What sort of moral shallowness transforms murderers into fashion icons? Sometimes, there’s no serious answer for unserious consumers of the radical chic pablum that twelve year old Cambodian girls stitch together for affluent suburban college kids.

If true, this could be a tangible sign of sincere Chinese annoyance with its North Korean viceroy. Via Daily NK, then Yonhap:

SEOUL, Jan. 28 (Yonhap) — A local Internet news site reported Saturday that a top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was arrested in Macao earlier this month.

Citing Japanese diplomatic sources, DailyNK claimed Kang Sang-choon, a secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and chief of staff to Kim, was detained in connection to circulation of forged U.S. dollars and money laundering.

DailyNK, which specializes in news related to the reclusive communist country, also said the arrest may have taken place on Jan. 11 and that South Korean and Japanese intelligence services are in the process of verifying the information.

Regarding the allegations, a source at the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s spy agency, said it received information on the matter. The official, however, said the agency is not in a position to offer a confirmation at this time.

Experts here said Kang is not involved in his country’s policy-making process.

Daily NK has a group photo of Kang and Kim Jong Il, and more information:

Kang Sang Choon has served as the chief of North Korean officials in North Korea in 1991, and after his visit to Macao through China has been reported in 1995, has been known as the person who frequently visited Macao for Kim Jong Il’s cash flow.

Lee Han Young had testified, “There is a department in the Central Party that has only one task of buying presents of Kim Jong Il. The secretary of that department is Kang Sang Choon. Lee is the nephew of Kim Jong Il’s wife who defected to South Korea and made Kim Jong Il’s private life to the public by his book, “The Royal Family,” murdered in February, 1997.

Lee testified, “Under Secretary Kang, starting in Japan, visits Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, and Austria. He buys about one million dollars worth of things yearly.

Fujimoto Kenji, a Japanese and a former cook for Kim Jong Il and the writer of the book, “Kim Jong Il’s cook” introduced Kang Sang Choon as being “responsible for escorting in the secretary office.

The obvious disclaimers apply. Decide for yourself.

Long-time readers of this blog know that for nearly two years, I’ve advocated aggressive economic measures against the North Korean regime that would force international finance to choose between doing business in the North and in the United States. Such sanctions would wring the most knowledgeable and best-financed investors out of North Korea until it made signficant and irreversible steps toward comporting itself with the rules by which humanity lives.

Until now, the Bush Administration has failed to take strong-yet-practical actions in the face of Kim Jong Il’s blithe recalcitrance and unabated brutality. After more than a decade of U.S., South Korean, Japanese, and Chinese diplomacy, Kim still isn’t negotiating in good faith.

That’s why it’s so gratifying to read this story. It reports that the White House is considering an executive order that would deny any financial institution doing business with North Korea the right to operate inside the United States:

The U.S. is readying fresh sanctions against North Korea over the regime’s alleged financial crimes that will be significantly more severe than the ones already in place. Raphael Perl, a congressional researcher in charge of tracking Pyongyang’s drug dealings and counterfeiting, said Friday authorities completed a rough draft of an executive order that would stop any financial firms involved in transactions with North Korea from conducting business in the U.S.

That will mean all banks, brokerage houses and insurance firms and refers not only to illegal transactions but to any financial deals with the North, Perl told the Chosun Ilbo on the phone. Once the regulations are finalized, “the message to financial institutions operating in the U.S. will be that the time has come for them to choose between the U.S. or North Korea,” he added.

What goes unmentioned in this article is the likely effect this will have on the Kaesong Industrial Park, South Korea’s plan to enrich itself by shifting from feisty, unionized South Korean labor to cowed North Koreans who’ll take $57.50 a month and (pretend to) like it, minus “voluntary” payments to the North Korean regime, of course. (In what must be the ultimate sign of South Korean labor unions’ capitulation of their constituents’ interests to the enrichment of Kim Jong Il, the South’s big unions have yet to raise a peep about the export of union jobs, or to question the safety of working conditions or the sufficiency of the wages under which their Northern brothers labor).

[U]nder the draft order, almost all finance companies would be effectively prohibited from doing business with North Korea. That would also affect international financial institutions outside the U.S. and thus deal a heavy blow to North Korea’s overseas trade.

In Perl’s reading, financial institutions would have a choice whether they are with or against the U.S., but given the importance of their U.S. interests, it would in effect force most major international firms to stop dealing with the North.

