Search Results for: rimjingang

THE PIANIST KIM CHEOL WOONG, whom Melanie Kirkpatrick wrote about in “Escape from North Korea,” will be here in the D.C. area to play two performances this weekend.  One will be at the “home theater” of conductor Lorin Maazel, of all people, in Castleton, Virginia, on Saturday evening.  The other will be on Sunday, March 24th, and will be sponsored by a new group, NKUS (site in Korean only).  Henry Song of the North Korean Freedom Coalition calls them the...

GOOGLE HAS RELEASED A NEW ATLAS of North Korea, and Curtis, who has endured countless hours of the torture that is North Korean television for Queen and Country, is deservedly and prominently credited.  On a personally gratifying note, it also seems apparent that the mapping of the political prison camps derives in large part from the work of this humble blog. *          *         * AIR KORYO’S AGEING Russian aircraft are banned from Chinese...

SO PARK GEUN-HYE HAS WON THE NOMINATION, as we knew she would all along. I wish Ms. Park the best of luck. This isn’t because I’m an especially great fan; Ms. Park has shown an authoritarian mindset and a lack of vision about achieving unification, as opposed to maintaining deterrence. It’s because Ms. Park is smart, tough, and would be an effective executive if — if — she can resist the temptation to overreach, and because the alternatives are so...

If South Korea’s National Assembly can’t pass a North Korean human rights law now, I doubt there will be another opportunity anytime soon. But not surprisingly, the Workers’ Party, south Chosun Branch Democratic Party remains opposed, leading to this wonderfully expressive quote from Nam Sung Wook of the Institute for National Security Strategy: Therefore, he asserted, “Hoping to pass the North Korean Human Rights Law by the mutual consent of both opposition and ruling parties is the same as looking...

Why does Marxist criticism seem to apply so much better to North Korea than to, you know, capitalist societies? To the Gypsy Scholar’s observation, I’d like to add this example: Wovon Lebt Der Mensch. It plays during the opening credits of The Threepenny Opera, a blunt instrument of 1920’s German Communist propaganda whose Brecht-Weill score still contained some good gritty, gripping songs that have outlasted the film. ___________________________ In the op-ed pages of Wall Street Journal, Melanie Kirkpatrick reports on...