Search Results for: Demick

October 25, 2012

UK production company making animated feature of Nothing to Envy.

Nothing to Envy was a terrific book – maybe the best book about North Korea I’ve read – but … animated?  Well, yes.   From the production company: THE FILM Directed by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Andy Glynne, Nothing to Envy is a new animated feature length film about life inside one of the most impenetrable and brutal regimes in the world – North Korea. Told through the true stories of defectors, this film will combine testimony with rich and vivid animation to provide...

Categories Books & Films
October 16, 2012

Reform Watch: North Korea can now afford to bury its orphans in Snoopy T-shirts

As a vibrant market economy arises from an underdeveloped one, it does not lift all boats as a rising tide would.  Some get very rich fast, and some stay very poor.  Such periods of rapid development are politically risky times, as uneducated masses are drawn away from their hardscrabble farm lives and packed into factory dormitories, slums, and shanty towns in the cities.  Those places become hothouses of envy and radicalism that can bring down the political systems in which...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
April 21, 2012

Anju, April 21, 2012

IF JIMMY CARTER HAS LOST RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH, HE’S LOST … well, upper Westchester County I suppose, but still, it’s good to see things like this in the Huffington Post: So why haven’t we done more to help the innocent people of North Korea who must live under fear and tyranny, and who suffer the specter of state-organized famines? Many will say that our hands are tied due to the fact that the North has nuclear weapons, which just reinforces...

Categories Anju Links
April 18, 2012

Anju, April 18, 2012

CHINA ‘PAUSES’ DEPORTATIONS? The AFP, citing the Yomiuri Shimbun, reports that China has temporarily stopped sending North Korean refugees back to Kim Jong Il’s firing squads and concentration camps to punish it for its latest misadventure in rocket science: The Yomiuri Shimbun quoted two Chinese officials as saying the long-standing policy of swiftly returning any North Korean who made it across the border and into China — despite the punishment they face — had been put on hold. “If refugees...

Categories Anju Links
April 3, 2012

Rising attention on North Korea’s prison camps

A few years ago, I spent what felt like an hour or two on Skype with The Washington Post‘s Blaine Harden, sharing and explaining satellite imagery of North Korea’s prison camp system. No doubt, Harden talked to plenty of other people, too, and the result was an excellent report and interactive graphic about the camps. A few months later, Harden turned over the Post‘s North Korea coverage to Chico Harlan, and now we know why. Harden went on sabbatical to...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps
December 18, 2011

Kim Jong Il Dead

Good riddance to him. Any bets on who will actually run the place now? It’s hard to imagine that anyone can fill the psychological void he leaves. It doesn’t matter that most North Koreans undoubtedly despised him. He was still a tremendous, terrible presence that no one else can be. [KCNA, Reuters] [Reuters, Kim Kyung-Hoon] Update: Here are some posts that seem freshly relevant: – Boldly, I had predicted that Kim Jong Il would die. But we could see this...

Categories Kim Jong Il
July 16, 2011

Open Sources: Another nuke test coming, says John Bolton

Things that Kim Jong Il is buying that you can’t eat, Part 1: As Allison Kilkenny once learned the hard way, John Bolton has a pretty good track record for predicting North Korean nuclear tests. He’s predicting another one soon, and I suppose it’s about time for one. Along with this, Bolton criticizes President Obama for his public silence on North Korea. But as we learned from George W. Bush, strident rhetoric is no substitute for a not-half-bad policy. This...

Categories Anju Links
January 18, 2011

The Great Wall of Rason: Kim Jong Il’s Grand Sell-Out

Over the weekend, as I was poring over relatively recent new imagery on Google Earth, I spotted the chilling sight of a fence line — the kind of fence line that until now, I’ve only seen around North Korea’s political prison camps. This was a mystery to me, since I believed that I’d located and delineated the last of the large prison camps years ago. I followed the fence line, wondering what I’d found, until I’d traced it for the...

Categories China & Korea/NK Economics
December 10, 2010

China’s Very Bad Week

I’ll begin this post by offering my congratulations to Liu Xiabao, and extending my hope that he’ll soon collect his Nobel Peace Prize in person. In recent years, Nobel Committee has tarnished the prize with some poor choices, and it may be that a man of Liu’s courage and character lends the Nobel more credibility than the other way around. Even President Obama had to concede that Liu deserved the prize far more than he ever did. The last regime...

