Search Results for “glasnost”

September 23, 2016

Invest in North Korea? Don’t let Jim Rogers talk you into prison.

For a few years now, I’ve heard that hedge fund investor, TV provocateur, and crackpot Jim Rogers has been urging his audiences to invest in North Korea. A few years ago, that advice might not have done much worse than condemn your soul to eternal damnation and bankrupt you, the way it bankrupted (or nearly bankrupted) Orascom Telecom and any number of other investors who preceded it. Since at least March, however, Rogers’s advice has been malpractice on a whole new...

Sanctions/Useful Idiocy

September 8, 2016

Dear AFP: May we see your agreements with the North Korean government?

This blog often criticizes the way the media cover North Korea; in fact, it sometimes even criticizes the way the media cover the media who cover North Korea. In the case of Agence France-Presse’s newly opened bureau in Pyongyang, most other media are treating AFP’s low-key opening ceremony as a non-event. It probably is a non-event — except for what it may mean for the decline in journalistic ethics, the corruption of our media, and their transformation into global propaganda...

AFP Watch/AP Watch

August 26, 2016

To prevent war, talk to North Korea’s soldiers about rice, peace & freedom (updated: it happened again)

When the U.S. Army wants to breach a minefield, it deploys a Mine-Clearing Line Charge to blast a path through it with 1,750 pounds of C-4. The procedure looks like this: Obviously, the North Koreans know this, so they can’t possibly think that planting a few more anti-personnel mines along the DMZ – right where U.S. and ROK forces will be watching and marking them – will do anything to stop an invasion that isn’t coming. I’m mildly surprised, by...

Border Control/NK Military

July 27, 2016

What Pyongyang Must Do to Get Sanctions Lifted

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower In yesterday’s post, I confronted two unwelcome facts: first, that Kim Jong-un almost certainly will not give up his nuclear arsenal voluntarily; and second, that we cannot learn to live with a nuclear North Korea (or more accurately, it will not learn to live with us). To these, I’ll add a third: things in Korea will certainly get much scarier over the next few years. Pyongyang is blaming...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

June 14, 2016

North Koreans find leaks in Kim Jong-un’s information blockade

Until 2011, the erosion of North Korea’s border control and the infiltration of foreign ideas may have been the only hopeful trends in a country where just about all of the news is bad. When Kim Jong-un came to power, however, he launched an all–out effort to seal North Korea’s leaky border with China. Most of the evidence tells us that that effort has had considerable success. It cut the flow of refugees from North to South Korea in half, and (with...

Border Control/Subversion

May 6, 2016

No Pyongyang Spring this year, either

The reasons why North Korea is holding a party congress are still a matter of conjecture to those of us fortunate enough not to live there. The congress is almost certainly related to Kim Jong-un’s consolidation of power in some way. It will probably reinforce the personality cult. The regime’s organization charts and wiring diagrams may be rearranged. Pessimists suspect that there will be more bloody purges or another nuclear test. Optimists still hold hope that His Corpulency will validate...

Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/Media Criticism

October 13, 2015

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship/Class Warfare/Engagement

October 12, 2015

The Myth of North Korean Socialism: How Pyongyang’s Profiteers Fooled the World

Over this long weekend, I’ve been reading Brian R. Myers’s new book, “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” a copy of which Prof. Myers was kind enough to send. Myers argues that juche, that cryptic ideology reporters often mention but never explain, is a sham ideology that is both overblown and seldom understood, by foreigners as well as North Koreans. Very roughly translated, juche means that man must be the master of his own destiny (in contrast to North Korea’s reality, in...

Class Warfare/Engagement/Propaganda/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy

August 13, 2015

Kim Jong-Un, deterrence, and the psychological evidence

“Dear Leader, you are a great and beloved strange human being who is extremely odd and should fulfill the destiny of your ancestors,” said the cacophonous group of voices reverberating in Kim’s head. “You are the shining sun. You are a lunatic who is going to end the world. You should destroy South Korea. You look ridiculous right now. They must bow to the might of your nuclear arsenal. I love you, my son. You are an insane man whose...

Kim Jong Un

June 16, 2015

What we learned from the Koryo Hotel fire: AP Pyongyang is not a news bureau (updated)

If one place in North Korea is the vortex of “engagement” with Kim Jong Un’s regime, and of every tendentious argument that this engagement will coax him into glasnost and perestroika, Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel is that place. By North Korean standards, it’s luxurious, with a casino, a revolving restaurant, a hard-currency gift shop, and a lovely selection of listening devices. For years, it had been the favored venue for diplomats, tourists, investors, aid workers, and the occasional imbecile with more...

