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January 28, 2014

Please buy Don Kirk’s new book on Okinawa and Jeju

A few weeks ago, it was my pleasure to meet up with Don Kirk for beers at the Press Club. Don was kind enough to give me a copy of his new book. I’ve only had time to poke through it so far, but it does (as you would expect) a comprehensive job of discussing the politics of military basing on both islands, each with its own history of conflict and controversy. Don asked me to give it a plug,...

Categories Books & Films/Korean History/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 13, 2014

“Secret State of North Korea,” on PBS’s Frontline, Tuesday, January 14th

On Tuesday January 14th, PBS’s Frontline will air a one-hour program about the North Korea most foreign journalists aren’t allowed to see: Secret State of North Korea. Not only are North Koreans illegally smuggling information from inside North Korea out, a growing cohort of defectors are risking their lives to get information about the outside world in. “Pretty quickly, what surprised me the most wasn’t the poverty and poor conditions people live in—which are, undoubtedly, shocking,” says FRONTLINE director James...

Categories Books & Films
December 4, 2013

Upcoming Events: “The Defector” Screenings, and EAHR’s online round table

I’D PREVIOUSLY POSTED ABOUT two new documentaries about how the real North Korea — the one behind the facade — is changing. One of these, The Defector, will be screened this week at two separate events in Washington. If you’re in the area, I hope you can make it. I OWE AN APOLOGY to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, which asked me to post about their online seminar on advocating for human rights in North Korea,...

Categories Activism/Books & Films
November 18, 2013

New documentaries show how N. Korea is changing, despite Kim Jong Un

Two new documentaries on North Korea are promising us brave and original journalism about life in North Korea, as the vast majority of North Koreans somehow live it. A long-time reader writes to tell me that the Heritage Foundation will be screening a new documentary, “The Defector,” on December 5th, at 5:30 p.m., and that Shin Dong Hyok will be in attendance. Here is how the film’s website describes it: Dragon is a human smuggler who leads North Korean defectors...

Categories Books & Films
October 10, 2013

Review: Treasury’s War, by Juan Zarate

Let me begin with an apology for the lack of posting lately. While tossing a football around with some friends, I took a direct head-on hit to that finger you need for typing words that contain the letters “l” or an “o,” which turn out to be less dispensable than you might think. The time I didn’t spend typing, I spent reading instead: [clicking the image takes you to Amazon] If you want to understand why the Banco Delta Asia...

Categories Axis of Evil/Books & Films/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
October 1, 2013

I can’t wait to read this one: “Treasury’s War,” by Juan Zarate

I wonder if Amazon can deliver this while I still have an unexpected windfall of leisure time: Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, plays the role of the bureaucrat. He joined the Treasury Department just weeks before the 2001 attacks to aid the agency’s enforcement wing. [….] Treasury launched its most ambitious assault with this new weapon on a tiny bank in Macau. That bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), caught the department’s attention in...

Categories Books & Films/Money Laundering/Sanctions
November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012. Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality. I couldn’t help quoting two of them. The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...

Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
October 25, 2012

UK production company making animated feature of Nothing to Envy.

Nothing to Envy was a terrific book – maybe the best book about North Korea I’ve read – but … animated?  Well, yes.   From the production company: THE FILM Directed by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Andy Glynne, Nothing to Envy is a new animated feature length film about life inside one of the most impenetrable and brutal regimes in the world – North Korea. Told through the true stories of defectors, this film will combine testimony with rich and vivid animation to provide...

Categories Books & Films
November 4, 2011

NKHR Film Festival, NKDB/US-Korea Institute Seminar

(seminar info updated below) NKnet is hosting a North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival in Seoul on November 10-11, 2011.  Let this also serve as the official OFK announcement that NKnet has a new English-language website ready for your consumption. _____________________________ The US-Korea Institute at SAIS and the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights are joining forces again for a seminar in Washington, DC, soon: Building a Strategy on North Korean Human Rights: International Perspectives with Keynote Address...

Categories Books & Films/Human Rights
November 5, 2010

NKDB Seminar in DC Nov. 11, NKnet DC Conference Wrap-up

Looks like the Seoul-based NKHRs groups are making the rounds in Washington, D.C., this fall.  Next up: North Korean Human Rights Advocacy: Making the Most of Scarce Data Thursday, Nov 11, 2010 – 02:00 pm Rome Auditorium, 1619 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036 Welcoming remarks by: Jae H. Ku, Director, USKI Kim Sang Hun, Chairman, NKDB Panelists: Kim In Sung, Researcher and Lee Ja Eun, Senior Researcher, NKDB and Paula Schriefer, Director of Advocacy, Freedom House Thursday, November 11,...

Categories Books & Films/Human Rights
August 14, 2010

Toronto: 10th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees; Seoul: Beautiful Dream Concert

On August 19-22 Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul is partnering with this year’s host HanVoice in Toronto for their 10th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees.  This will be the first time the conference has been held in North America; to date the ICNKHRR has been in Seoul (3x), Tokyo, Prague, Warsaw, Bergen (Norway), London, and Melbourne. The main session this year is Saturday, August 21st, from 9 – 6.  Events open to...

Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
April 13, 2010

Nothing to Offer, by Glyn Ford

Glyn Ford was a socialist member of the European Parliament until, under even its fringe-friendly rules, he lost his seat by placing fifth in the EP elections. Ford, an early defender of North Korea’s right to possess nuclear weapons, now finds himself with one less demand on his time, and so he reviews Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy. I’m not sure whether Ford himself or the Tribune Magazine is responsible for the headline under which his review is published: “North...

Categories Books & Films/Fiskings/Useful Idiocy
March 22, 2010

N.Y. Times (Sort of) Reviews “Kimjongilia”

The reviewer, Mike Hale, dismisses the documentary “Kimjongilia” as the result of “a morbid obsession with Mr. Kim and the hellish country he oversees, shared by escaped North Koreans and Western filmmakers,” which is an attack on the film’s choice of subject matter, not its artistic merit. Hale begins his review, in other words, wishing that filmmakers would pay as little attention to this subject matter as the New York Times’s news bureaus and its editorial board have. Any judgment...

Categories Books & Films/Media Criticism