Search Results for: confession

Tim Shorrock spreads disinformation about biological warfare in Korea. That makes him a disinformant.

If you’re unfamiliar with self-described Marxist and journalist Tim Shorrock, consider yourself fortunate. But if you’re on Twitter and you’re interested in Korea, you’ve probably run across his tweets. You might even have been blocked by him. And while the world is wide enough for all sorts of kooky viewpoints (as Mao said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” as he pulled the cord and started his lawnmower), Shorrock was one of the first “journalists” to whom Moon Jae-in gave an...

Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the...

How engaging the wrong North Koreans set back openness, reform & peace

South Korea’s social-nationalist government, joined by too many Western academics of the sort who bask in its generosity and fear the withdrawal of it, has re-embraced the “Sunshine” hypothesis. This hypothesis equates nearly all economic “engagement” with North Korea’s military-industrial complex — also known as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” — with economic openness, and economic openness with political openness, disarmament, prosperity, and peace. The Western exemplar of no-questions-asked engagement is the NGO and media darling known as Choson...

How Moon Jae-in rode a wave of violent anti-Americanism from obscurity to power

Like Roh Moo-hyun, the President he served, Moon Jae-in’s ideological origins are found within the leftist lawyers’ group Minbyun (which has since become Pyongyang’s instrument for intimidating North Korean refugees in the South). As lawyers defending left-wing radicals and pro-democracy activists alike against the right-wing dictatorship, Moon and Roh became close friends and law partners in Pusan. Moon went on to become the legal advisor to the Pusan branch of the Korea Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union, a radicalized union...

China’s next maritime conflict could be with North Korea

This week, the eyes of the world are on arbitrators’ rejection of China’s made-up claims to the South China Sea. Further north, however, Pyongyang’s lease of fishing rights to Beijing threatens to instigate violent brawls between North Korean and Chinese fishermen. Earlier this year, China stopped accepting imports of North Korean seafood. The reasons for this still aren’t clear, but one possibility arises from a report that much of North Korea’s fishing fleet is controlled by the Reconnaissance General Bureau,...

In Pyongyang, the ghost of Goebbels haunts the Associated Press

Why won’t the Associated Press release the Memoranda of Understanding it signed with the North Korean regime in 2011, in exchange for permission to set up a bureau in Pyongyang? What is it hiding? Plenty of possibilities come to mind, including the signature block. Imagine the AP’s embarrassment if it turned out that, to save time, someone had just pulled an old MOU out of a filing cabinet, crossed out “Josef Goebbels,” and written “Kim Jong-un” underneath it. Practically speaking,...

Before Josef Schwartz spends an eternity in Hell, would Austria please send him back to prison?

Reading through the new Panel of Experts report, I saw a finding, at Paragraph 108, relating to two 2011 “[s]hipments of spare parts and equipment for submarines and military boats brokered by Green Pine” — a North Korean trading company designated by the U.N. over proliferation concerns — “from Austria to Angola and Viet Nam.” Reading on, I saw that “[t]he consignments were shipped from Vienna by an Austrian national, Josef Schwartz, through his company, Schwartz Motorbootservice.” Remember him? Sure you...

Jeffrey Fowle’s mission to N. Korea no dumber than the rest of them

In this age of click-bait listicles, The Atavist has published a rare example of real journalism, in which reporter Joshua Hunt traces the story of Jeffrey Fowle from its origins (in a dream!) to its anticlimax. Fowle, you will recall, is the Ohio municipal worker who went to North Korea, “certain that God had a plan for him,” left a Korean-language Bible next to a toilet in Chongjin, got himself arrested and detained for six months, and nearly lost both his job and his wife. Later, asked if...

The AP should release its MOU or register as a N. Korean propagandist

Those who expect to shatter the illusions of 23 million North Koreans by airdropping copies of The Interview over the no-smile line probably overestimate the translatability of its humor into North Korea’s socially conservative culture. But for all its flaws, The Interview approached brilliance on one level – not as a parody of Kim Jong Un (Randall Park wasn’t nearly fat enough) but as a parody of the Americans who choose to nuzzle up to him. When James Franco was...

