the shift from a prisoner workforce to a local workforce.

According to NGO reports, the Chongjin political prison camp (Camp 25) covers nearly 247 acres of land in North Hamgyong Province and has an estimated population of 5,000 prisoners. Satellite imagery analysis shows that the camp perimeter grew 72 percent between 2009 and 2010. New guard posts, an air defense site, a high security walled building, a security area, and possibly a leadership memorial building were added to the camp. When Camp 22 (Hoeryong political prison camp) closed in 2012, NGOs speculated that some prisoners were transferred to Camp 25. Recent NGO reports indicate enhanced levels of economic interaction between the camp and adjacent areas, possibly indicating the increased economic importance of Camp 25 prison labor. Primary industry is focused on agriculture and livestock, a furniture factory and a lumber yard.

The camp appears to be a well-maintained and high-functioning prison with light industrial factories.

NGOs report that Chongjin is a total control zone prison holding only offenders, while other camps hold the offenders and their families. The camp facilities appear to be more like a traditional penitentiary, where offenders are detained collectively in prison cells versus the individual units in collective farms found in other camps. The sole known camp witness has testified that there are solitary cells in the prisonused for long term prisoners rather than short term punishment.

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The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea brought to light the deplorable situation inside North Korea. The Commission's excellent report gives us all the opportunity to hear and read the harrowing testimony of North Korean witnesses to the deeply disturbing crimes committed by the regime against its own people.

The "Voices of North Korea" highlights personal stories that are at once all too familiar to many North Korean escapees, yet unimaginable to those of us living elsewhere. Now that the world has heard their voices, it is more important than ever to act on behalf of the suffering.

*The DPRK government maintains a number of different types of detention centers. This listing describes the operations and conditions typically associated with the kwan-li-so, also known as political prison camps. Information on other types of North Korean detention facilities can be found in the DPRK section of the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

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The Kaechon political prison camp, also known as Camp 14, was established in 1959 and is located in the center of the country, approximately 40 miles north of Pyongyang, in South Pyongan Province. Situated on the north bank of the Taedong River, the camp is directly across the river from the Pukchang political prison camp (Camp 18) and near Mount Purok.

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The Gilead regime was in itself an institution of a kind, and death camps provide valuable insight into the way institutions work. The guards would have had to justify to themselves their actions, and being part of a larger institution allows them to defer blame.

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THEOSOPHY, Vol. 37, No. 1, November, 1948
(Pages 9-13; Size: 14K)
(Number 7 of a 15-part series)
MIND OF THE AGE
VII: CONCENTRATION-CAMP PSYCHOLOGY

For those who seek to understand the psychological illness of our time, the Nazi death camps of World War II may prove to have been object lessons nearly as valuable as they were costly. These "camps" represented the acute stage of a universal disease called Institutionalism. In Buchenwald and Dachau, for instance, a plan for the systematized dehumanization of human personality was conceived and executed with considerable "scientific" acumen. After prolonged incarceration, even the death of an individual seemed less and less important to his friends and family -- finally, to himself. His identification was gone. He was already as if dead, to family and acquaintances. He was not even charged with any particular crime, nor was he serving any specified sentence. For him, the world, as it is commonly known, had ceased to exist. Only The Process of the camp remained. In the vast majority of instances, the moral person was successfully killed before the death of the body.

In a comprehensive article, "The Concentration Camps" (in the June Partisan Review), Hannah Arendt centers her discussion around one point, that "the psyche (or character) can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man." Tersely and effectively, she sums up the technique designed for the destruction of moral consciousness:

When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family -- how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. In perhaps the only article which really gets to the core of this matter, Camus (in Twice a Year, 1947) tells of a woman in Greece, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which among her three children should be killed.
Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total. The SS implicated concentration camp inmates -- criminals, politicals, Jews -- in their crimes by making them responsible for a large part of the administration, thus confronting them with the hopeless dilemma whether to send their friends to their death, or to help murder other men who happened to be strangers.

The aim of the concentration camps, Miss Arendt shows, was to destroy the civil rights of the whole German population, to render the total citizenry incapable of individuality in any form. "Even free consent is an obstacle," for spontaneity of any kind proclaims the presence of a distinct person whose acts and responses cannot be exactly the same as everyone else's and who is therefore a disturbing factor in the regimented society. But we of the "democracies" expect a great deal of conformity also, especially when involved in a war or when afraid of being so involved. In wartime the use of individual moral discrimination is more or less dishonored under democratic as well as under authoritarian systems of government, and few are the active champions of this prerogative of ethical freedom. The death-camp psychology is only the last mile on the road of materialism, a thoroughfare with which every nation is familiar. The ideology of the death camp is an attempt to repeal the power of choice in the human ego, in the interests of efficiency.
What once seemed to be a technical debate about the reality of mind versus matter is now revealed to have been essentially a denial of the individual man's value. Miss Arendt writes that in a totalitarian system, "Character is a threat and even the most unjust legal rules are an obstacle; but individuality, anything indeed that distinguishes one man from another, is intolerable." Totalitarianism does not strive simply toward despotic rule over men, but "toward a system in which men are superfluous." To realize that the social consequence of materialism is institutionalism will make clear the way in which American bureaucracy in both business and government, national militarization programs, and national propaganda are related to the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Unless the premises of Institutionalism are denied in practice, unless the individual citizen is continually granted more "inalienable rights" and more areas of responsibility in government, any system is tending toward the death-camp goal: total disenfranchisement of man. The acme of Institutionalism is graphically described by David Rousset in his seven-hundred-page recollection of concentration camp experience entitled Les Jours de notre mort (literally, "the days of our death"):

The triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the SS men desire this defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold ... is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. The man who sees this says to himself: "For them to be thus reduced, what power must be concealed in the hands of the masters," and he turns away, full of bitterness but defeated.
The death camps aimed at perfecting an idiot- or robot-producing machine, and must have succeeded in the "extreme cases" (which were the rule instead of the exception) in so crippling the bodily instrument that the inner character could hardly communicate intelligibly. As Miss Arendt observes: "Actually the experience of the concentration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human beast, and that man's 'nature' is only 'human' in so far as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man."
Eugen Kogon, another survivor whose book Miss Arendt refers to as the product of "assimilated recollection," has offered the thesis that "most of the prisoners [left] the concentration camps with exactly the same convictions that they had before; if anything, these convictions became more accentuated." This is striking evidence of the fact that it is extremely easy to encourage large portions of humanity to "reinvolute into the animal kingdom" -- the alternative to moral growth. Man cannot stand still and remain human. The camps, as Miss Arendt points out, are a demonstration that "the power of man is so great that he really can be what he wishes to be" -- even if he wants to be less than man. The "drill grounds" for SS men, in Kogon's phrase, were also a fantastic experiment in cultivating inhumanity in the administrators themselves.

The cruelest situation must have some reason for being and for afflicting certain persons and not others; for one thing, the onlooker is always involved, and must choose between indifference and degrees of purposeful action. From Miss Arendt's conclusion it is evident that the indifference of the "outside world" to the fate of concentration camp victims would be only another Nazi victory. She writes:

Today, with population almost everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously being rendered superfluous by political, social, and economic events. At such a time the instruments devised for making human beings superfluous are bound to offer a great temptation: why not use these same instruments to liquidate human beings who have already become superfluous?
This side of the matter is only too well understood by the common sense of the mob which in most countries is too desperate to retain much fear of death. The Nazis, who were well aware that their defeat would not solve the problems of Europe, knew exactly what they were doing when, toward the end of the war -- which by then they knew they had lost -- they set up those factories of annihilation which demonstrated the swiftest possible solution to the problem of superfluous human masses. There is no doubt that this solution will from now on occur to millions of people whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, or social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

One difficulty in arousing the popular conscience with respect to the death camps is the fact that most people seem to find the very existence of the Nazi crimes unbelievable. Even when faced by the most exact corroborating testimony, complete with photographs and statistical records kept by the Nazis, the mind seldom accedes to the reality. Yet the process of deliberately destroying the personality of "political enemies" continues in Russia today in only slightly attenuated form. And now, for the citizens of the democracies, comes the vital question. Were eighty million German people completely different from ourselves? Was their culture, one filled with the contributions of fully as many humanitarian philosophers and artists as our own, of an entirely different bent? Are two hundred million Russians utterly dissimilar to ourselves? True, they are governed by a system which practices many horrors, and they support that system either by acquiescence or by positive zeal. But unless "citizens of the democracies" are themselves hopelessly institutionalized, they may answer truthfully that neither the German nor the Russian people are fundamentally different from ourselves, nor are their institutions based upon an entirely "foreign" psychology.
The programs of totalitarianism in Germany, Russia and Japan began with militarization. At present the process of militarization is still proceeding in the United States. Once grant the inescapable premise that men in the mass in all countries are much the same, and there is no dodging the conclusion that the degree of militarism already attained in England and America makes us to some degree like "those others." How fantastic and remote this sounds! Yet there is no flaw in the logic. The outcome of the argument appears fantastic and unreal only for the reason that in no modern western nation are men aware of the world-wide encroachment of institutional values upon the life of the human soul. The institutionalisms of England and America have not produced concentration camps, nor will they necessarily do so, but they have produced millions of minds already prone to think in "concentration-camp" terms, and to be blinded to all values apart from those of commercial, religious and political propaganda.

Few Americans saw anything of the "totalitarian" psychology in the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima or in the subsequent Bikini tests. But there is a strong connectedness of motivation and attitude. Both death camps and atom bombs are distinct repudiations or twistings of the moral sense. The real destruction is not by atom bombs, any more than the real obliteration of the German death camp inmate was accomplished in the gas chamber. Final destruction is death of the soul. If the moral man dies, there ends also that area of interdependence in aspiration uniting all who share a common humanity.
COMPILER'S NOTE: The following is a separate item which followed the above article but was on the same page. I felt it was useful to include it here:
The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.

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"MIND OF THE AGE"
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THEOSOPHY, Vol. 37, No. 1, November, 1948 (Pages 9-13; Size: 14K)(Number 7 of a 15-part series)MIND OF THE AGE VII: CONCENTRATION-CAMP PSYCHOLOGY For those who seek to understand the psychological illness of our time, the Nazi death camps of World War II may prove to have been object lessons nearly as valuable as they were costly.

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Burying the dead prisoners at Camp O'Donnell

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"annihilation through work," essentially enabled the plan of Jewish extinction in Nazi Germany. Similarly, the idea of work camps allows Gileadean society to do away with rebels, accomplish some kind of free “work” and to have a viable and obscure threat with which to threaten those who dared to defy them.

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Even before the war began, the Nazis imposed forced labor on Jewish civilians, both inside and outside concentration camps. As early as 1937, the Nazis increasingly exploited the forced labor of so-called "enemies of the state" for economic gain and to meet desperate labor shortages.

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Ebensee Concentration camp. Austria, 1945. 

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Ebensee Concentration camp. Austria, 1945. 

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Survivors of Ebensee concentration camp taken at liberation by US Troops.