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Otto… I can't stop thinking about Otto Warmbier.
His horrific death is unique and universal.
A carefree young man who sets forth on an odyssey is a story as old as time.
But a young student punished for an act of light-hearted mischief by having his brain destroyed — a fact kept secret for a year — is a travesty that could only happen in the most repressive and bizarre country on earth.
North Korea's diabolical treatment of Mr Warmbier reveals the central threat to that despotic regime.
Kim Jong-un's greatest fear isn't nuclear weapons — it's freedom of thought.
A bedrock principle often taken for granted in Australia, the US and other Western democracies.
Consider this: A 2016 study by Australia's Lowy Institute showed that only 61 per cent of Australians polled thought "democracy is preferable to any other kind of government".
Those who are Mr Warmbier's age are even less impressed.
Only 54 per cent of 18-29 year-olds believe democracy is the best. The Lowy Institute notes:
"One of the most striking findings in our polling history has been about the value Australians place on democracy. Over the last five years, Australians, particularly young Australians, have consistently indicated a surprising ambivalence about democracy as a system of Government."
Wake up, Australia.
What happened to Mr Warmbier was the collision of a young man raised according to Western ideas in a country that is deeply threatened by them.
Mr Warmbier visited North Korea with a Chinese company called Young Pioneer Tours in January, 2016. His "crime" was to take a propaganda poster.
In a sham trial two months later, he was sentenced to 15 years hard labour for "hostile acts against the state".
When his comatose body was sent back to the United States last week, North Korea said that he had suffered botulism and later taken a sleeping pill.
Doctors who treated Mr Warmbier at the University of Cincinnati Medical Centre in Ohio said he had suffered a "severe neurological injury".
They could not say what precisely caused the devastating damage to his brain.
The Rights of Man
Father Fred Warmbier chose to address the media wearing his son's jacket. It was a simple and eloquent expression of a family's pain and the universality of North Korea's crimes against Otto.
Otto could have been you or me. My daughter or your son. Any of us who tell our children to be curious. Travel the world. Call out injustice. Think for themselves.
New York Times reporter Sheryl Stolberg, a former executive editor of the UVA newspaper Cavalier Daily, told me: "Everywhere in America, people feel for these parents. There is sadness and anger. It is horrifying."
I didn't know Mr Warmbier, but he attended the University of Virginia, my alma mater.
UVA is a public university nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Charlottesville. It was founded by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.
Less well-known is the fact that Jefferson also helped General Marquis de Lafayette draft France's Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Jefferson believed passionately in freedom of thought and expression. He believed in the messy, fractious work we call democracy.
His writings are among the sources of inspiration for the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The preamble sounds familiar:
"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."
Nearly every line Jefferson penned in defence of liberty and independence of mind is an arrow aimed at authoritarian regimes like North Korea.
To be young is to be mischievous. To attend UVA, as Mr Warmbier did, is to get an extra dose of independent thought. To be nurtured at a taproot of liberty.
The democratic experiments of the United States and Australia are, of course, flawed. Sometimes deeply. But the key difference between "us and them" is that we can think and speak and write pretty much as we like. We are free.
There is no freedom of thought in North Korea. There's no room for mischief or silliness or speaking out or making a mistake. North Korea demands that its citizens be mindless. Or it destroys their minds, as it did to Mr Warmbier.
The fact that nearly half of 18-29 year old Australians don't believe democracy and all the freedom it delivers is the best system of government looks even more ludicrous in the face of Otto's story.
Jefferson understood the freedoms that only democracy could deliver.
Nearly two centuries after his work on the Declaration of Independence, British prime minister Winston Churchill perhaps summed up what young Australian need to understand, and the lesson that Mr Warmbier's death brings home:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Topics: world-politics, foreign-affairs, law-crime-and-justice, korea-democratic-people-s-republic-of, united-states
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