AP Watch

February 19, 2015

More food for hungry North Koreans is not “bad news” for sanctions proponents.

I don’t always agree with Scott Snyder’s views, but I’ve always enjoyed reading his work. In almost every case, I’ve found it to be well-researched and objective. In a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations, Snyder cautiously concludes that North’s cereal production is “stable and improving” — from 5.93 million tons last year to 5.94 million tons this year, a more generous characterization than the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report he cites, which calls North Korea’s food production “stagnant.”...

Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

January 1, 2015

Last year’s analysis proves that this year’s analysis of N. Korea’s New Year speech will also be crap

The worst news of the day is that KCNA is working again. That means that as you read this, somewhere in northwest D.C., America’s best-credentialed astrologers are sifting through a desert of despotism for grains of glasnost. In line with the requirements of the prevailing situation, the officers and men of the Korean People’s Internal Security Forces should sharpen the sword for defending the leader, system and people, and members of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards and the Young Red Guards...

Media Criticism/Washington Views

December 23, 2014

N. Korea perestroika watch: corruption defeats information crackdown

I’ve previously reported on Kim Jong Un’s efforts to crack down on illegal cell phones, memory sticks, DVDs, and other subversive information flows, even as some wishful observers clung to sketchy evidence to argue that Kim Jong Un was a reformer. The good news is that after an initial period in which smuggled DVDs became hard to find, they are making their way back into circulation. “People caught for watching South Korean dramas aren’t being punished that harshly anymore,” a source based in Pyongyang...

Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship

January 3, 2014

In case this isn’t self-evident, all analysis of North Korean New Year’s speeches is crap.*

In this year’s annual New Year’s Day message, Kim Jong Un boasted about his squalid little kingdom’s “brilliant successes in building a thriving socialist country and defending socialism,” its “upsurge … in production in several sectors and units of the national economy,” its “brilliant victory in the acute showdown with the imperialists,” and its “policies of respecting the people and loving them.” It’s crap like this that makes me proud of how little I’ve contributed to the torrent of junk...

Anju Links/Fiskings/Media Criticism

December 18, 2013

Kim Jong Un is “reckless,” “dangerous, unpredictable, prone to violence and … delusions of grandeur,” and nuked up. Is that all?

North Korea, which was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, has showered Baekryeong Island, a disputed South Korean-held Island in the Yellow Sea, and the site of the 2010 ROKS Cheonan attack, with leaflets threatening to turn the island into “a huge tomb.” [Screen grab from MBC, via the Chosun Ilbo] The leaflets did not explain why Kim Jong Un is not content to keep killing off his unwanted relatives, but a China-based,...

Anju Links/Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology

August 7, 2012

Open Sources, August 7, 2012

NORTH KOREA THREATENS TO ‘PUNISH’ DEFECTORS and activists beyond its borders for criticizing its regime. While I’ll tip my hat to the Chosun Ilbo for this one, I prefer KCNA’s original prose: In case the DPRK’s just demands are not met, there will follow corresponding measures including punishment of criminals involved in monstrous terrorism and other subversive and sabotage acts against the DPRK and the operations to lure and abduct its citizens. We declare that among the targets to be...

Anju Links

July 23, 2012

North Korea Increases Public Executions and Collective Punish…. Hey, Look! It’s Snoopy!

Writing in The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reports that as North Koreans try to flee its most recent avoidable food crisis, the repressive partnership of North Korea and China has been grimly effective in keeping North Koreans from escaping from their prison of a country: Last year, 2,706 North Koreans came to the South. During the first half of this year, there have been only 751 — a 42 percent decline compared with the same period a year earlier. The...

AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Refugees

July 1, 2012

Open Sources, August 1, 2012

ON RARE OCCASIONS, I CONSIDER KCNA to be authoritative, and this is one of those occasions: In a dispatch headlined “To Expect ‘Change’ From DPRK Is Foolish Ambition,” the North’s Korea Central News Agency in stark terms confronted and put down speculation and comments by outsiders that its authoritarian government might change its ways. [….] Then the spokesman said that South Korea’s government – which it blames for many of its problems – “let experts in the north affairs and...