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Category: Propaganda

March 26, 2015

Kim Jong Un’s censorship knows no limits or borders. To submit to it is to forfeit freedom.

If Kim Jong Un is weighing whether to answer leaflets from South Korea with artillery, it won’t discourage him that many on South Korea’s illiberal left have already begun to excuse him for it. Within this confused, transpatriated constituency, there is much “anxiety” lately about “inter-Korean tensions.” Those tensions have risen since North Korea has begun threatening to shell the North Korean defectors who send leaflets critical of Kim’s misrule across the DMZ. But then, any rational mind can see...

Categories Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Propaganda/Subversion/Terrorism (NK)
March 13, 2015

Good engagement: BBC, in a reversal, decides to broadcast to North Korea (Update: Did the Telegraph get it wrong?)

Congratulations to EAHRNK, Lord Alton, and Youngchan Justin Choi, another of the young Korean-American over-achievers who may already have had an impact beyond his years on the history of his ancestral homeland. Here’s another link to Choi’s pages on Twitter and Facebook, if you wish to add your congratulations to mine. (I’m sure I’ve omitted many names of those who pushed for this, so feel free to add others in the comments.) It now looks like the Beeb is going to launch a North Korea...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
January 28, 2015

Somehow, I don’t think this will encourage Kim Jong Un to engage with us.

I think Marzuki Darusman is a good man who means well, but it’s difficult to derive a coherent policy from this: “This is a new thing, spotlighting the leadership and ridiculing the leadership. In any authoritarian, totalitarian system, that is an Achilles’ heel,” Darusman said in an interview in Tokyo, where he held talks with the government on an investigation into North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens. If this kind of ridicule seeps into North Korea, it could become lethal for the regime, he...

Categories Engagement/Subversion/Sunshine
January 6, 2015

Activists send 600K leaflets into N. Korea

An activist group of North Korean defectors has launched balloons containing anti-North Korea leaflets across the inter-Korean border, police said Tuesday, in an act that could dampen a burgeoning thaw in inter-Korean relations. The Campaign for Helping North Korean in Direct Way scattered some 600,000 leaflets from Yeoncheon, a county bordering North Korea, on Monday evening, local police said. Lee Min-bok, the head of the group, and his wife participated in the 30-minute leaflet-scattering event, the police said, adding the...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
December 23, 2014

White House considers sanctions, psyops, and cyber responses to N. Korea

Because I’ve begun to develop a certain sense of when interesting events are about to get much more interesting, yesterday morning, I decided to check the web site of KCNA, North Korea’s official “news” service. The site did not load, but it has always been slow to load. Then, news sites began to report that North Korea’s internet access had gone down, and that the White House wasn’t denying that it had a hand in this. This morning, kcna.kp loaded...

Categories Cyberwar/Propaganda/Sanctions/Subversion
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

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 1, 2014

KCNA cites debunked accusations to deny human rights violations

It all started with a piece of web journalism that printed the demonstrably untrue accusations of two men whose views were never newsworthy, and which would never have been published had they been researched. One is a notorious denier of North Korea’s crimes against humanity who claims to have traveled widely within North Korea, meaning he’s either too blind to read a cuckoo clock at high noon or prevaricating, probably to protect his business interests there. The other is a combustible man (as in, warning: contents under pressure) without...

Categories Anju Links/Propaganda/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
November 21, 2014

South Korea’s illiberal left: authoritarians in the service of totalitarians

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] In America, we have grown accustomed to a political polarity in which we associate “left” with “liberal.” Whatever the merits of that correlation here, it’s useless to any understanding of politics in South Korea, where very few people...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column
November 19, 2014

N. Korea perestroika watch: regime installs German-made cell phone trackers

If and when the Security Council takes up North Korea human rights sanctions, I hope they’ll start by ordering the public flogging of whomever sold these to Pyongyang: The North Korean authorities have installed a series of German-produced radio wave detectors along the border areas to monitor and block residents from making phone calls with people in other countries. The Daily NK has learned that by using the new devices near borders areas where phone reception can be detected, the authorities have been...

Categories Border Control/Censorship/Subversion
November 14, 2014

Suki Kim recalls a “good student” in Pyongyang

Writing in The New York Times, Kim recalls a young North Korean student who made her uncomfortable with his risky questions about government in America: What I had just described was, more or less, democracy. I could not read his expression, but he thanked me and excused himself. That evening, I discussed my growing fears about the student’s motives with my teaching assistant. There was nowhere we would not be overheard, so we took a walk around campus, hoping it...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion/Sunshine
October 24, 2014

North Korea perestroika watch

The Daily NK reports that North Korean security forces in the bleak border province of North Hamgyeong are “shaking down” smugglers to make them rat out the identities of those who’ve escaped to South Korea. They’re identifying the smugglers by intercepting the cell phone signals of money-smugglers, who in turn are forced to rat out goods and people smugglers, who rat out the refugees, whose families are then vulnerable to shake-downs and collective punishment. For many of the stay-behinds, what...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Human Rights/Subversion
September 24, 2014

South Korean media reach deeper into North Korean society.

“The notion of what makes you a chon-nom (“country bumpkin”) in North Korea has really changed,” says Lee Han-byul, a refugee from Hoeryong, North Hamgyong province, who left the country in 2010. “In the past, the term was used to mock young people living in the provinces,” she says. “But now it’s less so much where you live, but more about how familiar you are with culture outside the country that makes you a chon-nom.” Han-byul suggests that South Korean...

Categories Subversion
September 23, 2014

Park Sang Hak is a very brave man.

Park and the Fighters for a Free North Korea, most of whom are North Korean refugees, ignored a letter from Pyongyang to the office of South Korea’s President that, according to Yonhap, “alluded to retaliation” against their next leaflet balloon launch: Defying the warning, 10 activists from Fighters for Free North Korea launched 10 big balloons carrying 200,000 anti-North Korea leaflets into the sky in Paju, north of Seoul. The waterproof leaflets contain messages denouncing the three-generation power transfer in...

Categories Activism/Propaganda/Refugees/Subversion/Terrorism (NK)
September 10, 2014

A young Korean-American activist has started a campaign to push the BBC…

to start broadcasting to North Korea. His name is Youngchan Justin Choi, and I hope you’ll join me in supporting his campaign on Facebook and Twitter. According to Choi, the financial cost of broadcasting to North Korea would be just a few million dollars — a tiny amount. When a publicly funded global media conglomerate refuses to broadcast to a country where the need is as great as it is in North Korea, I start to wonder what other motives are left...

Categories Media Criticism/Subversion