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January 9, 2020

Moon Jae-in’s Wednesday Night Massacre threatens the rule of law in Korea

IF ONLY HE’D MASSACRED THEM ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, the metaphor would have been impeccable. But when South Korea’s President, Moon Jae-in, directs his Justice Minister, Choo Mi-ae, to reassign 32 prosecutors as they closed in on political corruption in his office–four months before elections will decide whether his party will have a majority to pass laws or a supermajority to amend the Constitution–it should have been the biggest news since the impeachment of his predecessor, Park Geun-hye. Last night,...

Categories Censorship/Democracy/Korean Law/Korean Politics
September 23, 2019

How South Korea’s “human rights lawyer” president waged a quiet war to silence North Korea human rights activists

The Chosun Ilbo has published a Korean-language interview with Lee Young-hwan, the head of the Transitional Justice Working Group, one of the most respected human rights groups researching Kim Jong-un’s crimes against humanity. Although TJWG is based in Seoul and headed by a Korean, it’s really an international NGO with both Korean and foreign staff. Lee has been an activist for human rights in the North since the late 1990s, and received a Democracy Award from the National Endowment for...

Categories Activism/Censorship/Human Rights
April 3, 2019

S. Korea’s ruling party thinks Korean journalists must “contribute to peaceful reunification, national reconciliation & the restoration of national homogeneity”

I often reflect on how life has been kind to me lately. Once, I was poor and cold; now, I live in comfort and warmth. Once, I struggled to eat enough; now, I struggle to eat less. Once, life was enclosed in the ennui of poverty, isolation, and the prospect of a life lived in dullness and pointlessness; now, life is endlessly interesting. Once, I was alienated and alone; now, I come home to my best friends, including the two...

Categories Censorship/Media Criticism
April 2, 2019

“Liberal” South Korean authorities launch criminal investigation of political parody posters

At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. “[T]he freedom to speak one’s mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty — and thus a good unto itself — but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole.” – Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 50-51 (1988)....

Categories Censorship
April 1, 2019

State Department cites “liberal” South Korean government’s censorship

In December, I was a panelist at this event at the American Enterprise Institute. You can read the transcript here, or watch it on video here. In my remarks, I tried to put the censorship of South Korea’s left and right into that country’s recent historical context, noting the signs that left-wing leaders who emerged from a nominally pro-democracy movement were now engaging in a strategic and systematic campaign to silence defectors, vloggers, and political critics through internet censorship and...

Categories Censorship
February 28, 2019

How to negotiate a lasting peace in Korea, feed the hungry, and heal the sick

Let’s say you still believe in a negotiated disarmament of North Korea, something to which I assign a ten percent probability at most. Or, let’s say you don’t. Suspend your disbelief and assume that aggressive sanctions enforcement—the enforcement Kim Jong-un tricked Trump into calling off nearly a year ago—becomes a sufficient threat to the solvency and cohesion of Kim Jong-un’s regime that he comes back to the table next year, offers to submit a complete declaration of his WMD programs...

Categories Class Warfare/Democracy/Diplomacy/Sanctions/U.S. Law
November 26, 2018

In “liberal” South Korea, three journalists go on trial for criminal defamation

Via Tara O: Journalist Byun Hee-jai of Mediawatch has been in jail since May 30, 2018. On the top right corner of the Mediawatch.kr website, it shows how many days Byun has been in jail. Byun was charged with libel for publishing a story that JTBC (a cable TV channel) manipulated the files on a tablet PC to make it appear that Choi Seo-won (Park Geun-hye’s friend, sometimes referred to as Choi Soon-sil) used the tablet. The false news about...

Categories Censorship
September 24, 2018

From Sunshine to solar eclipse: Can Moon Jae-in censor his way to reunification?

FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, THE STATED PREMISE OF THE SUNSHINE THEORY of “engagement” with the regime in Pyongyang has been that economic incentives and integration would gradually draw it into the community of civilized nations and spur political reform, disarmament, peace, and eventual reunification. The Sunshine Policy and its progeny promised that the gentle suasion of liberalization would win over even those responsible for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including as...

