I am ready to pronounce a partial reversal of my view on North Korea’s Arirang Festival. For the little trifle that the North Korean regime hoped to earn from curious westerners or sympathetic South Koreans, they certainly did not expect to turn a profit. The real motives were domestic consumption and foreign propaganda–to show the world that North Korea is unified, stable, happy, and dangerous to any foe. If that was the motive, the resulting coverage fell dramatically short of...

The Guardian, via SMH, reports that the North Korean excecution video, which you can now see with English narration, courtesy of The Korean Mediator, was the product of an organized North Korean resistance movement: The footage, secretly filmed in March, is evidence of a resistance network. “If he [the cameraman] had been caught, the punishment would almost certainly have been death,” said Jung-Eun Kim, an American-Korean journalist who has spent seven years monitoring the growth of the resistance movement. The...

The New York Times describes how the Mongolians put Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld into something of a fix by presenting him with a horse that didn’t exactly fit onto his airborne command center. Rumsfeld, echoing my own observation about the similarity of Mongolia’s countryside to God’s Country, called the young buckskin “Montana” (on the grand scale of the American West, my home town is right next door). “Buckskin,” by the way, is a term used by us simple country folk,...

Until now, I’ve usually been in the “overhaul dramatically” camp, as opposed to the “scrap now” camp, when it comes to the United Nations. But if Syria gets away with the murder of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon with facing serious international sanctions, I’ll be ready to declare the whole institution to be completely incompetent (as opposed to almost completely incompetent) as the arbiter of world affairs it seeks to become. As usual, John Bolton adds needed clarity (via...

The U.S. government has not taken a public position on Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s most recent visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, but the Chairman of the House International Relations Committee has: WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (Yonhap) — A senior U.S. congressman formally expressed his regret to Japan over Tokyo officials’ controversial visits to a shrine honoring war criminals. In a letter to Japanese Ambassador to Washington Ryozo Kato, a copy of which was obtained by Yonhap News Agency on Saturday,...

The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow was calling for U.S. forces to leave Korea before that became the majority view among Washington think tanks. This time, the reaction in the Korean papers promises to be a real hoot. What we’re less likely to get is the State Department’s candid reaction. The U.S. State Department has never met an alliance, treaty, or aid program that it doesn’t like. As a result, the list of Washington’s foreign policy welfare queens is long. The...

A Good Harvest. Some of the more hard-line readers may not approve, but I think this was inspired. When will it ever end, you ask? It will end when we strip the affair of its propaganda value. This is a brilliant way to begin doing that. It’s about time we got creative and proactive, for once. SGT Ray, if you’re reading, I’d be particularly interested in your reaction.

The Race for Mayor of Seoul. The Joongang Ilbo has it covered. I don’t know much more about Park Jin than the fact that he’s a hard-liner on North Korea, but I like that much about him. I suppose Oranckay will now tell us that he used to break kneecaps for Chun Doo Hwan.

The sordid life of Charles Robert Jenkins. Give the North Koreans credit for one thing–carrying out a far more effective punishment than the UCMJ would have provided. That’s still true, even with the conjugal privileges.

More Fun with the KFA. Do yourself a favor and go here, then click the link between the second and third pictures. Charles Robert who? Update: I wondered why KFA member Jason LeBouyer looked so familiar. Well, mystery solved.

Bill Richardson is the Governor of New Mexico, a former Secretary of Energy, a suspected presidential aspirant, and the latest of a series of highly intelligent men to make jaw-droppingly stupid pronouncements of diplomatic–and even humanitarian–optimism about North Korea. Richardson may well be a perfectly fine governor, but reasonable success at governance and bureaucracy in a society of laws and compromises does not necessarily qualify one to go eyeball-to-eyeball with bloody-minded sociopaths with nukes. Only in the foreign policy vacuum...

The New York Times: During his news conference, Mr. Rumsfeld was pressed for a response to recent public opinion polls that indicate a sense among some South Koreans that the United States is a greater threat to peace on the peninsula than North Korea. Mr. Rumsfeld took an uncharacteristically long pause, and then reminded his audience of the vibrancy of South Korea’s democracy, economy and lifestyle — and said they had been purchased, to a great extent, by American sacrifice...

On September 21st, I said this: The jockeying for the South Korean presidential race has started. Like mercurial gobs, parties split into factions and clump together again. The Joongang Ilbo has an interesting article that suggests potential splits in both the Grand National and Uri parties. . . . I’m actually hoping for splits and ferocious ideological power struggles in both parties, particularly the GNP. The Uri’s fresh ideas are all wrung out, and the GNP’s fresh ideas are all...

Busted! A U.N. inquiry has found evidence that Syria and its Lebanese puppets plotted the murder of Rafiq Hariri. In related news, the United Nations finally makes a judgment about a crime (but not an ongoing one).

Kenneth Clarke, the BAT official and U.K. Tory leader who knew about the company’s factory in North Korea, came in a miserable fourth in the race to lead his party, which lost its political relevance when Margaret Thatcher stood down. I can’t say to what extent the N. Korea relevations played a part, but it’s interesting how much traction the story got in the British press, which has done a much better job covering North Korean human rights than the...

Iron Ajumma Update: Kim Jong Il, flushed with his successes in agriculture, industry, economics, film-making, corrections, printing, pharmaceuticals, basketball, and golf, takes on corporate personnel management. SEOUL, Oct. 20 (Yonhap) — North Korea warned Thursday that it may have to cancel its exclusive business deals with the Hyundai Group unless the South Korean conglomerate restores the honor of an executive who was ousted this month on allegations of corruption.” (The expulsion) threw cold water on Hyundai’s relations with us, and...

The newest addition to my blogroll is Korean Mediator, written by milblogger Sergeant Joshua C. Ray. Sgt. Ray and I struck up an e-mail friendship just a few days ago, at which time he mentioned that he recently returned from a tour in Iraq, is studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and that he was an eyewitness to the horrific accident in 2002 that cost two girls their lives, and which was subsequently so shamelessly exploited...

I’ve been anticipating the Flying Yangban’s full report on this event, only to have Andy e-mail me and show that I’ve been looking in the wrong place. I’ll borrow just one quote before encouraging you to go off and read the whole thing yourself. “[The South Korean Government] should have asked for transparency in return for the food aid,” Kang said in a speech to a crowd comprised largely of foreigners living in Seoul. “That kind of attitude is extending...