North Korea wanted to rid itself of short people

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across some rather troubling information involving the treatment of short people in North Korea during Kim Jong Il's tumultuous reign.  While it didn't surprise me, it was and is still disturbing to think about.

A portion of a memoir about Kim Jong Il was included in Foreign Policy Magazine dated September 1st of 2008; a story which was penned by his former tutor Professor Kim Hyun Sik. 

Back in 1989, a few months after the Olympics were held in South Korea in 1988, the government of North Korea had decided to get rid of its "substandard" people.  They moved them out of the capital and even shipped the shorter ones off to uninhabited islands so that they couldn't reproduce and spread their "undesirable" genes. 

Here is a portion of the memoir:

All of which is bad news for those who don't fit into Kim Jong Il's ideal of a healthy, vital citizenry. In the people's paradise that is North Korea, disabled -- even short -- people are considered subhuman. In 1989, Pyongyang hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students. In preparing for the international gathering, the entire nation was encouraged to outdo South Korea's hosting of the Summer Olympic Games the year before. Pyongyang's event had to be bigger and more glamorous. One such method was to purify the revolutionary capital of Pyongyang of disabled people.
Six months before the festival, the government rounded up all disabled residents of Pyongyang and sent them away from the capital to remote villages. The majority were clockmakers, seal engravers, locksmiths, and cobblers who made their living in the city. Overnight, they were forcibly deprived of the lives they had known.
I saw this policy of "purification" up close. I have an old friend who, upon graduation from the Pyongyang University of Medicine, built a career in the state Academy of Medical Science. We were classmates at Heungnam High School and fought together in the Korean War. We were like brothers. One day during May 1989, he visited me at home looking deeply upset.
"What's troubling you? You look very distressed," I said to my friend.
"Well, I'm OK, I guess... but I've done a terrible thing. An abhorrent thing."
"What do you mean? You aren't a bad person."
His eyes welled with tears.
"I have made cripples out of normal, healthy people and sent them away for good," he said. "It is inhumane, what I have done. I shall never be able to hold my head up again."
My friend, a well-connected physician at the time, told me that he had been ordered by the Communist Party to pick out the shortest residents of Pyongyang and South Pyongan province. Against his conscience, he went out to those areas and had local party representatives distribute propaganda pamphlets. They claimed that the state had developed a drug that could raise a person's height and was recruiting people to receive the new treatment. In just two days, thousands gathered to take the new drug.
My friend explained how he picked out the shortest among the large group. He told the crowd that the drug would best take effect when consumed regularly in an environment with clean air. The people willingly, and without the slightest suspicion, hopped aboard two ships -- women in one, men in the other. Separately, they were sent away to different uninhabited islands in an attempt to end their "substandard" genes from repeating in a new generation. Left for dead, none of the people made it back home. They were forced to spend the rest of their lives separated from their families and far from civilization.

A very troubling revelation.  This was a blatant act of genocide! North Korea didn't want short people around so it got rid of them.  Anyone wonder if the United Nations intervened?  Obviously not.

Believe it, many feel this way about us shorter people that we are all "substandard".  If twitter is any indication, they would like nothing more than to have us removed from society.  Yet, they will, at the same time, claim that they are the most tolerant and open minded people to ever exist.