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September 8, 2015

BBC “plans” daily broadcasts to N. Korea, but plans cost money

Having been fooled once before, I wasn’t about to accept that BBC was going to begin broadcasting to North Korea simply because Time, The Guardian, AFP, and The Financial Times say so. Digging further, these reports all cite this BBC.com report on a speech by Director General Tony Hall on the beeb’s plans for next year. Buried deep within that report is a plan for “significant investment” in the BBC World Service, “including a daily news programme for North Korea.” But plans are...

Europe/Subversion

September 4, 2015

N. Korea Glasnost Watch: Video shows men sent to camps for copying American movies

The Telegraph has obtained guerrilla footage of two men, one 27 and one 30, being tried and sentenced to nine months in a labor camp for copying and selling American movies. The North Korean judge, or official, says that one of the defendants is “a person immersed in the corrupt ideology of capitalism” and tells the crowd that the criminal acts were “revealed by agents in South Korea operated by our party.” During the full 12 minutes of footage, filmed...

Censorship/Subversion/The Camps

September 1, 2015

For Pyongyang, Korean War II is a war of more limited objectives

To Kim Il-Sung, Korean War I was a principally conventional and unlimited war whose goal was the unitary domination of the entire Korean Peninsula by force. To Kim Jong-Un, Korean War II is a war of skirmishes, whose less ambitious aim is hegemony over a supine and finlandized South Korea. Korea has changed dramatically since 1953. It should not surprise us that Pyongyang has adapted its strategy and objectives to fit this new reality. For Pyongyang today, survival is the...

Korean War II

August 31, 2015

Agreed Framework III Watch: Syd Seiler steps down

Yonhap is reporting that Syd Seiler, the State Department’s Special Envoy to the long-defunct six-party denuclearization talks, has stepped down and returned to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The move was unexpected enough that an e-mail from a Yonhap reporter to Seiler bounced back, with an out-of-office message saying that Seiler was “moving on to [his] next assignment.” A diplomatic insider in Washington said, “The departure of one of the most trustworthy experts on North Korea...

Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

August 28, 2015

Brit pleads guilty to smuggling North Korean meth into U.S.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a press release announcing the guilty plea of Scott Stammers, for conspiring to smuggle 100 kilograms of 99% pure North Korean meth from the Philippines to New York. The press release implies, but does not directly state, that the North Korean government itself knowingly sold the meth to Chinese gangsters, who sold the drugs to Stammers. As Tan Lim explained, his criminal organization was the only one currently...

Drugs & N Korea

August 27, 2015

Can Hollywood still make movies about North Korea? We’re about to find out.

Via Deadline Hollywood: Hawaii Five-O star Daniel Dae Kim and his CBS-based production company 3AD are partnering with Sriram Das’ Das Films (November Man) to develop Mike Kim’s Escaping North Korea: Defiance And Hope In The World’s Most Repressive Country, as a feature film. Rosalind Ross (Matador) is attached to pen the adaptation, and the South Korean-born Daniel Dae Kim will star as Mike Kim (no relation). The 2008 memoir chronicles a first-hand account of a high-risk mission to lead...

Books & Films/Censorship

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...

Korean War II

August 24, 2015

Korean War II: It’s (probably) over for now, but it’s not over

They came, they talked, and they solved nothing, but after a tense weekend, at least Korea is not at war. As of this writing, it looks like representatives of the two Korean governments will continue to talk and solve nothing, except to calm South Korea’s foreign investors. The North will not admit that it laid the mines that forever maimed Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon, the South will eventually relent on blaring propaganda to a few hundred...

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...

Korean War II

August 20, 2015

Revenge attacks demoralize North Korea’s security forces

Yesterday, Yonhap reported the possible purge of Won Tong-Yon, head of the United Front Department,* which handles North Koreaâ€™s propaganda. The report remains unconfirmed, but it would be consistent with reports that Kim Jong Un has put his 25 year-old sister, Kim Yo-Jong â€” known for her â€œeccentricity to the point of weirdnessâ€ â€” in charge of North Koreaâ€™s Propaganda and Agitation Department. If so, Miss Kim may have a reason to consolidate control over her own fiefdom. Won was...

Kremlinology/Resistance

August 18, 2015

Pro-North Korean group denies that it’s under investigation for tax evasion

According to the UPI, which in turn cites reports from Yonhap and SBS, one of America’s most infamous and influential pro-North Korean groups is under investigation “for tax evasion and political activities that violate U.S. tax laws.” The nonprofit Korean American National Coordinating Council in New York is under investigation according to local Korean American and diplomatic sources, but it was unclear which government agency was conducting the full-scale investigation, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported. The investigation also is the first reported...

U.S. Law/Useful Idiocy

August 14, 2015

Is that a cabana you’re designing, or are you just happy to see me?

Curtis Melvin has made an unsettling discovery on Google Earth, at one of (probably) Kim Jong-Un’s palaces. Oh, my…. Hey, that looks just like …. As HRNK points out, this story has a less amusing side for the North Koreans who go hungry while His Porcine Majesty spends their lunch money on giant phalluses, and other “improvements” to his palaces.

Humor/Satire/Kim Jong Un/Unfortunate photo ops/WTF?

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

August 12, 2015

Mr. President, You’re no Jack Kennedy: The Coming Korean Missile Crisis

In October 1962, the United States almost went to war with the Soviet Union over Khrushchev’s deployment of nuclear capable missiles to Cuba. The Cuban crisis has been in my thoughts recently because of how it compares to the Korean nuclear crisis as it is today, and how it will be in January 2017. While most attention is on Iran, the consensus is quietly shifting to the view that North Korea is at the verge of nuclear breakout. Furthermore, President Obama...

Kim Jong Un/WMD

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...

Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy

August 6, 2015

NYC insurer agrees to $271K penalty for insuring North Korean ships

This afternoon, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets control announced that as part of a settlement, Navigators Insurance Company has agreed to pay OFAC a civil penalty of $271,000 for 48 sanctions violations involving Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea. Navigators is a New York-based provider of maritime insurance. It also had a branch in London, which evidently decided to cut costs by skimping on lawyers. Here’s how that worked out for them. Between May 8, 2008 and April 1, 2011, Navigators and...

Sanctions

August 5, 2015

Famine, food policy, and the lost lessons of history

A drought, exacerbated by disastrous agricultural policies, causes widespread famine. A divided Congress, unsure about feeding an enemy, reluctantly agrees to send aid. A paranoid, totalitarian government obstructs the delivery of the aid, infiltrates and spies on aid organizations, and diverts food from starving children to a loyal elite. Desperate victims resort to cannibalism. Back in America, politics continues to intrude — the hard right wants to starve a Marxist-Leninist government into submission, while the hard left sympathizes with the regime and accuses...

Famine & Food Aid

August 4, 2015

Switzerland sells luxury watches to Kim Jong-Un, despite U.N. sanctions and food shortages

Throughout North Korea’s Great Famine, as millions of North Koreans either starved to death or watched their loved ones die, suppliers across Europe willingly sold Kim Jong-Il millions of dollars’ worth of luxury cars, yachts, cognac, and Swiss watches. In 2006, the U.N. Security Council recognized the obscenity of this practice by adopting Resolution 1718, which first banned the export of luxury goods to North Korea. Among European nations, probably none has done more than Switzerland to enable the democidal kleptocracy of...

Europe/Luxury Goods