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Anju: January 21, 2012

The Daily NK writes about “The High Price of Idolatry:”

We should perhaps remember with great concern the time when Kim Jong Il used $900 million to both permanently preserve Kim Il Sung’s body and then create Keumsusan Memorial Palace to keep it in.

It is no simple task to erect a statue of anybody, let alone someone who presumably requires a large statue such as Kim Jong Il. In the South Korean city of Gumi, a mere 5m statue of former President Park Chung Hee cost 1.2 billion South Korean Won ($1.03 million). Kim Il Sung’s statue in Pyongyang is 24m high. For a massive statue like that to be erected, the foundations also need to be consolidated, then a road must be paved to go to the area. Lighting needs to be set in place and electricity provided all year round.

Thus, at the same time as Kim Il Sung was being publicly idolized, thousands upon thousands of people in different parts of the country were collapsing in the streets of hunger.

Jimmy Carter was unavailable for comment.

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I don’t think you have to agree with Soviet-style political abuses of psychiatry to believe that people with an emotionally driven affinity for evil regimes probably have a psychological disorder that’s amenable to medical diagnosis. Not that the disorder necessarily makes them unable to function in society, it just makes them look awfully silly and unworthy of publication in any serious newspaper. The more debatable question that follows is whether you still consider The New York Times to be a serious newspaper, given its willingness to publish the likes of Christine Ahn.

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But then, great institutions die like our own bodies — one piece at a time. I thought the Times wrote an interesting (and favorable) review of “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Here’s another review at Bloomberg Businessweek. This is going to have to go on my very crowded reading list, along with that Kim Jong Nam book I’m eagerly anticipating.

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So the number of North Koreans arriving in the South continues to rise, but are these recent arrivals in China or people who’ve been hiding in China for years, finally making a break for it? Everything I hear from the China-North Korea border these days is about crackdowns, snipers, and land mines.

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I don’t fully understand why North Korea is importing more cell phones, given the mortal threat they potentially pose to its monopoly on information. The best explanation I can offer is that they’re thinking like the city governments that give free needles to junkies: they’ve concluded that people are going to get them anyway, so better to give them something they can control better. “Approved” phones can be concentrated in loyal hands, can’t call overseas, can be monitored (a few of them, anyway), and can be cut off should things get dodgy (as our British friends would say). The other reason may well be that Orascom’s financial generosity to the regime — and key regime officials — has influenced its judgment. There are some things I just can’t explain. This is one of them.

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13 Responses

  1. Re: the Daily NK URL above: on my iMac, Google Chrome tells me it found malware at that site. IIRC, this happened a few months ago, and NK, or friends of NK, had something to do w/it. Be careful . . .

  3. I understand your disagreement w/ Christine Ahn in general. But do you disagree in particular w/ what she wrote in the NY Times article? I think she is bringing up good points when questioning the need for another US military base in South Korea.

  4. Well, I’d like the see the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from South Korea. There ends the agreement. I’m open to keeping an air and naval presence as long as South Korea welcomes it and as long as North Korea continues to pose a threat.

    But that’s beside my point, which is that Ahn can’t write a paragraph without littering it with factual and logical fallacies. Fine, it’s a free country, but the Times’s reputation should take a hit when it prints crap, even if they did correct one of Ahn’s sloppy errors after the fact:

    An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a RAND Corporation report. The report was published in 2011, not 2009, and it discussed the importance of the Jeju naval base to South Korea, not the United States.

    No reason to stop there!

    For instance: Ahn’s strained conjuring of “U.S. imperialism” from the democratically elected South Korean government’s plan to build a South Korean naval base in South Korea, without quite bothering to mention that South Korea has its own Aegis warships. The logic of the Cheju location — apparently not obvious enough for Christine Ahn’s analytical mind — is that it’s out of the range of most NK SRBMs, but far enough north to send ships north off either of its coasts if tensions rise. And yes, the government of South Korea might also ask U.S. Navy ships to make port calls for such an occasion. So? Aegis is a defensive system. This was five months after the North sank the Cheonan and three months before it shelled Yeongpyeong, after all. Note how Ahn says the Cheju base is too far south to protect Seoul, yet poses a mortal threat to … southern China. (And who has been claiming the entire South China Sea recently?) Ahn’s talent for inventing Yankee conspiracies may actually exceed Roy Cohn’s talent for inventing commie conspiracies.

    Once you eliminate Ahn’s misreading of the RAND report, what evidence supports her theory? Well, there’s Ahn’s quotation of some unnamed person who answers the phones at the Korean Embassy, and another from a ChiCom colonel (nice to see that Ahn has found a military she trusts). Yet when she found no credible evidence whatsoever to support her theory, she explained it by saying that “Washington hasn’t been forthcoming.”

