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Monthly Archive: December, 2014

December 14, 2014

The North Korea crazy train keeps on a-rolling

So the views of Arturo Pierre Martinez that interest me aren’t his views on Iraq, Ferguson, or even North Korea, but the views that explain him best, which were buried at the bottom of CNN’s report: He also talked about unidentified flying objects, CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, “ultrasonic” devices that cause people to hear voices and experience bodily discomfort and how the Western news media unfairly portrayed North Korea. [CNN] You can see a video clip here, if...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
December 12, 2014

This is why no rational person would invest in Kaesong

North Korea has unilaterally raised those “wages” that South Korean companies pay the North Korean regime for labor at Kaesong—wages that the workers probably never see, and that for all the Unification Ministry knows, are used to buy iron maidens, centrifuge bearings, and 300-millimeter rocket fuses. The Unification Ministry isn’t happy, but only because wage hikes are bad for business: “Our firm position is that it’s impossible to revise the wage system without consultations between the South and North,” the...

Categories Kaesong
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...

Categories Censorship
December 10, 2014

I wonder how Air Koryo serves them their macadamia nuts (answer: very carefully)

Not only are the sons and daughters of North Korea’s highest-ranked elite wielding influence outside the sphere of leader Kim Jong Un  – they are also displaying it in public, a news outlet run by a high-profile defector said Tuesday. The people mentioned in the report have access to external trade and foreign currency and many officials bring money to secure an audience with them. They appear untouchable by law, the report said, even though political factions can be gravely...

Categories Class Warfare
December 10, 2014

Cougar Town, North Korea

Twenty years ago in North Korea’s outer provinces, heavy industry seized up. In short order, so did most of the beneficial functions of government, including the food distribution system. The state continued to do other things, of course, most of them mean or silly. In former industrial regions, it still enforced the primacy of men as breadwinners by forcing them to report each day to idled factories that couldn’t pay their wages. A consequence of this was that market-savvy wives supplanted...

Categories Capitalism/NK Military
December 10, 2014

Suki Kim will be on The Daily Show tonight

More on that here. In a separate interview, Ms. Kim says that “North Koreans are so oblivious of the outside world that even some children of elite families believe that Korean is spoken in the rest of the world.” “They, first of all, didn’t know anything about the rest of the world. If any of them did, they were fearful to admit that,” Kim said. “Some of the students really thought people spoke Korean in the rest of the world. So...

Categories Books & Films/Subversion
December 9, 2014

Of course, a better North Korea policy means more than sanctions

Professor Haggard is skeptical that a “sanctions only approach” toward North Korea could work, which compels me to expand on why I agree, and on what a better approach would look like. It should go without saying that no act of Congress can ever be more than part of a complete foreign policy, something that, by constitutional design, only the executive branch can wield. Certainly the imposition and enforcement of tough sanctions are at the heart of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, H.R....

Categories Anju Links/Diplomacy/Sanctions
December 9, 2014

Putin is already censoring your news.

Granted, Buzzfeed has never been known as a paragon of journalistic integrity, but it should have to register as a foreign agent for giving in to this. Separately, Anne Applebaum writes about state-sponsored comment trolls, who I’ve often suspected of having an outsized presence at the Post’s own comments section, and of commenting at this humble site on occasion. Most of the best comments and corrections I get come by e-mail, which is why I often wonder whether enabling comments is worth...

Categories Blogs & Blogging
December 9, 2014

Help Change North Korean Society From the Ground Up By Breaking the Information Blockade

Kang Chol Hwan is best known for the Aquariums in Pyongyang, in which he tells how he was raised in a political prison camp for an unknown “crime” “committed” by his grandfather. Perhaps less well known is that Kang started the North Korea Strategy Center in Seoul several years ago, and for years they have been sending in DVDs, USBs, etc. loaded with movies, TV shows, and information about the outside world (eg, a copy of Wikipedia). The ways in...

Categories Activism/Subversion
December 8, 2014

N. Korea: We didn’t hack Sony, but we’re glad someone did

As suspicions grow that North Korea was indeed responsible for the Sony hack, North Korea offers that oddly unconvincing denial. If the North Koreans really did do it, some commenters think the U.S. will have to respond: Aitel says the hacks are potentially “a ‘near red-line moment’” because they represent the kind of incident that would almost require a US policy response assuming a rival state was behind it. As Aitel says, “This is the first demonstration of what the military would call...

Categories Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea
December 8, 2014

PUST’s un-Christian attacks on Suki Kim

Ms. Kim’s recollections about PUST and North Korea have obvious public interest value for citizens and policymakers, but it’s hard to believe she told us much that an astute observer wouldn’t have guessed anyway. I think the most valuable thing Suki Kim may have taught us is how invested those who “engage” Pyongyang become in imposing a code of omerta to conceal the truth from us, regardless of the ethical cost. But the author, Suki Kim, may have provoked even...

Categories Appeasement/Books & Films
December 8, 2014

Dennis Halpin on the suppression of protests in Hong Kong

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Halpin explains why the crackdown in Hong Kong not only portends worse things to come for China’s aggression against democracy within it borders, but also beyond them: A major Beijing propaganda theme in attempting to deny the democratic aspirations of the people of Hong Kong is that outside agitators, chiefly from the United Kingdom and the United States, are behind the wave of unrest. China’s government mouthpiece, the Global Times, editorialized earlier this fall that...

Categories China
December 8, 2014

N. Korean spy targeted refugees in the South

As much as I agree that the National Security Law is overbroad and prone to abuse, cases like this show that parts of it remain necessary for the protection of South Korean citizens, including refugees from the North. A North Korean defector was sentenced to two years behind bars on Friday for trying to pass on information about fellow defectors in South Korea to Pyongyang authorities. A local court in this southeastern city said it found the 45-year-old woman, identified...

Categories Refugees/The Fifth Column
December 5, 2014

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...

Categories AP Watch
December 3, 2014

So I guess naming your dog “Kim Jong Un” is a definite no-no.

North Korea has ordered its people not to use the name “Kim Jong-un” in a bid to protect the supreme authority of the current leader, according to Pyongyang’s official document confirmed Wednesday. In January 2011, then leader Kim Jong-il issued a decree urging people with the same name to change it “voluntarily.” As North Korea is regarded as a totalitarian state, it is unclear whether the decree was actually voluntary. [Yonhap] Oh, it seems clear enough to me. When I...

Categories Kim Jong Un/WTF?