Search Results for “confederation”

September 23, 2019

How South Korea’s “human rights lawyer” president waged a quiet war to silence North Korea human rights activists

The Chosun Ilbo has published a Korean-language interview with Lee Young-hwan, the head of the Transitional Justice Working Group, one of the most respected human rights groups researching Kim Jong-un’s crimes against humanity. Although TJWG is based in Seoul and headed by a Korean, it’s really an international NGO with both Korean and foreign staff. Lee has been an activist for human rights in the North since the late 1990s, and received a Democracy Award from the National Endowment for...

Activism/Censorship/Human Rights

November 1, 2018

Moon Jae-in chases Kim Jong-un while South Korea’s economy burns

Just over a year ago, Bloomberg Opinion published an op-ed under the title, “Can South Korea Save Liberalism?” It purred that Moon Jae-in was “charting an entirely contrary course in economic policy than much of the rest of the developed world” that was “unapologetically … dependent on the kind of taxing and spending conservatives loathe.” “If successful,” it hypothesized, “the experiment could alter how governments tackle the most challenging problems of our day.” As recently as June, The Diplomat published...

South Korea

May 29, 2018

Guest Post: A Hostile Takeover of MBC, a Major TV Broadcaster in South Korea

The following guest post is submitted by Dr. Tara O. ~ ~ ~ Controlling the narrative through the information people receive is one of the key steps in influencing people’s thoughts and behaviors. Influencing the media is important in this regard. The Moon administration in South Korea has taken over control of Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), with help from the labor union, the National Union of Media Workers at MBC Headquarters (전국언론노동조합 MBC 본부), which is under the umbrella of...

Censorship/Korean War II

May 9, 2018

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean Society/Korean War II/North-South/Sunshine

April 23, 2018

Moon Jae-in’s vision for reunification means One Slave Korea

LAST DECEMBER, I PUBLISHED A SURPRISINGLY CONTROVERSIAL HYPOTHESIS that Korean War II would not be a conventional war, but is a hybrid war to alternately cajole and coerce South Korea into gradual submission to the North’s hegemony, aggressive implementation of a series of joint statements, and eventual digestion into a one-country, two-systems confederation. I argued that this plan would only work if a sufficiently submissive government in Seoul yielded to Pyongyang while going only so far and so fast as...

Appeasement/Korean War II

April 6, 2018

South Korea’s “liberal” government is trying to censor the North Korea policy debate in America

IT’S WEIRD HOW A TL/DR POST I PUBLISHED IN 2014 ON THINK TANKS, PROPAGANDA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Korea suddenly resurrected itself to relevance twice in two days, almost four years later. As you may recall from that post, in 2005, the Korea Foundation suddenly pulled its funding from the American Enterprise Institute after its in-house magazine, The American Enterprise, published a special edition about the current wave of sometimes-violent anti-Americanism in South Korea during and after the...

Censorship/Korean War II

January 8, 2018

Guest Commentary: How Pyongyang’s reunification plan outlived Seoul’s

The following commentary is submitted by OFK contributor Rand Millar. ~ ~ ~ For most of the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century Germany was perceived by most European nations as the primary security hazard in Europe on account of its expansionist ambitions. In the aftermath of its defeat in the First World War, Germany was forbidden by the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty from fortifying the left bank of its Rhineland territory or...

Korean History/Korean War II

December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Fiskings/Korean War II

December 4, 2017

Korean War II: What the Joint Statements tell us about Pyongyang’s strategy

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell On June 15, 2000, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il signed a joint statement agreeing to seek “independent” reunification and an inter-Korean coalition government. It was not the first joint statement between North and South. This relatively modest one from 1972 calls for “both parties [to] promote national unity as a united people over any differences of our ideological and political systems.” In retrospect, this...

Diplomacy/Korean War II

October 4, 2017

The deterrence of North Korea has already failed

First, the North Korea commentariat told us that the Yongbyon reactor might be for no more nefarious purpose than generating electricity (never mind that it was never connected to the electrical grid). Then, it told us that the North merely wanted aid and recognition by the United States, to better provide for the people it had so recently starved to death in heaps, the dust of whose loves and aspirations now fills a thousand forlorn and forgotten pits in the barren...

Korean War II

September 5, 2017

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that...

Books & Films/Censorship/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)

August 8, 2017

How censorship is leading Korea to ruin

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] Last year, I wrote a post, which I fear is already becoming prescient, about how North Korea could plausibly win the Korean War. In condensed form, the strategy involves Pyongyang leveraging its nuclear, cyber, and chemical weapons supremacy...

Censorship/Propaganda

February 23, 2017

Must read: Brian Myers on what North Korea really wants (hint: it’s South Korea)

Over the years, the soft-liners’ explanations for why Pyongyang sacrificed billions of dollars and millions of lives to build a nuclear program have shifted. First, they said it just wanted the electricity. Then, they said it wanted a bargaining chip to trade away for better relations with us. Now, they say it just wants to protect itself from us. Unlike them, Brian Myers has listened to what Pyongyang has been telling its own subjects — it wants reunification, on its own terms. North...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/Korean War II

December 30, 2015

Robert Koehler, the Dean of Korea bloggers, retires

One day in 2006, I took a few hours off from work to attend a hearing of what was then called the House International Relations Committee, one of many hearings to ponder the then-awful state of the U.S.-South Korean alliance without calling it awful. One of the witnesses that day was Richard Lawless, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Asia-Pacific Affairs, who had to squeeze past my chair to get to his. Lawless is a large man, but I can’t say...

Blogs & Blogging

September 1, 2015

For Pyongyang, Korean War II is a war of more limited objectives

To Kim Il-Sung, Korean War I was a principally conventional and unlimited war whose goal was the unitary domination of the entire Korean Peninsula by force. To Kim Jong-Un, Korean War II is a war of skirmishes, whose less ambitious aim is hegemony over a supine and finlandized South Korea. Korea has changed dramatically since 1953. It should not surprise us that Pyongyang has adapted its strategy and objectives to fit this new reality. For Pyongyang today, survival is the...

Korean War II

October 6, 2014

Prediction: the Kaesong worker safety inquiry will be a whitewash.

You may recall that several weeks ago, some North Korean workers at Kaesong fell ill with symptoms of benzene poisoning. The bad news is that we still haven’t heard a peep of protests on the workers’ behalf from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, for some reason. The good news is that the Korean government cares enough about appearances to have ordered a safety inquiry: The South Korean government began a two-month probe Thursday into the working conditions at 33 factories in the...

Kaesong

September 23, 2014

North Korean Gulag survivors call on Switzerland to freeze Kim Jong Un’s slush funds (Alternate title: Cursed are the Cheesemakers).

Switzerland has always been there for North Korea. When North Koreans were starving to death in heaps, Switzerland was there to receive Kim Jong Il’s personal shopper and sell him millions of dollars’ worth of its finest timepieces. When North Korea needed creative new ways to make money – literally! – Switzerland sold it the very same intaglio presses and optically variable ink our Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses to make money. When Kim Jong Un needed a place...

Activism/Anju Links/Europe/Money Laundering/Refugees/Sanctions

August 17, 2014

Between surrender and stupid: Regressing toward the mean in a post-Iraq world

As the world’s attention is focused on the disaster in Iraq, let’s take a moment to mourn the last remnants of Syria’s non-extremist, secular rebels, who are facing their final extermination in Aleppo. To Syrians who risked everything for a future worth living in, it’s academic now that Hillary Clinton privately agreed with what I said back in 2011 (last item), when I called for us to arm moderate rebels there. Clinton now says she warned that if we didn’t,...

Geopolitics

Search Results for: confederation