Otto Warmbier and American Exceptionalism

On state violence, injustice, and double standards.

Time for some whataboutism.

Otto Warmbier, an American college student, traveled with friends to North Korea where he was arrested, charged with stealing a propaganda poster in his hotel, convicted, and sentenced to over a decade of hard labor.

He didn’t make it two years. Some time after his sentencing, he fell into a coma, was recently released and flown back to the United States, and died. The exact cause of his condition isn’t known, but he’d suffered extensive brain damage, almost certainly the result of abuse by the North Koreans.

It’s a horrifying story. But why? Why does it provoke us to rage, to a desire for violent revenge against the country that would commit such an atrocity? There’s a bad answer to this and a better one. Both are true, in that both are reasons why actual people find Warmbier’s story actually enraging. But both are troubling, as well. The bad answer is vacuous. The better answer, however, exposes in us, in our inconsistency of its application, a damaging hypocrisy that gets to the core of what’s wrong with so much of our politics.

Here’s the bad answer: We get mad when we hear about Otto Warmbier because it’s a story of them harming one of us. A foreign power…