Categories China & Korea/Korean War II/Yeonpyeong Attack
October 22, 2010

The admiral in charge of Pacific Command calls on North Korea not to test another nuke. Personally, I hope the North Koreans test one. It’s one less they can use in an actual weapon, and it’s great for my traffic. Bonus points if the test a uranium bomb, since that will make plenty of the right people look really stupid. ____________________________ Selig Harrison call your office: Reuters has published a devastating chronology of all of the retrograde, statist, anti-reform confiscations...

Categories Anju Links
July 16, 2010

Good Friends serves up the irony — that, or disinformation — in its penultimate update: This past June 1st, the Pyongsung City police succeeded in arresting 7 people involved in a professional counterfeiting operation. 4 out of 7 were women. Working out of a hidden location within the city, they were counterfeiting travel documents, Pyongyang residency proofs, Renminbi, dollars, and the new North Korean currency. Among those arrested included an employee of the Pyongsung currency printing press. After searching through...

Categories Anju Links
July 15, 2010

WHO Knew? North Korea’s health care system is nothing to envy.

So, aside from stultifying political repression, famine, forced labor, criticism sessions, neighborhood spies, propaganda speakers in every home, prison camps for dissenters, and the occasional public execution, what has Kim Jong Il ever done for us? Ask any Chomsky-parroting career grad student in the East Bay and she’ll say, “universal health care!” Alas, those neocons at Amnesty International have come to crush their tiny, misshapen hippie souls with this extensive report: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address...

Categories Health & Disease
July 2, 2010

1 July 2010

Congratulations to Barbara Demick, whose wonderful book, “Nothing to Envy,” has just won Britain’s Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. _______________________ Closets Are for Clothes! Yonhap: “N. Korean leader makes robust outings amid tension with S. Korea” _______________________ The aid NGO Caritas claims that North Koreans will suffer from donor fatigue. I think donor fatigue has afflicted me, too. I’d long been a supporter of monitored food aid, but I’ve coe to doubt that Kim Jong Il will ever allow monitoring...

Categories Anju Links/NK Crime
June 14, 2010

Kaesong Death Watch

Contrary to a recent North Korean statement suggesting that the regime was shutting down Kaesong once and for all, the factories are still shipping goods, although the experiment itself is pining for the fjords. The complete failure of South Korea or the United States to respond to the sinking of the Cheonan with sufficient measures to deter the next attack, on one hand, and the failure of North Korea to extract more money from South Korea or the United States,...

Categories North-South/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
June 9, 2010

At Last, China Regrets June 4th Shootings!

And obviously, I refer to the killings of three Chinese citizens and the wounding of a fourth by North Korean border guards: Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang, briefing reporters in Beijing, said the shooting incident occurred in the early morning hours of June 4, around the northeastern town of Dandong, when the Chinese civilians crossed into North Korea to engage in illicit trading, common along the 880-mile border. South Korean and Japanese media reported that the Chinese were in a...

Categories China & Korea/Drugs & N Korea
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
May 4, 2010

Prediction: U.N. Resolutions, Cheonan Sinking Won’t Change China’s Support for Kim Jong Il

What will the Chinese ask Kim Jong Il during his visit? South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, was in China as well last week, meeting with Hu on Friday to solicit support if his country sought stronger U.N. sanctions in retaliation for the Cheonan attack. “China wants to hear North Korea’s explanation so it can determine its position,” said Yang Moo-jin, professor at the University of North Korean Studies. China has been taking a more active role recently in mediating North...

Categories China & Korea
May 1, 2010

The Head of the World Health Organization Bears May Day Greetings from Pyongyang! (Update: No Signs of Obesity There!)

It could have been worse, I suppose, had I awakened this morning to the clatter of panzerkampfwagens rolling through the D.C. suburbs blaring the Horst Wessel Lied from loudspeakers. But if the prospect of the U.N. as Government of Earth horrifies you any less, get a load of what Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization, holds up as the very model of a peachy health care system: UN health agency chief Margaret Chan said on Friday after...

Categories "United" Nations/Fiskings/Useful Idiocy