11 June 2010
So, did you hear about Lee Myung Bak’s plot to kill Kim Jong Il?
Sure, the idea that we can punish North Korea for sinking the Cheonan by staging some event at the World Cup is absurd in itself, but hey, it’s still not as dumb as blaring K-pop over loudspeakers at the DMZ. It might have some merit in the context of a broader campaign of subversion, which doesn’t appear to be taking shape.
There aren’t many people I’d say this about, but I really wish Fidel Castro would just hurry up and put us all out of his misery:
In the final analysis, the U.S. could do too easily such big job, ie, the operation to eliminate the coalition government of Hatoyama but it is paying a very dear price for what it has done, he observed. The political leaders and the world public opinion have proof of the cynicism and absolute lack of scruples that characterize the United States’ imperial policy, he stressed.
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How North Korea acquired Russian missile technology: I’ve seen reports that it acquired other designs from the Chinese, but those reports aren’t mutually exclusive.
What happens to reformers in North Korea.
South Korea is holding a purge of its own, though I expect there will be fewer mysterious deaths in this case.
from rural North Korea.
Here’s a profile of Japan’s new Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, and an analysis of his plans to repair relations with America.
Aside from the fact that blaring K-pop is cruel and unusual punishment, this could be more effective than you think. Back in the 1990’s when the North and South were starting to talk, the loudspeakers along the DMZ were always the top priority item that North Korea wanted to remove.
Defectors from North Korea who served on their DMZ have said it was not the propaganda that the North Korean leadership feared but the entertainment and news programs. The bored North Korean soldiers were always waiting for their favorite shows and the North Korean leadership was truly worried about the effect on discipline and morale.
So regardless of whether or not the broadcasts have any actual effect on North Korean military discipline or morale, they do seem to irritate the leadership. But then again, any parent who sees the content of South Korean mass media entertainment would be worried about its effect on their kids, so I really can’t blame the North Korean leadership for that!
Apparently, this factory produces fertilizer the old fashioned way, using lime and slave labour (Apocalypto anyone?). Although I am guessing in equipment considerably less pristine than this animation on the lime production process I found.
By the way, the Wikipedia article on Hungnam links to a webpage about Rev. Moon and his time spent in said labour camp. Sorry to link to this if it is a no-no (I am not a schill for the Moonies) but the article includes a photo of said labor camp.
I could not find mention of the camp on this website but I am probably missing it (there is so much info on here) I tried a google tour through Hangnam but after ten minutes I wanted to kill myself like the poor bastard mentioned in the article.
Is this labor camp is still in operation? I swear this whole town looks like a labor camp to me.
Ganbatte, Korea was under Japanese occupation from 1905 to 1945. Much of its industry and its much-touted vinalon fabric were developed during the occupation.
If you want to see the sites of factories on GE, suggest you go here. You’ll be impressed — trust me.
oofta…man I thought this website was dense!
There must be a 5 Phd.’s worth of info between these two websites. Okay, I’ll go away for a few weeks and read through the site/photos.Thanks again.
While I was aware of the Japanese occupation, I was uncertain how much, if any of the imperial Japanese infrastructure was either destroyed by the war or absconded by the Red Army/PLA (like the cyclotron!? mentioned in the wikipedia article) after the collapse of the Japanese empire. I had read that the Soviets stalled the handover of China to Mao while they packed up most of the industrial equipment in China and shipped it back to Russia.
The best opportunity to assassinate Kim Jong-il, as mentioned in previous comments on this blog, was while he was touring China last month. There were outdoor opportunities in Dalian, Tianjin, and Shenyang where a skilled sniper could have deftly avenged the Cheonan. As long as there were no Chinese casualties, the response from Beijing would have been overwhelmed by the immediate urgency of a power vacuum crisis in Pyongyang. Of course Lee Myung Bak would not have risked harming South Korea’s relations with China by killing Kim Jong-il at Beiling Park in Shenyang, but it would not have been too difficult (or expensive) to hire a qualified Soviet substitute.
Now that Kim Jong-il is safely back on his home turf, it would be foolish to believe a Korean spy could get close enough to the Dear Leader to poison his “poisson”. Kim Jong-il will probably never leave North Korea again, so plotting an assassination attempt inside Pyongyang would be futile.
World Cup stunts to shame North Korea? Even if China did facilitate broadcasts into North Korea I don’t think the North Korea matches would be shown live. Therefore any stunts would be edited beforehand. I have advocated printing yellow cards with anti-Kim Jong-il propaganda in Korean and distributing them at South African arenas. They also would fit nicely under the doors of certain hotel rooms where the North Korea team happens to be staying (Protea Hotel Midrand). A DVD (or brochure) from the embassy of South Korea in South Africa persuading North Korean team members to defect during their June 25 match would fit nicely under those doors as well.
A friend of mine who wrote his thesis on revolution argues that individuals don’t rebel because of harsh rules, for the rules at least provide order and predictability. Rather, people rebel when that order and predictability is gone because the rules no longer apply. The Kim regime may be past that point by now if even members of the nomenklatura can no longer bank on survival despite loyalty to the regime.
Jeffery Hodges
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Also interesting Joshua is that NKleardership watch has “unearthed” The most “rare” of photos in concern to the Kim Dynasty to date. The writer of that esteemed new blog deservers some MAJOR “props”, as the young ones today would say.
Joshua,
I think the loudspeakers might be more effective than you are giving them credit for. Today, the Norks threatened not only to shoot at them, but also declared that resuming psyops would be a “declaration of war” and that they would turn Seoul into a “Sea of Fire.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jQydsIWmNQZpwRriADac51u5rx8gD9G9JFAO0
That said, it doesn’t look like they will be turned on any time soon. I have a feeling the Lee government is going to back down.
