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Monthly Archive: March, 2008

March 4, 2008

Nazis Loved Classical Music

OK, I lied.  But Sonagi’s post and the piece she links here inspire further thought. And of course, plenty of us who aren’t Nazis also love classical music.  So when Lorin Maazel says, “in the world of music, all men and women are brothers and sisters,” I wonder if he knew that Auschwitz had an orchestra, too, or why:  The orchestra played at the gate when the work gangs went out, and when they returned. During the final stages of...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming
March 4, 2008

North Korea: You’re Terrorists, Too!

The Daily NK reports that the United States isn’t going to remove North Korea from this year’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.  Personally, I’ve been burned  pretty much every  time I believed what the  State Department said directly, much less indirectly, so I’m agnostic on this one.  In related news, North Korea has listed the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism: North Korea Tuesday called the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq typical examples of “state-sponsored terrorism”...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
March 4, 2008

Of Geography and Mortality: The Food Crisis Worsens, Again

All of the worst stories that hardly anyone ever hears happen in North Korea, and here is one of the best worst stories I’ve heard.  It’s  an object lesson in how  useless  good intentions  can be when bad intentions have all the spine.  In 1997, at the peak of the Great Famine, documentary filmmaker Mark Davis  accompanied a Care  aid worker  — and two North Korean minders — into the North Korean countryside.   They went there to  looking, in vain,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
March 2, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem

North Korea’s government has long been suspected of producing illicit drugs for export. In 2003, a high-level defector testified that the goverment is deeply involved in producing and exporting opiates, including heroin, and amphetamines. North Korea’s official ideology, really “crude, race-based nationalism” thinly veiled in socialism, would have had no problem justifying the poisoning of Japanese and Australian kids, but it was just a matter of time before North Korean drugs found their way into North Korean society. Until recently,...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK/Regime Change
March 1, 2008

May This Be the Last N.Y. Philharmonic Post

I am really, really tired of blogging about this, but I have two more links that I can’t pass up (thanks to the readers who forwarded them). Both have to do with the N.Y. Philharmonic’s financial backers, and both reflect very different ways of viewing the orchestra’s visit — with and without its moral context. The first story, from long-time Korea hand Don Kirk, is mildly inspiring: During one of the carefully scripted tours of the capital prior to Tuesday’s...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/Korean Society