The Daily NK: Keeping the promises that the Sunshine Policy couldn’t

In a land of scarcity, North Korea’s scarcest commodity is truth, and it is truth that is transforming North Korea.  In the last ten years, North Korea’s death-grip on the flow of food, consumer goods, and information across its borders was fractured, and probably for good.  This change is enormously consequential to how we ought to approach North Korea.  Even as inter-governmental “Sunshine” and engagement failed decisively–and probably exacerbated North Korea’s brutality–market-based engagement and information flows have been profoundly transformative.  The Daily NK was one of the first to tell of that change, and one of the key engines that drove the flow of out-bound information.  It was among the first to help the North Korean people tell us their story–to cry out to us for help.

Truth placed in the hands of its people will eventually cause the decay and downfall of this regime’s power structure, and truth in our hands will catalyze policy changes that will finally put an end to discredited policies that only prolong North Korea’s suffering.  The first ones to give practical effect to this concept were the Daily NK’s editors, reporters, and courageous sources–who risk their lives every day because of their compulsion to speak the truth.  The Daily NK is, in other words, the opposite of everything that I find so despicable about the Associated Press’s sellout to the North Korean regime.  You don’t have to share that contempt to agree that the Daily NK provides valuable information, even that it is a necessary counterweight.  I wish that a well-funded wire service would partner with them and make better use of its network of clandestine correspondents.

North Korea’s hacking of the Daily NK tells you that it has been effective.  It was the Daily NK, after all, that broke the story of North Korea’s currency revaluation, an incident that disillusioned (perhaps permanently) thousands of members of North Korea’s nascent middle class.

One of my personal regrets is my own failure to submit columns to the Daily NK recently, but I count myself as one its strongest supporters.  I hope you’ll consider supporting them at this link.