Search Results for: loudspeaker

August 25, 2015

Koreas agree to fight another day

They came, they talked, and they signed, but they solved nothing. Plus or minus one piece of paper, three severed legs, and an implicit promise of payment, we are where we were on the morning of August 4th, when Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon embarked on their fateful patrol. As I predicted hours before the deal was announced, Pyongyang didn’t apologize, and Seoul will continue to pay. The loudspeakers will be switched off. There will not be...

Categories Korean War II
August 21, 2015

Bullets Cross DMZ: Random Observations

By now, you’ve read the reports of what happened in the last few days, but here’s a quick recap. Last week, South Korea accused North Korea of planting mines near a South Korean border checkpoint, blowing the legs off two South Korean soldiers. Seoul’s response, which I found a bit asinine at the time, was to blare propaganda at a few hundred helpless North Korean conscripts. Yesterday, North Korea shelled the loudspeakers, South Korea fired back and evacuated some civilian...

Categories Korean War II
August 11, 2015

North Korean Men Cross DMZ (and plant land mines)

By now, you’ve read that South Korea’s government has accused the North Korean military of sending soldiers across the DMZ to plant mines near South Korean guard posts, an act that blew the legs off two South Korean soldiers last week. The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies. One lost both legs in the...

Categories Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
July 31, 2015

The rise of North Korea’s dissident culture

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....

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
October 30, 2014

What else is Kim Jong Un buying instead of food? A new airport.

The new airport, which is now in its final stages, is the latest of North Korea’s “speed campaigns,” mass mobilizations of labor shock brigades aimed at finishing top-priority projects in record time. Dressed in hard hats and brown or olive green uniforms, impressive swarms of workers toil under huge signs calling on them to carry out their tasks with “Korea Speed.” From some corners of the site, patriotic music blares from loudspeakers to provide further motivation. [….] But, in search...

Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid
September 23, 2013

AP Pyongyang outsources National Geographic reporting to objective journalist

It’s telling that when the AP wants to exhibit its work to the readers of National Geographic, it teams David Guttenfelder’s photos with Tim Sullivan’s reporting (which has usually been good) instead of Jean Lee’s (which hasn’t). The result is better reporting: But hearing the truth is challenging while loudspeakers blast songs of praise for Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. When the government allows foreigners inside, it presents them with a delicately crafted illusion of how the regime wants the...

Categories Anju Links
December 13, 2012

AP Exclusive: 100% of North Koreans interviewed by other North Koreans in a bar in Pyongyang applaud missile launch!

According to an exclusive, groundbreaking AP report from the frontier of journalism — Pyongyang — 100% of North Korean citizens interviewed by other North Koreans in a bar support Great Leader Kim Jong Un’s completely successful launch of a peaceful satellite despite the hostile policy of the imperialist Barack Obama! In Pyongyang, however, pride over the scientific advancement outweighed the fear of greater international isolation and punishment. North Korea, though struggling to feed its people, is now one of the...

Categories AP Watch
January 3, 2011

Open Sources

Several weeks ago, I blogged about the North Korean manager of a restaurant in Nepal who absconded with the till and defected. The Chosun Ilbo has several interesting updates to that story, including the fact this turns out to have been just one of two such restaurants in Kathmandu, that the manager has arrived in South Korea, and that Nepal has released the South Koreans who helped arrange the defection. Then there is this illustration of how small changes in...

Categories Anju Links
October 5, 2010

At National Review, Mario Loyola takes up many of the themes I wrote about in my Capitalist Manifesto, and concludes that North Korea’s collapse is accelerating. I think a few of us have noticed that trend for an uncomfortably long time, but until the last two or three years, I couldn’t quite understand how those trends could continue this long without the termination of the regime. _______________________________ Open News has two interesting reports on one of the most important and...