What I’d ask Jean Lee if I could

So Jean Lee is going to be at this event at the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C. this afternoon, but I’m down with the flu. Assuming she takes questions, maybe one of you can ask instead. 1. Why did AP agree to co-sponsor “A joint exhibition by The Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of Kim Il Sung” that portrayed North Koreans as content, well-fed, and devoted to their leaders? In retrospect, can you see...

N. Korea seizes another Chinese fishing boat.

For once, I’m mostly in sympathy with North Korea’s position. Chinese fisherman are notorious for invading the territorial waters of their neighbors, the Chinese government may well have grander plans to invade them, and the North Korean people certainly need those fish more than the Chinese do. (Leave aside the question of whether the fish would otherwise be eaten by hungry North Koreans or exported by the regime for hard currency.) The North Koreans have impounded the ship, pending payment of...

N. Korea Perestroika Watch: 2 U.S. tourists to face “trial” for petty heresies

One of the core arguments of the Sunshine Policy and its “engagement”-based derivative theories is that more people-to-people contact between Americans and North Koreas will reduce tensions, stimulate economic and political reforms, and eventually, improve inter-governmental relations.* The last two decades have been unkind to this theory, but today, North Korea made an announcement suggesting that its opposite may be closer to the truth. SEOUL—North Korea said Monday it will charge two Americans in its custody with unspecified crimes, a move that may signal...

Open Sources, January 22, 2014

~ 1 ~ PARK GEUN HYE, WHO HAS a (ruthlessly) capable intelligence agency to inform her, sounds quite convinced that North Korea is about to “provoke” the South, and at least publicly, some U.S. officials say they’re worried, too. President Park Geun-hye called for an “airtight” security posture against North Korea from South Korean soldiers and other officials on Saturday, viewing the North’s recent charm offensives as a possible prelude to imminent military provocations. “In India, Park ordered the (South...

KCNA: Jang Song Thaek executed for plotting coup against Kim Jong Un (Update: Also, vaporized)

KCNA has just announced that Jang Song Thaek was executed shortly after this party meeting, after confessing to “attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods.” It also released this picture of him, possibly the last of his life. Such a nice, clean suit, too. [via Yonhap] As they say around these parts, sic semper tyrannis. As I noted this morning, Jang had many victims of his own in the camps. Most of them left...

Why Merrill Newman came home and Ken Bae didn’t.

By now, everyone knows that Merrill Newman has come home, but hardly anyone knows that Ken Bae is in the hospital after losing 50 pounds in a North Korean prison. What accounts for the difference in outcomes? One reason, I’m afraid, is the cultural tendency of Koreans to feel that they have a certain ethnic “jurisdiction” over other ethnic Koreans — a tendency I’ve certainly observed in South Korea, too. Korean-American friends of mine, who were culturally just as American as...

China not sounding so happy about N. Korean purge (Update: Park warns of “reign of terror,” unstable relations)

[If you haven’t read yesterday’s post on the purge in Pyongyang, start there.] China has summoned Kim Jong Un to Beijing “as soon as possible” to kowtow and offer tribute discuss what Yonhap describes as “the North’s long-term stability and bilateral relations.” China seems displeased with Jang’s ouster, and in case that message was too subtle, China also staged a 5,000-man night landing exercise on the Yellow Sea coast near North Korea (ht: Adam Cathcart). Kim Jong Un now faces a...

Merrill Newman’s real “offensive” was booking a tour of North Korea in the first place.

Just last week, I predicted that we were entering the provocation phase of North Korea’s mood cycle. The day after I wrote that we’d soon read of “satellite theater” and steam coming from reactors, the IAEA said that North Korea had restarted Yongbyon. The day after that, North Korea released a hostage video of an 85-year old tourist with a heart condition, after forcing him to sign a “confession” to war crimes that he’d allegedly committed 60 years ago. Or at least,...

Ambassador Gifford’s Trojan Rabbit

Just in time for North Korea’s latest nuke test scare, Mike Gifford, the British Ambassador to North Korea, takes to the pages of the L.A. Times to urge readers to support “engagement” with North Korea, although not very convincingly. Gifford begins with a litany of reasons why we either shouldn’t, or can’t — human rights (reason enough to isolate South Africa and Sudan, but not North Korea, apparently); WMD proliferation, attacks, and threats (followed by U.N. sanctions that impose financial transparency requirements North Korea...