Category: Miscellaneous

It’s telling that when the AP wants to exhibit its work to the readers of National Geographic, it teams David Guttenfelder’s photos with Tim Sullivan’s reporting (which has usually been good) instead of Jean Lee’s (which hasn’t). The result is better reporting: But hearing the truth is challenging while loudspeakers blast songs of praise for Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. When the government allows foreigners inside, it presents them with a delicately crafted illusion of how the regime wants the...

~          1          ~ SO, CHARM OFFENSIVE’S OVER, I TAKE IT? Pyongyang sends Chuseok greetings: Just two days ago, one of the South Koreans selected for the reunion passed away. Three others said they couldn’t make it because of deteriorating health, the South’s unification ministry said. For those healthy enough, like Park Tae-bong, 85, this reunion was supposed to be a chance to piece together decades of missing family history. He was set...

~          1          ~ QUICK! TO THE VANKMOBILE! I hate to break it to “Jonathan Smith,” but no, South Korea is not known as the “PRK,” which I assume is supposed to stand for the “Peoples’ Republic of Korea.” Smith has set up a web site intended to reassure readers that their travels in North Korea will be perfectly safe (Ken Bae and Park Wang-Ja were not available for comment). His choice of a Q&A format–along...

Reader Chris Beaumont* emailed me yesterday to draw my attention to the web site of the U.N. Commission on Inquiry on human rights abuses in North Korea. On this page, you can find links to videos of all of the Commission’s hearings in Seoul (English and Korean) and Tokyo (English and Japanese). I haven’t had time to review the complete record, but in this one, Shin Dong Hyok testifies about Camp 14 with the aid of Google Earth imagery. There...

~          1          ~ MADE IN NORTH KOREA: NK News has done us a service by identifying a factory in North Korea that’s making Land’s End clothing, which the Chinese subcontractor then sells as “Made in China.” I suspect there’s more of this going on than we know. Land’s End ought to terminate all relationships with the Chinese supplier.  If it doesn’t, it implies tolerance of illegal violations of North Korea sanctions, and immoral exploitation...

PRAISE BE TO ZEUS, I DON’T HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THAT IMBECILE DENNIS RODMAN again, because Sung Yoon Lee has already done it so much better than I could. It’s not an easy thing to write a fat joke with the subtlety a respected academic must use to get invited back on the PBS News Hour to (polemically speaking) deflower those paired with him–or to the Oval Office. Lee not only manages this, he begins with a silly-yet-tragic story about...

The most ironic argument the administration has advanced to support the bombing of Syria is that it’s necessary to send a message of credible deterrence to North Korea, against its own use of weapons of mass destruction. There’s a lot to unpack there, so I’ll summarize my arguments first and expand on them below. First, I agree that we (and many other nations) have a compelling interest in deterring the use of WMD. I wouldn’t have put it quite that...

THREE MILLION DEATHS IS A STATISTIC, BUT A DEAD PORN STAR IS A HEADLINE! Sure, I guess the nominal leader of a regime that starved 2.5 million people to death and killed another 400,000 in concentration camps is capable of having his ex and a bunch of her musician friends machine-gunned. I can even believe that North Koreans can buy video cameras and make porn, although I incline more to the view that, if any part of this story is...

CALL ME OLD FASHIONED–it’s fine, really, I’m used to it–but I fail to see what’s so hard-line about the idea, most recently advanced by John McCain, that restarting six-party talks ought to be contingent on North Korea demonstrating its seriousness about disarming, such as by beginning to disarm. That’s pretty much the same view the Obama Administration had stated publicly, although it seems necessary to clarify it when North Korea has, more times than I could count, said it will never give up its nukes, when...

NOW THAT EVERYONE HAS SUDDENLY DISCOVERED THAT North Korea has a meth problem, I thought I’d link this five-year-old post and let you read (or reread) what OFK readers read way back when. (There’s plenty more where that came from if you put “meth” or “heroin” in the search window.) This is a perfect example of why we need sources like the Daily NK so badly.  They are the first harbingers of emerging social, economic, and political trends that will have important...

HAVES AND CAN’T HAVES:  Two million North Koreans have “authorized” cell phones; meanwhile, the regime is cracking down on the unauthorized kind.  I default to skepticism of any self-serving claims that a transaction involving the government of North Korea will result in social or political changes in North Korean society, but Orascom may be the one exception I’m willing to acknowledge.  I don’t think any state can monitor that many phones, and in a society where money can buy anything, more...

To all of the regular and not-so-regular OFK readers– Thank you for your regular visits, comments, criticisms, and interest over the last nine years. This morning, I begin work on an important project that is incompatible with continued posting, so I must suspend posting for a few months. That won’t be easy for me. This site had become an outlet for recreational thinking, and for beliefs I hold strongly. It had also become a part of my daily mental equilibrium...

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR PROFILES Alejandro Cao de Benos, who was interviewed for OFK by our friend Enzo in 2010. For a starving country, North Korea certainly does a brisk trade in size 52 extra-fat uniforms. What’s most striking about Cao’s claims that North Korea has no hunger or human rights violations isn’t their blatant mendacity, really. It’s the fact that a KCNAP consumer could easily believe every word of it. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~...

MUST SEE: Marcus Noland, speaking to the Lowy Institute in Australia, thinks that North Korea is slipping back into famine.  He thinks that the North Korea people have adapted enough that a 1990s-scale famine can be avoided, but consider this in the context of Noland’s finding that the regime itself has probably had a current account surplus since 2011. On the other hand, Kim Jong Un loves Mickey Mouse, amusement parks, the NBA, and dolphins, so reform, prosperity, and perestroika are...