Categories Uncategorized
June 16, 2010

A Nation in Denial: On South Korea’s Mid-Terms

I’ve taken a good long while to chew on the results of South Korea’s recent election, and while I’m ready to offer some unscientific speculation about what it didn’t mean, I really wish that I had some good, reliable polling numbers to give me a more concrete idea of what motivated people to vote, and what didn’t. With that said, my main interest in the results (below the fold for the winners) is the media consensus that it was rebuke...

Categories Cheonan Incident/Korean Politics
June 14, 2010

Psyops Updates

Kim Jung-Wook, the Joongang Ilbo’s Washington Correspondent, thinks that the Cheonan Incident has revived the U.S.-Korea alliance, but frankly, the end result may well be the exact opposite. No, the incident didn’t raise tensions in a way that makes obvious the many conflicts in the two states’ interests, and yes, President Obama has shown more backbone than the North Koreans probably expected. The problem with this theory is that so far, there has been no significant response to the attack...

Categories Deprogramming/North-South/Propaganda/Subversion/The Fifth Column
June 11, 2010

11 June 2010

So, did you hear about Lee Myung Bak’s plot to kill Kim Jong Il? ___________________________ Sure, the idea that we can punish North Korea for sinking the Cheonan by staging some event at the World Cup is absurd in itself, but hey, it’s still not as dumb as blaring K-pop over loudspeakers at the DMZ. It might have some merit in the context of a broader campaign of subversion, which doesn’t appear to be taking shape. ___________________________ There aren’t many...

Categories Anju Links
June 10, 2010

Once Again, South Koreans Prove Exceptionally Prone to Mass Hysteria

There are times when I wonder if South Koreans will ever learn anything from the entire Mad Cow fiasco, when all it takes to spread mass hysteria in a prosperous, technologically advanced, industrialized society is a 16 year-old with high speed Internet: Police said yesterday that the boy, resident of Yeosu, South Jeolla, identified only by his surname, Yoo, sent 15 friends an online message that South Korea had decided to “make a pre-emptive military attack on North Korea” because...

Categories Korean Society/Technology
June 2, 2010

Kim Jong Il Has a Vote, Too

It’s election day in South Korea. The South has retreated, for the moment, from its plans to use psyops to influence public opinion in North Korea, but the converse certainly isn’t true. North Korea has a well developed, firmly rooted cadre of sympathizers, fifth columnists, , and the occasional hit team in South Korea, and the National Intelligence Service thinks they were actively campaigning on election day: A South Korean intelligence officer on Tuesday said Pyongyang is posting articles on...

Categories Korean Politics/North-South/The Fifth Column
May 25, 2010

That’s More Like It: South Resumes Propaganda Broadcasting to North Korea

While most of the reporting has focused on the rather futile gesture of blaring propaganda from loudspeakers, it seems that South Korea is doing something else that’s more likely to reach a wider North Korean audience: South Korea’s military resumed radio broadcasts airing Western music, news and comparisons between the South and North Korean political and economic situations late Monday, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military also planned to launch propaganda leaflets by balloon and other methods...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
May 24, 2010

President Lee Announces Weak Response to Cheonan Sinking

We have always tolerated North Korea’s brutality, time and again. We did so because we have always had a genuine longing for peace on the Korean peninsula…. But now things are different. North Korea will pay a price corresponding to its provocative acts,” he said. “I will continue to take stern measures to hold the North accountable. — President Lee Myung Bak After this, President Lee explained that his government will adopt the following measures as a response to North...

Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
May 10, 2010

10 May 2010: If They’ve Lost Fred Hiatt ….

If China really is “a moderating, useful influence” over North Korea, why did it roll out the red carpet for Kim Jong Il and reportedly offer him a $100 million bailout while it is the prime suspect in an action as dangerous and provocative as sinking the Cheonan? Suddenly, another bulb goes on at the Post: Despite all the time spent in six-party talks in recent years, and all the discussion of China’s new role as a “responsible stakeholder” and...

Categories Anju Links
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