I have one very modest kvetch. This exec order is tied to counterfeiting, certainly a grave concern and a legitimate interest of this country, but less grave a concern (at least, to me) than millions dying in man-made famines–including the one that may yet happen because the North kicked out the World Food Program–and hundreds of thousands in concentration camps. My own proposal (the draft text is here) would have tied the financial disincentive to the sale or use of the products of forced labor, which is probably the foundation of the North’s oppression of its own people. It would also have the advantage of compensating the victims, creating an incentive for defections, and using the incentive of attorney fees to attract aggressive lawyers into what could prove to be a litigation quagmire for any company that invests in the North.

Nonetheless, this move is an excellent start, one that could signal a new hard-headedness in Washington. And although the South Korean government is sure to complain–no matter the legitimacy of the U.S. interest–it’s sufficiently justified when the U.S. has enough proof of what North Korea is doing to bring criminal cases to trial.

And of course, I make no personal secret of my desire for ending Kim Jong Il’s reign, and ultimately for uniting the Koreas under democratic rule (although plenty of other Americans do make a secret of it, perhaps for good diplomatic reasons). This alone will not drive Kim Jong Il from power, but it will do severe damage to North Korea’s remaining foreign income, most of it from arms sales or illegal trade. To do that, it’s not necessary to drive all foreign capital out of North Korea; it’s only necessary to prevent any significant influx. Pyongyang’s own greed, paranoia, arbitrariness, and inefficiency will do the rest.

The Donga Ilbo reports that North Korea has banned fishing from motorboats.

Sunni tribes claim to have arrested 270 al-Qaeda, and those harboring them. The next test is whether they will hand the prisoners over to someone who can exploit their intelligence value.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, whose goons most recently gained infamy with an anti-anti-North Korean protest that blocked the U.S. Ambassador from attending a media interview, will now represent South Korean government workers. The KCTU has a long history of violent and thuggish protests, reflexive anti-Americanism,* and sympathetic dealings with the North Korean regime. The KCTU is the more radical of South Korea’s two largest labor organizations, the other being the Federation of Korean Trade Unions.

The Korean Government Employees’ Union yesterday decided to officially join the nation’s progressive labor umbrella organization, heralding a major transition of the labor movement in Korea.

KGEU’s participation will make the Korean Confederation of Trade Union, currently the second-largest, the nation’s largest labor organization with more than 800,000 members.

Like virtually all Americans, I’m generally in favor of unions’ rights to organize and compete in free labor markets. I don’t favor closed shops; I believe that unions should compete like businesses or political parties in open elections for union representation.

As many countries have learned, however, you get big problems when the same unions that represent workers in private industries also represent workers in the government. In the United States, there are two completely different sets of laws for federal and private labor relations. There’s nothing unfair about that in a society where you don’t have to work for the government. The idea is to keep union politics out of the affairs of government and keep strikes from shutting the government down. That means that the goverment will reflect the political views of the voters, not those of the union leaders. Getting the KCTU mob mixed up in the government bodes very ill for Korea’s future as a mature democracy.

Mark my words: the KCTU will want to turn the government into its own closed shop, will try to meddle in the affairs of government, and will resist with violence when the government tries to root it out.

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

I see you are bleeding, says the passerby to the man who adopted and raised him. Allow me to pour some salt were the bone protrudes. On September 17, 2001, the KCTU hauled forth this hackneyed screed of Marxist cliches and contorted blame-the-victim logic:

It is widely acknowledged that the U.S. is widely and deeply implicated in various acts of “crime” against various peoples around the world, especially those who are seen to be small and weak. Many Koreans identify themselves as victims of such “crimes” – crimes of willful acts, acts of aggression or callousness and arrogance, or even acts in fear and ignorance — perpetrated by the U.S. (Even the “handling” of the “accusation” of “crimes” is received as further crimes stemming from callousness and arrogance.)
. . . .

We must reflect on the recent incidents with two clear eyes. We must grieve the death of thousands of people, paying respects to the dead and condolences to their families.

At the same time, we must also remember all those people of smaller and weaker nations who have died at the receiving end of the “precision” fire power of the mighty military capacity of the U.S. The American conglomerate media has carried live broadcasts of U.S. attack on various countries, as if they were computer games, blinding the spectators of the death and pain of the real people at the other end.

We are concerned that when the U.S. launches its attack on Afghanistan, the world media is portray it as an “air show” of computer game-like high-tech weaponry. How will people of the world rise to find real solutions to real pains, and real angers of real people?

