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Category: Propaganda

October 27, 2009

Defector: Naver Infiltrated by NorkBots!

Hmmm. I wonder if we’ve seen some of those types around here? Writer Jang Shin-Jung (former employee of the United Front Department), a North Korean refugee, testified that North Korea’s United Front Department has adopted a new propaganda strategy against South Korea by operating a new internet commenting team to reflect South Korea’s change in media culture. [….] Jang conjectured that about 30 team members at contact station 101 were cultural experts of South Korea. He described their proficiency in...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion/The Fifth Column
October 18, 2009

Extortion for Domestic Consumption

This, coming from a regime that offers little more than propaganda for its people to consume: Upon seeing signs that the food situation is becoming serious, factory managers are moving to soothe workers, saying, “Great amounts of food will come from foreign countries in January, so don’t worry so much. However, the workers reactions are not ones of great relief, because it is not clear whether that foreign food aid would be distributed to workers even if it did arrive....

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Propaganda
October 14, 2009

Lankov in the NYT, on Changing North Korea

My friend Andrei begins by advocating “cultural exchanges” as a means to change North Korea, a topic we’ve often debated in the past. If only such exchanges had the potential he suggests they do. North Korea only permits them on an infinitesimal scale, with people whose loyalty is thoroughly vetted, and when it calculates that the regime-stabilizing financial benefits outweigh the risk that the participants will be corrupted. Look no further than the Kaesong experience, or that of the North...

Categories Deprogramming/Propaganda/Subversion/Sunshine
October 4, 2009

Brian Myers on the New North Korean Constitution

My thanks to one reader and one commenter who have drawn my attention to Brian Myers’s latest piece in the Wall Street Journal. Here, summed up, is Myers’s central thesis: These changes do not reflect a sudden shift in policy. Despite the world media’s tradition of referring to North Korea as a “hardline communist” or “Stalinist” state, it has never been anything of the sort. From its beginnings in 1945 the regime has espoused–to its subjects if not to its...

Categories Kremlinology/Propaganda/Racism
September 4, 2009

North Korea’s Uranium Enrichment: Raising the Stakes

Umm, about that North Korean uranium enrichment program the Bush Administration made up …. North Korea said Friday that it is in the final stages of enriching uranium, a process that could give the nation a second way to make nuclear bombs in addition to its known plutonium-based program. North Korea informed the U.N. Security Council it is forging ahead with its nuclear programs in spite of international calls to abandon its atomic ambitions, the official Korean Central News Agency...

Categories Proliferation/Propaganda/Subversion/WMD
August 6, 2009

Upping the Ante

It is indeed good news to hear of the safe return of Laura Ling and Euna Lee after months of imprisonment in North Korea, but does this really signal an improvement in U.S.-DPRK relations? North Korea did, after all, use these journalists to get what it wanted (Bill Clinton in North Korea), and the U.S. did honor the regime’s request, although under the label of a “private” mission. While the rescue is being hailed as a “success,” it’s too early...

Categories Ling/Lee Incident/Propaganda
July 24, 2009

Take a Drink!

Curtis reminds me: Recalling that the Korean war of aggression ignited by the U.S. imperialists 59 years ago was the most brutal and brigandish war in the history of world wars, the statement continued [….] Should the U.S. imperialists ignite another war, oblivious of the lesson drawn from their past defeat, the heroic Korean People’s Army will fully display its invincible might of the powerful revolutionary army of Mt. Paektu which has grown under the care of the great Songun...

Categories Propaganda/Unintended Humor
July 13, 2009

Treasury Should Block “Arirang” Funds

I think it’s now fair to say that guiding groups of tourists through exhibitions of soul-crushing North Korean mind control has lost most of the arguments that justified its existence.  Rather than changing the character of the North Korean regime, it’s reenforcing it by making a profitable industry of it.  It’s become a source of hard currency to the regime, something that the world has collectively decided to cut off in the interest of the world’s security.  And finally, there’s...

Categories Propaganda/Sanctions/Sunshine
July 9, 2009

Succession Watch

According to Open Radio for North Korea, party officials are already announcing Kim Jong Un’s succession.  Me:  maybe so, but that doesn’t translate to him holding real power.  I’m still waiting for the KNCA tributes to his academic achievements, martial spirit, invention of a new edible grass, and his single-handed responsibility for the Great DOS Attack of 2009.  Nor is there any reason to think that KJU would rule differently than his father did.  Strawman: But he went to school...

Categories Kremlinology/Propaganda
July 8, 2009

High-Level Defector Describes Regime’s Illicit Income

I’d previously mentioned that I recently had the opportunity to meet Kim Kwang Jin, a high-level North Korean defector with detailed knowledge of North Korea’s illicit financing and money laundering.  Now, Kim adds much to our understanding of how North Korea pays for all those Mercedes-Benzes and missiles.  Having guessed that most of the cash came from flipping houses and the inventing some of the novel kitchen applicances I’d seen Billy Mays selling on my TV, this was a cruel...

Categories Deprogramming/Money Laundering/NK Military/North Korea/Refugees/Regime Change/Religion/Uncategorized
June 26, 2009

Fists Still Firmly Clenched …

Punching their fists into the air and shouting “Let’s crush them!” some 100,000 North Koreans packed Pyongyang’s main square Thursday for an anti-U.S. rally as the communist regime promised a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation” for any American-led attack. Several demonstrators held up a placard depicting a pair of hands smashing a missile with “U.S.” written on it, according to footage taken by APTN in Pyongyang on the anniversary of the day North Korean troops charged southward, sparking the three-year...

Categories Propaganda
June 15, 2009

The Hankyoreh: A Wealth of Embarrassments

The Hankyoreh watches North Korea TV for instructions analysis following U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874 and pronounces North Korea’s reaction “moderate,” even finding reason to believe that it creates “room to negotiate.”  No, seriously: In a Foreign Ministry statement released immediately after the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted Resolution 1874, North Korea announced it would weaponize all newly extracted plutonium, begin uranium enrichment and react militarily to a blockade. All three of these threatening measures fell within a range...

Categories Media Criticism/Propaganda
June 13, 2009

Change Has Come to North Korea!

How much hope do you suppose the sullen masses in Hamhung feel at the prospect of another generation of this? The youngest son of North Korea’s leader has been given the title of Brilliant Comrade, a newspaper reported on Friday, another sign that the Communist regime is preparing to name him as successor to its leader, Kim Jong-il. Intelligence authorities from the United States and South Korea disclosed this week that Kim Jong-un, 26, is now being referred to in...

Categories Kremlinology/Propaganda
June 10, 2009

N. Korea: CIA and Lee Killed Roh

Did I or did I not call it? The Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea Tuesday released a detailed report on the truth about the death of Roh Moo Hyun, former “president” of south Korea.  According to the detailed report, Roh’s death was not a suicide but a politically motivated, premeditated and deliberate terror and murder orchestrated by the United States and the pro-American conservative forces of south Korea.  [KCNA] So he didn’t kill himself?

Categories Propaganda