On a side note, I heard Pak Sang-hak launched more balloons on Thursday. Thank god for Mr. Pak.
It seems that at least once a month since the armistence, the DPRK has threatened to reduce Seoul to ashes. For a people that don’t make idle threats, they sure seem to contradict themselves on a regular basis.
About industry in North Korea :
Even before the Japanese occupation, the Northern parts of Korea were more industrialized and urbane compared to the Southern parts. 90 percent of Korea’s publishing industry was North of Kaesong (near the current DMZ) and the literacy rates in the Northern provinces was far higher than the Southern provinces.
The Japanese built alot of industry in the North especially after the 1930s when they were gearing up for the war with China. While few Koreans earned engineering degrees many of them learned how to be technicians and skilled laborers to work in those Japanese built factories.
The Soviets may have taken quite a bit of the machinery from the Japanese built factories during their brief occupation of North Korea around 1945. But the human capital in skilled labor survived even the Korean War. That allowed the North Koreans to develop heavy and chemical industries quite quickly. They were making small arms and artillery by the 1960’s and in the 1980’s they were maintaining and improving their Mig-21 and Mig-23 fighters – which were first class fighters until the 1970’s.
This head start lasted for many decades. In per capita income and purchasing power, it was not until the late 1970’s that South Korea caught up with the North – although there is some variance depending on how you valued the output from communist economies.
Since the 1980’s overspending on their military and a series of policy blunders and gross mismanagement which lead to a famine has ruined North Korea. The extent that the North Korean regime has ruined things is really quite sad. Deforestation is so severe that in some of the remote North Korean cities, telephone poles have to be bundled together out of scrap lumber sticks.
I strongly support the continued existence of the democratic state of Israel, with an undivided Jerusalem as its capital. I think it is so important that it is something the USA should defend by war. I am not Jewish.
Jewish is itself a peculiar term. Judah, the eponymous kingdom of the Jews, was destroyed, almost utterly, by the Assyrian, long before the birth of Christ, leaving only a very small contingent of Samarians (i.e., Samaritans) left in the very north of Israel/south of Lebanon, and they number a few thousand only, today. Their practices are sufficiently different from Conservative Judaism as to make them heretical. So the remaining tribes of Judah are not recognised as properly Jewish! Israel, I believe, is called Israel today because only the ?two? remaining tribes of Israel survived that Assyrian holocaust.
It appears almost certain that Sephardim and Ashkenazim are genetically dissimilar in significant areas (perhaps arising from facts that gave rise to the legend of the Khazar khan), as appear to be the Ethiopic Jews. Since there appear to be more Ashkenazim in the world today, due to the nineteenth century migrations from Eastern Europe to the United States, it is very doubtful that one can any longer call Jews “Semitic.”
Likewise, we have discovered three black-skinned but quintessentially Semitic-hereditary groups — the Black Jews of India, and two African tribes, one in Uganda and another in Kenya, all of which appear to be Cohens genetically. There is also the story I recall of an ethnically Jewish group in Kobe, Japan that had assimilated over so many centuries that it lost its own knowledge of the language in which its religious services were being performed until it was rediscovered in 1946. There are occasional rumors of still extant Jewish communities in Uighur China.
It is not easy therefore to define a Jew as a Semite. Like Tiger Woods and Obama, they are “mixed race”. Equally, I find the constrained religious definition in the Law of Return that requires orthodoxy to be a “Jew” to be deplorable.
It is even more difficult even to define an anti-Semite than it is to define a Jew, and I think we should recognise that the term is almost certainly a Soviet one, from their penetration of the West’s socialist cultures, and their attempts to create division within our own society. The term arose because it was convenient for the Communist Poles, East Germans, Hungarians and Czechs to pretend they were polite to their Jewish minorities, and that Hitler and his followers had been uniquely capitalist. So the term developed as a Socialist term of abuse for West Germany. Remember, the Soviets specialized in the Big Lie, and it sometimes stuck.
The use of Jews for political purposes has existed almost as long as Christianity. The “Jewish libel” of secret ceremonies to eat the blood of a Jewish child or to bake it into Communion wafers was first reported to the best of my recollection about 600AD, and is simply a vicious version of the central lesson of the Bible that the Pharisees actually killed Christ, and the Romans were just doing their bidding. This is a central problem in the “Good Book” and the (must I say it) false Protocols of the Elders of Zion are just an 18th century version of the libel.
There is a Christian tradition of murdering Jews that goes back a long way before Hitler — for instance, when Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice about 1605, no one in his audience had seen a live Jew in England, because they’d all been killed or burned alive in 1199, and it had been a crime punishable by death or expulsion to be a Jew in England thereafter. The first Jews came back to England about 1620 — and were called, politely, Portuguese to protect their lives.
Now, what does this matter on this site? The recent Myers book shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, that one of the fundamental pillars of the religion of Juche is a pathological race-based hatred for outsiders — and that one of its attractions in South Korea is the secret idea that maybe Koreans are more special than Chinese or Japanese, or Manchurians or Americans. Now that’s a very serious problem and needs to be dealt with by the polite, rational, courteous, dignified, individualistic and tolerant West by refusing to accept group libels or categorization by race or purported racial characteristics at all.
Remember my favorite poem:
Roses are red, violets are bluish,
If it wasn’t for Jesus, we’d all be Jewish.
It stands to teach us a lot about ourselves. Sorry about the length of this one.