Categories Censorship
May 2, 2018

North Korean Freedom Week is the next test for free speech in “free” Korea

A FEW OF US WILL ALWAYS STUBBORNLY INSIST THAT WE DISREGARD THE LIVES AND DIGNITY of North Korea’s oppressed people at our own peril. We argue that there can be no verified disarmament of a North Korea that remains a closed society, no security in its promises as long as it mendaciously denies the existence of its prison camps, no lasting peace as long as it holds human life in contempt, no reunification between a liberal democracy and a tyranny...

Categories An Alliance?/Censorship/Korean War II/Sunshine
April 16, 2018

“Liberal” South Korean government blocks filming of Thae Yong-ho’s speech; article reporting it vanishes (Updated)

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices … in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for...

Categories Censorship/Defectors/Democracy/Korean War II
April 6, 2018

South Korea’s “liberal” government is trying to censor the North Korea policy debate in America

IT’S WEIRD HOW A TL/DR POST I PUBLISHED IN 2014 ON THINK TANKS, PROPAGANDA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Korea suddenly resurrected itself to relevance twice in two days, almost four years later. As you may recall from that post, in 2005, the Korea Foundation suddenly pulled its funding from the American Enterprise Institute after its in-house magazine, The American Enterprise, published a special edition about the current wave of sometimes-violent anti-Americanism in South Korea during and after the...

Categories Censorship/Korean War II
February 14, 2018

The media fawning over North Korea’s Censor-in-Chief is indefensible, yet they still defend it.

A MEDIA CRITICISM OF DONALD TRUMP that weighs more heavily than their predictable policy and tribal differences with him is that his tepid repudiation of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer “normalized” some of America’s most deplorable people. It’s going to be much harder for the Washington Post to make that charge stick after its reporters fawned over one of Earth’s most deplorable people — the Censor-in-Chief of a racist, homophobic, misogynistic regime that stands credibly accused by the...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Sports
September 5, 2017

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that...

Categories Books & Films/Censorship/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)
August 8, 2017

How censorship is leading Korea to ruin

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] Last year, I wrote a post, which I fear is already becoming prescient, about how North Korea could plausibly win the Korean War. In condensed form, the strategy involves Pyongyang leveraging its nuclear, cyber, and chemical weapons supremacy...

Categories Censorship/Propaganda
April 11, 2017

South Korean censors fine lawmaker $4300 for telling the truth about Minbyun (updated)

South Korean National Assemblyman Ha Tae-Kyung invites a particular potency of venom from both the hard left and the hard right. The hard left hates him because he used to be pro-Pyongyang and they still are. Ha was imprisoned under the old right-wing dictatorship for his activism and for (by his own admission) his former pro-Pyongyang sympathies. He later turned against Pyongyang and became an activist for human rights for the North Korean people, for which he has received threats to...

Categories Censorship/Democracy/Useful Idiocy
September 1, 2016

What victory looks like from Pyongyang (Parts 1 and 2)

Part 1 David Straub’s “Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea“ has resonated with me in several ways, but none of them more than Straub’s deep ambivalence about Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when I also served there as a young Army officer. Straub admits that in writing his book, he struggled to reconcile, and to show his readers, an honest-yet-fair portrayal of a society that earned his affection, and also caused him much exasperation, even as...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Diplomacy/Korean Society/Korean War II
June 13, 2016

Meet the “Libertarians” who would surrender our liberty & our security to Kim Jong-un’s censors

I doubt that America has fully come to terms with the damage done to its freedom of expression by the Sony cyberterrorist attack of 2014, or by the increasing willingness of Muslim supremacists to extinguish our civil liberties through violence. It is an easy thing to be a civil libertarian when the subject is, say, the limits of a proposed law allowing the FBI or NSA to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ communications or monitor their social media posts. Even if we...

Categories Censorship/Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
March 18, 2016

Designation of N. Korea’s propaganda agency could mean trouble for AP Pyongyang

Yesterday, a reader — he can identify himself if he chooses to do so — asked me an excellent question that had not occurred to me: what are the implications for the Associated Press’s Pyongyang Bureau of the Treasury Department’s designation of North Korea’s Propaganda and Agitation Department for censorship? From Treasury’s Wednesday press release: OFAC has designated the Workers’ Party of Korea, Propaganda and Agitation Department (the “Propaganda and Agitation Department”) as an agency, instrumentality, or controlled entity of the...

Categories AP Watch/Censorship/Sanctions