It's a simple statement, but it's something that many liberals think is at best unproductive and at worst unwise and counterproductive.

While the truth may hurt Kim's feelings (cry me a river), it's important to speak the truth. It's important to the North Korean people who starve and suffer under a brutal regime. It's important to make sure that the word 'evil' still has meaning. It's important for human history.

A recent article in National Review magazine recounted some of the horrors of the brutal North Korean regime -- including forcing mothers to smother their own newborn children. That is evil.

An article in today's Wall Street Journal also adds to the catalog of torture, murder, starvation and systematic oppression in North Korea day after day.

As I wrote in April 2001: "In the hospitals one sees kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler's Auschwitz."

While Western critics denounced President Bush's decision to include North Korea in the axis of evil, the long-suffering people of North Korea cheered it. I know; refugees have told me. They know how Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" was an early and important step toward its collapse. Moreover, the axis-of-evil remark proved prescient after North Korea's confession that it had a large, covert nuclear-weapons program. More and more high-ranking defectors have told us that Kim Jong Il's government is in a desperate situation, much closer to collapse than the outside world knows. This, they say, is why he needs the fear of nuclear annihilation to win concessions from the West, prop up his regime, and subjugate his own people.

This is why we must not cave in to Pyongyang's nuclear blackmail. The North Korean regime must fall -- the sooner the better.

Faster, please.