We are also concerned that there are groups which are set to gain profit from all the terror attacks and wars which everyone must oppose. The military-industry complex is set to profit enormously from the imminent U.S. attack. They are intent on driving the death of thousands of people and the grief felt by all of Americans and the people all over the world into a war frenzy.

While the war may start out as an effort to seek “retribution”, it will soon be turned into a war which will be driven by the thirst for profit among the nexus of the military-industry complex and hawkish Bush Administration.

Fuck these people, and fuck the nags they rode in on. You can’t craft policies to please people who are incapable of containing their glee while your wives, children, and parents are being slaughtered. Why don’t I don’t buy anything made in Korea anymore? Because these septic ingrates–who, thanks to decades of American largesse, go home to a shiny appliances, cable TV, and the Internet–probably made it.

How did I miss this? I’d normally hang on every word of a Hitchens article about British cuisine; this time, he nails the human rights issue in North Korea, drawing unfavorable comparisons to history’s most infamous oppressions:

To call a set of actions “genocidal,” as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the “slavery” of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves “captive.” The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

Hitches castigates the human rights industry, the one that’s so lazy, facile, publicity-hungry and morally unfocused that it can’t see a gulag unless there’s a place near the front gate to hold a press conference:

It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.

Hitchens, formerly a rabid leftist and now a liberal with a recovering post-9/11 moral perspective, once rather famously called for the indictment of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. I do not know if he’s ever retracted that particular position, but if the North Koreans researched him, they probably saw those early writings and felt safe giving him a smidgen more access to the North Korean countryside. They obviously didn’t get the toadying Walter Duranty / Ted Turner figure they’d hoped for.

Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more. Bravo to President Bush, anyway, for his bluntness.

I’d endorse the last sentence wholeheartedly if President Bush’s policies were as supportive of North Korean refugees and undercover dissidents as his words have occasionally been. Otherwise, Hitchens has nailed it.

First, let me say that I will miss Hidden Nook’s blog, and I will leave the link on my sidebar in the event he returns to blogging, as he’s suggested. Second, I extend him a public invitation to blog here on occasion, particularly if the thoughts are reasonably topical.

Your correspondent is a rich lode of eccentrities, which is why it’s so difficult to pick just five things about myself that are strange:

1. My wife and I have always referred to each other using the Korean “yeobo.” Never by name. As a consequence, my son did not know my wife’s name until age three. It was especially shocking for him to learn that there was another Joshua in the family.

2. I’m left-handed. I shoot right-handed. I’ve never qualified less than expert at the pistol range.

3. I’ve had a Lakota name I was a toddler, and so have my brothers. Mine was given to me by a Lakota elder whose funeral I still remember vividly, though I was just six or seven at the time. The procession of cars mourning this kindly, regal lost link to another time stretched from Oacoma, across the Missouri River, through Chamberlain, and halfway back to the Ft. Thompson Indian Reservation. If I shut off the TV and close my eyes, I can imagine the brush of the cool wind, scented with five hundred miles of prairie grass. Related strange fact: my father speaks Lakota, along with six other foreign languages. I’ve actually heard him do it.

4. To me, there is nothing is as dull as watching sports on TV. I don’t understand how people can stand it. And just in case you were going to ask, yes, I’m completely heterosexual. I know that some people who claim to be experts say we’re all a little bit gay. As some(!) of you already know, those people are wrong.

5. When I retire, I’m going to move back to the West and build UAVs. It’s been my lifelong obsession to design and build a jet-powered UAV, put a camera in the nose, and fly it up steep, narrow canyons.

I discussed the rising Chinese military power earlier.

Here is a contra-indication of that trend (maybe Richardson was right about the personnel quality issues):

Three divisions, comprising about 50,000 troops, from the Shenyang military region took part in the four-stage exercises, in which the troops representing the PLA were defeated by the enemy Blue Army – believed to have simulated US battle techniques.

In the first stage, the Red Army was ordered to repel the attacking Blue Army. Despite its firepower being strengthened by the availability of six hi-tech aircraft, the Red Army troops were defeated because the army commander forgot to call in air support. The other three stages revealed the PLA officers were slow to respond and did not have a firm grasp of the advanced technologies needed to stage information warfare.

Or maybe this is all just disinformation warfare to lull us into complacency. So the PLA excercies with OPFOR and all that, huh? I guess Kerqin is their Mojave Desert.