    Ahn also cited as fact the allegations of dumping Agent Orange at Camp Carroll, which were thoroughly investigated at a cost of $3 million to U.S. taxpayers. Even then, the evidence for the claim was sketchy, but in the end we found bupkes. I’d say that’s worth another correction.

    And finally, given all the litter Cheong Wook-Sik has left on the internet, you’d think that stable of NYT fact-checkers would have caught Ahn’s whopper when she refers to him as a “South Korean military analyst.” In fact, Cheong’s only qualification is that he’s a professional far-left agitator. If he qualifies as a military analyst, I can only assume he was accredited by the same institution that accredited Michael Jackson as a day care provider.

  5. Speaking of Christine Ahn, she has a piece in the Huffington Post, talking about how the National Security Act is a violation of freedom of speech, a fair enough issue but without any context about the danger the country to the north is, making it a true enemy state whereby it is prudent to keep an eye on its active supporters.

    I’m a bit ticked off right now, because my comment to that effect…

    Christine Ahn would have the uninformed layperson on North Korea believe that the Pyongyang regime is just another regular country — a misunderst­ood country at that — and not one that deliberately starves, tortures, and/or murders millions of its citizens and regularly threatens military attack on its neighbors. She conveniently leaves out North Korea’s recent killing of dozens of South Korean sailors or its shelling of South Korean visitors.

    Her parroting of Pyongyang propaganda relies on you having forgotten that, so that this just seems like a mere free speech issue (conveniently told from one side, with inflammatory language to boot). She gives this away when she describes the US military presence as an “ongoing military occupation” (when in fact South Korean administrations on both the right and the left have repeatedly asked for US forces to remain in order to maintain South Korea security against North Korean provocations and Chinese encroachment; it is completely voluntary and the Seoul government, à la the Philippines in the early 1990s, can ask the US to leave anytime).

    However, at heart, this is no mere free speech issue, but one that comes from a context of a real enemy trying to do real harm. Christine Ahn, whose writing elsewhere seems to indicate that she simply does not believe Pyongyang really is killing all those people, would rather you not think about that.

    … has been turned down by the moderators. It seems that kind of thing happens to about half the comments I leave at HuffPo; I guess I really am just a moderate.

  6. D’oh! I forgot to include a link to the aforementioned Christine Ahn propaganda piece: here.

    It’s now midday the following day, and my comment appears to have been rejected again. I wonder if Christine Ahn herself is doing the moderation. I encourage others to go and leave nice, polite, inoffensive, and link-free comments to see if they can get past the moderators. Maybe HuffPost just doesn’t like me.

  7. Given that the HuffPost has so many contributors, I’ll bet she is moderating her own posts. Why don’t you contribute a response piece that would get a much wider audience than a comment on a thread? I almost always read comment threads looking for counterarguments, clarifications, and additional information relating to claims made in the original text. I learn as much from regular commenters as I do from reporters. Today’s edition of the NYT published a piece on educational reform titled “States Try to Fix Quirks in Teacher Evaluations” which predictably contained misleading and disingenuous quotes from education “experts,” but alas, no comment thread allowing readers to challenge statements made in the story.

  8. Hmm… maybe I’ll consider contributing something, then. There’s a higher bar (one would hope) between a post on my own blog and one on a news forum site like HuffPost, but I might be up for the challenge every now and then.

    And I agree with you about the value of reading comments threads. Sadly, though, places like OFK where there is usually an intelligent and informative exchange of ideas are not always the norm, so I can understand why the NYT might not offer a comments section on some of their articles, but in that case moderation is the better middle ground.

    Actually, come to think of it, I think their policy is to not have comments threads on the articles that actually appeared in print. I think.

  9. I’d say you’re definitely up to the editorial standards of any publication that would print Christine Ahn.

    (I meant that to be more complimentary than it sounded.)

  11. Joshua, no worries (and thanks!). I knew you didn’t mean that as a dig.

    Glans, I’m not really sure what you meant. That does sound like a dig (but is it at me or at HuffPost?).

    MI or HP, I’d get paid the same either way.

  12. I think Glans’ point is that some of us refuse to frequent the HuffPost site, so your word wouldn’t be seen by such persons. However, it would be seen by many others (your target audience?). Perhaps you could post at both sites! 😉

  13. so I can understand why the NYT might not offer a comments section on some of their articles, but in that case moderation is the better middle ground.

    NYT comment threads are moderated. I don’t know if there is any rule determining whether a story gets a comment thread, but the degree of controversy doesn’t seem to be a factor. Some stories will get hundreds of comments within a few hours, prompting the NYT to close the thread temporarily while they work through the moderation queue. I don’t waste time wading through hundreds of comments and just skip to the most recommended NYT Picks and Reader Picks.

    Do consider publishing a piece about North Korea on a left-leaning media website, so you’re actually preaching to those who need to hear the message.