May 5, 2014

Dennis Rodman, back from rehab, recounts hallucinations from last visit to Pyongyang

So Dennis Rodman is out of rehab and talking to the media again. In this interview, he’s described as “a potential source of information about a country that is inaccessible to most of the world,” so let’s test that. Rodman’s first major revelation is that Jang Song Thaek wasn’t really executed several weeks before Rodman’s last trip to Pyongyang. In fact, Rodman says that on his last trip, Jang was “standing right behind me.” Also, Kim Jong Un is “doing...

Categories Kremlinology/Useful Idiocy
May 2, 2014

Americans hate foreign policy, and also, the lack of one

One lovely April morning, the world awakened to find that its greatest power has fallen under the control of a cabal of perky Starbucks baristas. As it turns out, I am not alone in ridiculing the weaponization of tweets and hashtags as a substitute for tough and substantive national security policymaking as the world’s predators seize the day. Conspiratorial minds will suppose that this is all somehow coordinated, and maybe some of it is, but I assure you that I’ve been...

Categories Geopolitics/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
May 1, 2014

And now, a brief Marxist-style criticism of North Korea’s class struggle and internal contradictions (Updated)

Yonhap reports that North Korea has cut its grain imports from China by more than in half in the first quarter of this year “due to an increase in the country’s grain production last year.” A fall in market prices for corn corroborates that there is a greater supply of corn than usual; ordinarily, spring is the leanest time of year for poor North Koreans. Despite Pyongyang’s decision to buy and import less grain, the World Food Program, which recently...

Categories Class Warfare/NK Economics
April 30, 2014

Eagerly awaiting Christine Ahn’s reaction to North Korea’s sexism and homophobia

Now that North Korea’s state media have called South Korea’s female president a “whore,” a “prostitute,” a “crazy bitch,” and a “comfort woman,” no one will ever have to invent sexism again to deflect criticism of North Korea’s crimes against humanity, and whoever does will, from this date forward, have to argue her away around real, vicious, state-sponsored misogyny. What Park did before Obama this time reminds one of an indiscreet girl who earnestly begs a gangster to beat someone or a capricious whore who asks her...

Categories Anju Links/North-South/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
April 29, 2014

Just test the damn thing already.

So the news this week is that the Obama Administration, which for the last five years has stayed its hand from sanctioning North Korea because of Chinese sensitivities, has just blocked the assets of top members of Vladimir Putin’s government over their seizure of the Crimea. That sounds like an effective way to piss them off, but I can’t see how it poses a serious threat to Russia’s economy or Putin’s domestic support, or how it will deter his next...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. & Korea/WMD
April 27, 2014

Ghost of Darwin promoting tours of North Korea. Selectively.

I can’t improve much on of the latest American doofus to get himself arrested in North Korea, despite all my considerate public service warnings to stay the f**k out of there. For some people, neither ethics nor personal safety are good enough reasons to heed these. In fact, some North Korea tour companies claim that arrests are good for their business. If this is true, it’s cause for us to reflect on how quickly the genetic blessings of natural selection...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
April 25, 2014

Breaking! N. Korean gulag prisoners celebrate liberation by Samantha Power’s hashtag

The Talmud scholars have long written that it isn’t given to any generation of human beings to correct every wrong and every injustice. But neither are we excused from our obligation to try. And that is the challenge as an international community we face this week. It isn’t given to any generation, or members of the Security Council or the great officers of the world, to right every wrong. But surely we are not excused from our obligation to make...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights
April 22, 2014

N. Korea keeps it classy, calls Chair of U.N. Commission “a disgusting old lecher with 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality”

Last week, the Honorable Michael Kirby, a retired Justice of the High Court of Australia, and the Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry for Human Rights in North Korea, was in Washington. It was my honor to be invited to two events with Justice Kirby — a small-group breakfast meeting (Kirby called this is a “barbarous” custom) hosted by the Australian Embassy, and a small-group dinner hosted by a member of the Board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea....

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/WTF?
April 21, 2014

Open Sources, April 21, 2014

~  1  ~ THOSE NORTH KOREAN UAVs look exactly like a model manufactured in China. Not that it’s needed, but it’s yet more evidence that China isn’t enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions on North Korea. I hope the U.N. Panel of Experts is paying attention. Speaking of which, the POE’s new head will be French missile expert Erik Marzolf. I wish him luck in his important work. ~  2  ~ PUTIN IS BECOMING A PROBLEM ON NORTH KOREA: It looks...

Categories Anju Links
April 17, 2014

Yay, nuclear blackmail! Obama Admin caves on N. Korea denuclearization, human rights in face of nuke test threat (Updated)

The Nuclear Threat Initiative Newswire, citing Yonhap, reports that the Obama Administration, South Korea, and Japan have agreed to a major shift in its policy toward talks with North Korea, “easing its conditions for returning to nuclear talks,” out of fear of a new nuclear test on the eve of mid-term elections in South Korea and the United States. Since before Obama’s inauguration, North Korea has repeatedly said that it would never give up its nuclear weapons programs. Until now,...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
April 15, 2014

Inspector General finds flaws in WFP monitoring in N. Korea (and I find a bigger one)

A reader (thank you) directs my attention to this Fox News report covering a new report by the U.N. World Food Program’s Office of Inspector General, finding major loopholes in the WFP’s controls to prevent the North Korean government from stealing food aid and diverting it to regime loyalists and the military. The report is so cryptic that it’s almost unreadable, so I’ll summarize: – The WFP failed to meet its targets for monitoring visits to ensure that aid was...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
April 10, 2014

Open Sources, April 10, 2014

~   1   ~ YONGBYON JUST KEEPS GETTING SCARIER: OFK readers will remember the day the North Koreans blew up the cooling tower of their 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon to feign compliance with George W. Bush’s Agreed Framework 2.0. This was the modest pinnacle of Chris Hill’s diplomatic career, and came even as North Korea was submitting false declarations about its nuclear programs, denying the existence of a (since revealed) uranium enrichment program, and submitting samples of aluminum tubing...

Categories Anju Links
April 9, 2014

With or without flamethrowers, purges continue in North Korea (Updated)

What are the odds that Jang Song Thaek was eaten by a pack of dogs, or that Ri Sol Ju made a sex tape with Jang? Probably not greater than 10%, and I’d put the odds that the South Korean NIS planted both stories at roughly twice that. Lurid stories like these have never held much appeal to me, because I’ve never believed that anyone in a position to know them first-hand would ever tell them to a South Korean...

Categories Kim Jong Un
April 8, 2014

HRNK to host address by Michael Kirby, other events next week

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will host a series of events next week. From HRNK’s site: – Human Rights in North Korea: An Address by Michael Kirby. On April 14, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) will host an address by Michael Kirby, chair of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea (COI), to present its findings and recommendations. Following...

Categories Human Rights
April 5, 2014

If Kaesong “wages” aren’t used to pay workers, what are they used for? (The Unification Ministry won’t comment.)

In yesterday’s post about Kaesong, I argued that by any reasonable definition, its North Korean workers are forced laborers, and that the best evidence we have suggests that the vast majority of their “wages” are probably stolen by the Pyongyang regime, through a combination of direct taxation and confiscatory exchange rates. My argument relied heavily on a recent study by the economist Marcus Noland, who has done an excellent job researching questions that most journalists have overlooked, addressing the ethical...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/North-South/Sunshine