OK, He’s Gone! Pack Everything Up!

Kudos to Instapundit for making the apt comparison between Walter Duranty, the NYT reporter who got a Nobel Prize for his rosy–and completely false–reporting on the (lack of) famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and flood of ink from the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler on North Korea recently. Kessler was led by the nose to a North Korean Potem-K-Mart and reported on the bounty of vibrancy of the commerce there. Kessler must have missed this report from Amnesty International; otherwise, he might have wondered how things are outside Pyongyang, where, despite apparent mass-starvation, the government has kept out all foreigners, especially those distributing food aid. The story revealed little suspicion that the market tour was a mendacious little dog-and-pony show, designed to show that economic pressure against Pyongyang would never work. Kessler dutifully filled his story with money quotes from the now-dismissed Undersecretary for Appeasement, Jack Pritchard, like this gem:

“Pritchard said the visit indicated that change is occurring in one of the world’s most closed societies, even during a crisis over its nuclear ambitions, and that North Korea is far from economic collapse. . . . ‘Time is not on the U.S. side.'”

The real problems with this story are (1) the WP Post printed it four different times; (2) it doesn’t say much about about the food situation for anyone except those Kim Jong-Il trusts and who keep him in power–ie., the people who are allowed to live in Pyongyang; and (3) it’s based on a false premise–the idea that Kim Jong-Il can stay in power without outside help. In fact, better reporting elsewhere gives us a pretty good breakdown of where the regime gets its money.