Category: Propaganda

It’s still much too early to say that the new campaign to cut off the hard currency that sustains His Corpulency’s misrule will result in either behavior modification or the termination of that misrule, but we continue to see signs that are consistent with Pyongyang feeling the pressure from sanctions. One of these is its exceptional belligerency of late — exceptional even by North Korean standards. Not a week goes by without news of North Korea violating U.N. sanctions by...

With much of the North Korea policy debate understandably focused on sanctions this week, I hope North Korea watchers won’t miss this new report from Amnesty International on the efforts by “Swiss-educated reformer” Kim Jong-un to seal off all unauthorized contact between his subjects and the outside world. In recent years, the principal medium for such contact has been the use of Chinese cell networks whose signals penetrate a few miles into North Korea. Those calls had become an important lifeline...

Penetrating outside information into North Korea questioning the legitimacy of leader Kim Jong-un should be considered as a key means to retaliate against and curb the communist nation’s cyber attacks, a U.S. think tank said. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) made the suggestion in a report on policy suggestions on how to counter the North’s cyber operations, saying reponding to cyber attacks with cyber attacks won’t be effective because the North isn’t as dependent on networks as...

Totalitarian states have always understood the power of culture. Historically, they have required culture to serve the state. Also historically, once they lost control of culture, they also eventually lost control of everything else. In the 1930s, during the worst excesses of Stalinism, intellectuals, whether Soviet or western, seldom denounced the system. A decade or two later, however, one could already hear Soviet composers expressing disillusion, alienation, and loss — without words, of course — in the dark, mourning, and menacing notes of Prokofiev’s 6th Symphony and Shostakovich’s 11th....

If Kim Jong-Un’s twenty-something year-old little sister really has taken control of the manufacture of North Korea’s production of propaganda and mythology, she has begun her work with a powerful tacit admission: the state her brother leads has much in common with the feudal oligarchs past generations of North Koreans sang about overthrowing. In an attempt to root out elements that can lead to potential political instabilities in the country, North Korea is stepping up music censorship and scrapping all cassette tapes and...