Monthly Archive: December, 2004

Remember that criticism of bilateral talks with North Korea? Forget you ever heard it.

Remember that criticism of bilateral talks with North Korea? Forget you ever heard it.

A few days ago, I blogged here that a careful listener would hear secondary explosions near the Blue House during the visit of the mercurial neocon sage Michael Horowitz to Seoul. And without further ado . . . ka-BOOM! Horowitz once advocated changing North Korea through a process like the old Helsinki process, one that I consider hopelessly naive in the North Korean context. Since then, however, Horowitz has joined the militant wing, and Norbert Vollertsen sticks close to Horowitz...

Charles Robert Jenkins, now released and off to live out his remaining years in what he hoped would be obscurity, says that North Korea had designs on his daughters that began with intensive language training: [The North Korean authorities] wanted us to have children so they could use them later. . . . I knew what they were trying to do. . . . They wanted to turn them into spies. My daughters, they could pass as South Korea. There...

Not a Vegas act, but the name of a loose collection of North Korean guerrillas who fought against Kim Il Sung, and whom everyone–North Koreans, Chinese, South Koreans, and Americans–conveniently swept aside after the signing of the 1953 armistace. For a while, of course, they were useful to us: Unconventional warfare operations began Jan. 8, 1951, with a South Korean navy ship patrolling near the Yalu River. The ship discovered more than 10,000 North Korean guerrillas fighting the North Korean...

Not a Vegas act, but the name of a loose collection of North Korean guerrillas who fought against Kim Il Sung, and whom everyone–North Koreans, Chinese, South Koreans, and Americans–conveniently swept aside after the signing of the 1953 armistace. For a while, of course, they were useful to us: Unconventional warfare operations began Jan. 8, 1951, with a South Korean navy ship patrolling near the Yalu River. The ship discovered more than 10,000 North Korean guerrillas fighting the North Korean...

When I was a kid, what attracted me the most about liberalism was its tolerance of views with which it disagreed. Want to lead a parade of Illinois Nazis through Skokie? Well, I’m from the ACLU, I hold your views in contempt, and I’m here to defend your right to march anyway. This sort of thing, however, suggests that at the very least, there’s a crisis of tolerance within liberalism. And then there’s this, which is just plain repellent. And...

When I was a kid, what attracted me the most about liberalism was its tolerance of views with which it disagreed. Want to lead a parade of Illinois Nazis through Skokie? Well, I’m from the ACLU, I hold your views in contempt, and I’m here to defend your right to march anyway. This sort of thing, however, suggests that at the very least, there’s a crisis of tolerance within liberalism. And then there’s this, which is just plain repellent. And...

Unhappy with the Chinese government? Be kind to the next Falun Gong activist you see. You don’t have to share their beliefs to support their right to practice them. Not direct enough for you? Then you could decide to attend a worldwide protest in front of Chinese Embassies and consulates worldwide on December 22nd. Our specific grievance is the Chinese government’s repatriations of North Korean refugees back to North Korea, where they face a grim fate. All of the protests...

My name is 635.

Unhappy with the Chinese government? Be kind to the next Falun Gong activist you see. You don’t have to share their beliefs to support their right to practice them. Not direct enough for you? Then you could decide to attend a worldwide protest in front of Chinese Embassies and consulates worldwide on December 22nd. Our specific grievance is the Chinese government’s repatriations of North Korean refugees back to North Korea, where they face a grim fate. All of the protests...

Unhappy with the Chinese government? Be kind to the next Falun Gong activist you see. You don’t have to share their beliefs to support their right to practice them. Not direct enough for you? Then you could decide to attend a worldwide protest in front of Chinese Embassies and consulates worldwide on December 22nd. Our specific grievance is the Chinese government’s repatriations of North Korean refugees back to North Korea, where they face a grim fate. All of the protests...

Who knew? It turns out that my sister-in law is a talented photographer with an extraordinary sense of detail. Each photograph is a pixel of life in Korea; taken together, they form a surprisingly revealing picture of how it feels to live there. More here–look for the blue tabs to the right of the winter scene, click the third one down, and start scrolling. There must be hundreds of them. I intend to make a weekend tradition of putting the...

My name is 635.

My name is 635.

Who knew? It turns out that my sister-in law is a talented photographer with an extraordinary sense of detail. Each photograph is a pixel of life in Korea; taken together, they form a surprisingly revealing picture of how it feels to live there. More here–look for the blue tabs to the right of the winter scene, click the third one down, and start scrolling. There must be hundreds of them. I intend to make a weekend tradition of putting the...

Even Roh Moo-Hyun doesn’t see much point in having a summit with Kim Jong-Il. He probably reads this blog. Sunshine is fading into oblivion along with the failure of the North Korean state. By any measure of Machiavellian diplomacy, they should have sent Kim Jong Il to Seoul to whip up more “unification fever” by now. Their failure to exploit even those who would willingly support them speaks volumes about their current paralysis. Meanwhile, on the six-party front, even Richard...

North Korea has marked World AIDS Day by smugly announcing that it has zero cases. Other than mass starvation, a broken health care system, no reliable food supply, kids who are a foot shorter than their counterparts in the South, and sky-high infant mortality, their system has made the North Korean people extremely healthy. If there’s any truth to this report, it’s just a matter of time. There may not be, because after all, they tried to tell us there’s...