Search Results for “KCTU thugs”

January 6, 2007

KCTU Thugs May Have to Switch to PVC Pipe

When I testified before the House International Relations Committee last September, one of the issues I raised was a report that the South Korean government was funding “civic groups” that habitually engaged in violence (see page 18), including the protests at Camp Humphreys last year. More recently, some of the leaders of those protests, and other violent anti-American protests, have been exposed and indicted as North Korean agents. This should not have surprised anyone.

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Democracy/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea

January 23, 2009

As KCTU Calls for ‘All Out War,’ Rally Attendance Declines

The thugs at the Korean Confederation of trade unions see opportunity in their country’s bad economic times, reports the sympathetic Hankyoreh: The KCTU plans to launch an “all out war” against the Lee administration in February, since it has again made known its intention to have the ruling Grand National Party pass revisions to laws on irregular workers and the minimum wage in the extraordinary National Assembly session scheduled for that month. The KCTU plans to launch its offensive with...

Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column

February 1, 2008

KCTU Declares Jihad Against Lee M.B., Scores Meeting With Nancy Pelosi

On Tuesday, I wrote that President-Elect Lee was about to meet with the leaders of South Korea’s largest, most radical, and most violent labor organization — the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. There was, however, the matter of KCTU Chairman Lee Sok-Haeng’s outstanding arrest warrant for an “illegal”Â rally last October. President-Elect Lee, showing more interest in public order than his predecessor, was not willing to let this slide or grant Chairman Lee the special privilege of being questioned at...

Anti-Americanism/U.S. Politics

May 3, 2006

Union Thugs Attack Riot Policemen’s Mothers

[Update: More KCTU follies: “We will unite with the workers of the North to fight against the U.S.” Except these workers, I presume.] The 51-year-old mother of a riot policeman is being treated in the hospital for a serious head injury after being pushed to the ground by union demonstrators while she and a group of other parents were monitoring a protest rally in South Jeolla province, police said. The group demanded an apology yesterday from the Korean Confederation of...

Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society

January 14, 2006

South Korean Street Thugs Silence U.S. Ambassador, But Not for Long

[Updated 15 Jan 06] I had meant to say something earlier about how South Korea’s culture of politics-by-thuggery has now touched even the U.S. Ambassador to Korea, Alexander Vershbow. The Flying Yangban’s observations have inspired me to add more, beyond the expression of my strong agreement with those observations. Finally, after years of watching U.S. ambassadors work the cocktail circuit while the propaganda war was lost in the streets below, a U.S. ambassador has the vision and guts to do...

Uncategorized

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

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

July 5, 2016

Minbyun’s frivolous lawfare terrorizes 12 young N. Korean refugees & endangers lives.

The western association of “left” with “liberal” does not hold up well in South Korea, whose political spectrum is dominated by warring factions of nationalists. These factions wield the law as an authoritarian sword against their rivals, and as a (sometimes flimsy) shield against their rivals’ authoritarian assaults. Historically, the worst authoritarianism was on the political right before the transition to democracy in 1987. The left still fuels its moral propulsion from the nostalgia of dissent dating back to this...

Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean Politics/Refugees/Useful Idiocy

April 18, 2016

Dear President Park: Make Reunification Your Legacy

Last week was a tough week for Park Geun-hye, when her party lost its majority in the National Assembly. The simplest explanation for this is that historically, ruling parties usually take beatings in mid-term elections, particularly when their own voters don’t show up to vote. The ruling party may poll well in the abstract, but a party that enters an election divided is likely to underperform expectations. Republicans, take note. And don’t look so smug, Democrats. Something like this appears...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion

December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine

December 12, 2014

South Korea’s censorship problem isn’t just about chromosomes

One of the most bipartisan political traditions in South Korea’s young democracy is the tendency of its presidents to use tax audits, prosecutions, libel suits, and state-subsidized street violence to censor their political opponents. This has always been wrong, but in America, our condemnation of it has always been selective. Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae Jung used tax audits to harass conservative newspapers. His successor, the leftist* Roh Moo Hyun, sued four right-wing newspapers for $400,000 each over what...

Censorship

December 2, 2014

Sony Pictures should go after North Korean hackers’ Chinese enablers

Since the weekend, several of you have e-mailed me about “suspicions” – and really, I don’t think they went further than that – that and leaked unreleased movies to file sharers to punish it for “The Interview.” Those rumors were covered by many outlets, but frankly, the open-source evidence for North Korea’s complicity was little more than speculation, at least until I read this today: Hackers who knocked Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems offline last week used tools very similar...

Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea

November 21, 2014

South Korea’s illiberal left: authoritarians in the service of totalitarians

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] In America, we have grown accustomed to a political polarity in which we associate “left” with “liberal.” Whatever the merits of that correlation here, it’s useless to any understanding of politics in South Korea, where very few people...

Censorship/Korean Politics/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column

August 27, 2014

North Korean workers at Kaesong show symptoms of exposure to toxic chemicals …

including benzene. If you wonder why people such as myself rail against slave labor and the lack of labor rights at Kaesong, this is why. A real independent union would have stood up for the workers and raised this issue long ago. I can’t say I have much confidence in the desire of either of the governments involved — much less the employers — to tell the truth about the exposure of help the victims; after all, that wouldn’t serve the financial or...

Kaesong/Sunshine

June 14, 2009

Hey DJ, What’s That Big Pink Animal With the Prehensile Trunk? (Updated)

Admittedly, I don’t have high expectations of NPR, but I would expect that even they would at least mention the circumstances surrounding the summit that bought Kim Dae Jung his Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, NPR lets his grandiose claims go unchallenged: “The Sunshine Policy has been and still is supported by the majority of South Koreans and the whole world,” Kim says, sitting in his living room. “It’s the reason I won the Nobel Peace Prize. People are telling President...

Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Media Criticism

August 27, 2008

Unusual Suspects (1)

Update: I see Robert had pretty much the same reaction. Maybe all that hand-wringing about a Lee Myung Bak dictatorship isn’t so exaggerated after all: Oh Se-cheol, a professor emeritus of Yonsei University and prominent leftwing academic, was arrested on Tuesday on charges of breaching the National Security Law. Oh’s arrest is seen as a start of a government crackdown on leftwing organizations which grew and expanded their realm of activities under the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations. Seoul...

Censorship/The Fifth Column

March 18, 2008

Rule of Law or Rule By Law?

The Hanky has the vapors over President Lee’s plans to let the police use a bit more force against violent protestors. The plans include detailed rules on the use of force, and plans to arrest people who engage in violence and cross police lines. To this, the Hanky reacts with hyperbolic charges of a return to dictatorship: President Lee seemed to have been encouraging the police when he said, “If foreign television programs show the nation’s unlawful, violent demonstrators wielding...

Censorship/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society

Search Results for: KCTU thugs