Fear and Loathing Updates

I posted a long, detailed update here at NKZone, which links to some great reporting from the Times of London. Today, at least, the Chosun seems to have better sources in Washington than in North Korea (where’s Kang Chol Hwan these days?), while the opposite is true of the Korea Herald.

This Roger L. Simon blog post contains a summary of linked reports (admittedly from the Sankei Shinmun, not my favorite Japanese newspaper) that there is indeed a nascent resistance movement inside North Korea. Now, no rumor that comes out of North Korea on that subject can be considered conclusive, but the reports are certainly piling up. Scroll down for more of them.

Still, there is enough credible information from enough sources to suggest that strange things are afoot. The problem is that we really don’t know what they are. The suggestion I consider the least likely is that this might be the start of a Pyongyang Spring or North Korean perestroika of sorts (especially since we all know how that one turned out):

When the magic of the personality cult is gone, there will be no fiction to glue a broken society together, and North Korea will be finished. Nor is there much support for this theory from North Korea itself. Even Alejandro Cao de Benos, North Korea’s “official” webmaster and tour guide, took time out of ransacking other peoples’ hotel rooms to deny the reports:

Today many newspapers/tv/radio carry the new (sic) that the portraits of our Leader Kim Jong Il, Chairman of the National Defence Commission, General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea and Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, have been removed from public places. This new (sic, dammit!) was accompanied with all kind (sic! sic!) of rumors and comments without sense. The Government of the DPR of Korea expresses that such information is an absolute lie created by reactionary elements [oh, that’s just precious . . . ]. This new (sicsicsic!) is aimed to create confusion, and clearly demonstrates once again that the reality of the situation in the Korean peninsula is manipulated on a daily basis by the agents serving Washington’s interests.

That’s right–the BBC, New York Times, and Reuters are reactionary neocons. Or, this might be a good time to watch for “unusual troop movements.”