Anju Links for 13 April 2007
* Matters of Life and Death. The Chosun Ilbo reports that Lao authorities have arrested six North Korean women. I’m not sure if it’s the same group I mentioned here. Meanwhile, 53 others are still in imminent danger of being sent back from Thailand. If you haven’t already done so, please contact the Thai Embassy (see previous link for e-mail address) and tell them not to send these refugees back to the gulag. Recent reports suggest that North Korea is imposing especially harsh punishments on repatriated refugees. It only takes a few minutes to send an e-mail. Consider the stakes. Thank you.
* Here’s a copy of LiNK’s press release from its day of fasting.
* The New York Times has much, much more on the Banco Delta story and the dirty money we gave back to Kim Jong Il. It’s too long and too depressing to graf, so just read it all on your own.
* At Least Al Gore Claimed Credit for Inventing Something Positive. I expect a candidate’s staffers to shill for him, but it does stretch even the limited credibility of a shill for Kim Jong Bill’s © “unofficial” campaign site to claim credit for a North Korea “breakthrough” (ht: a different Richardson) that not even Nancy Pelosi has the constitutional authority or personal prescence to have signed. Notably absent are pictures of the guv touring the U.S.S. Pueblo. See you on the 13th, guys. Note to Gov. Richardson’s staff: do you or your candidate have any idea what goes on in Camp 22? Has your candidate ever said the words, “Camp 22,” such as in one of the governor’s many conversations with the North Koreans? Is Gov. Richardson just having fun playing diplomat, does he have clientitis, or is he actually trying to give Kim Jong Il a free hand to perpetuate crimes against humanity that are on the same infamy scale as Mauthausen and Tuol Sleng? Speak up, Kim Jong Bill.
* Ampontan thinks China scholars have whored themselves out to the Communist Party. I don’t know enough to affirm that, but if it’s true, it’s a striking contrast to Korea scholars here. Yes, the Korea lobby has sway over plenty of them, and there are some (the Nelson Report crowd and the Korea Society in particular) who indeed sleep at Lee Tae Shik’s feet. Yet a sizeable faction — perhaps even a majority — of the Washington’s Korea scholars advocate a reduction in the U.S.-Korea military relationship, the preservation of which is Korea’s first priority here. Why has Korea alienated so many people who should be its friends? Aren’t the reasons obvious?
* “Let My People Go.” Don’t miss this GI Korea post that dovetails with this question. It links to a piece by Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, who is at the core of the left-of-center foreign policy establishment that is probably South Korea’s last base of “insider” support here.
* The Trotskyites at the Korean Teachers’ Union are at it again with anti-American, anti-FTA agitprop in the classroom. I found exclusive video.
* Powerline calls John McCain’s latest speech on Iraq “Churchillian.” Yes, it may just be that good. If another candidate were to lay out the stakes this way, he could get my vote. But for now, John McCain is the only one who is, so I’m leaning more strongly toward him. It strikes me how exceedingly uncommon it is for politicians to tell us things they know we don’t want to hear. We’ve learned to ignore the things that do not comfort us, but the truth that can’t be denied is that surrender means more war, more genocide, more body bags, more terrorism, and a much worse economy.
Did you post that at;
http://www.americaforrichardson.org/
???
Nice.
Yep.
“Ampontan thinks China scholars have whored themselves out to the Communist Party. “
This is not news to anyone who’s listened to these whores on CCTV and their pimp, Yang Rui of Dialogue. I nearly choked when I heard a U-Hawaii PhD holder claim with a straight face that China did not have any influence over North Korea and that its aid was just humanitarianism.
Well, it looks like they deleted my post. Did they delete yours, too? It’s odd that they’d (a) enable a feature that allows stangers to post, (b) crow about Kim Jong Bill’s great breakthrough, and then (c) delete a perfectly on-topic post that takes issue with the laudatory party line.
I mean, I can see why don’t have to allow ANY outsiders to post (hell, I wouldn’t let strangers guest post here). I can see why they’d delete things that were profane, slanderous, or off-topic (I do). But simply deleting fair criticism strikes me as cowardly. My criticism was simply asking whether Richardson has ever brought up Camp 22 in his public discussions about North Korea or his private conversations with the North Korean officials.
I guess we have to all help make sure the name “Kim Jong Bill” sticks. Remember you heard it here first.
“Kim Jong-Bill” I like it. I’m sure he is of the Albright mold and much to holier than thou to answer your fair criticism.
I just read the Bill Richardson website and the other Richardson has totally destroyed the post they put there. I wonder how long before they take Richardson’s comments off the site?
I have been digging around Kim Jong-Bill’s website some more and here is what the wrote on why they deleted your post:
http://www.americaforrichardson.org/node/1023
I love this opening paragraph:
“This morning I deleted three posts that appeared in quick one right after each other last night. All three were particularly critical of Gov. Richardson. While this website isn’t supposed to be a Richardson lovefest with no criticism allowed, we are a “for Richardson” site.”
So being for Richardson means not answering legitimate questions? They should call themselves a Richardson propaganda site instead.
They should be welcoming help at this early stage correcting all of their site’s major mistakes about North Korea diplomacy and Gov Richardson’s minor role in it — before they mushroom into a campaign-killing slogan to be used against the governor, like Al Gore’s “I invented the Internet” gaffe.
PLEASE, always refer to ‘him’ as “Gov. Richardson” or “Bill Richardson,” for the sake of all that is good!!!
I didn’t know they were setup to let complete strangers make *posts*, and I only made a few comments, which as GI Korea notes, are still there.
Yes, Joshua gets credit for “Kim Jong-Bill,” which I like for two reasons; a) it’s catchy, an b) makes no reference to family name. Sigh.
And yes, the owner of that site is definitely on the cultish side. A bit spooky.
[link]
That is the raw video file for the infamous anti-APEC video.
Here is some stuff I added to the infamous APEC Video. I wanted to break it down more, but I couldn’t find anybody with the Korean language skills who would work with me on it.
http://usinkorea.org/videos/new/KTU-Anti-US_Video_APEC_2005.wmv
I am still unhappily surprised at how little the K-bloggers covered this at the time. I didn’t remember anything about it at Marmot’s outside the comments section, and I did a quick check seach over there and didn’t find anything about it.
And as I remember it, the video didn’t get much play on the other popular K-blogs – not to the extent I thought it deserved.
They pulled the video off the net after some time, but not before the regular K-bloggers had a chance to see it, and I had it back up not too long afterward.
I thought there was at least a chance it wasn’t given the play it deserved, because some realized it had the potential to get play outside the K-blogsphere and make people angry at Korea. I’ve heard small notes like that here and there over the years about my site, and I know I’ve heard that in the Korean Studies area. It is a kind of thought like, “We’ve earned the right to complain about this stuff, because we’ve invested so much time in getting to know Korea, the good and the bad, but these others don’t know enough to process items like this video.” The short version – “This will make some anti-Korean who have no right.”
Maybe the video just hit my own personality in such a way to make me think it deserved more highlighting than the average person things.
I thought it was one of the most disgusting things to come out of the anti-US culture in Korea. Highly disgusting……
And obviously something that should peak the interest of at least the K-bloggers….
I just watched the video, US. Some of the content was apalling, some of it just plain silly. I got a kick out of the fact that Australian Prime MInister John Howard is a no-name to the KTU. Reminds of a similar gaffe committed by one of English rags. A front page photo of then APEC leaders Bill Clinton, Hu Jintao, Kim Dae Jung, and Jean Cretien omitted the name of Canada’s prime minister, thus offending Canadian colleagues at my workplace. Korea complains when it gets “no-name” treatment but dishes it out to other major nations.