Anju Links for 28 October 2008
ANOTHER STALINIST WHO’S PISSED AT LEE MYUNG BAK: Noam Chomsky, over an alleged ban on his works. I’m not sure whether Chomsky’s screeds circulate freely in Pyongyang, but the answer is probably useful to prove a point regardless of what it is. I don’t support banning even a yutz like Chomsky, whose work is all over the internet anyway. But if Chomsky is — to use Yonhap’s barren description of him — no more than a “linguist,” then Goebbels was no more than a “community activist.”SOMEHOW, I DON’T THINK THAT WILL DETER THEM:
A group of South Korean businesses on Sunday pleaded with activists to stop sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into North Korea, saying the practice was straining already frosty inter-Korean relations.
The request came a day before campaigners were due to float another 100,000 leaflets over the border.
Pyongyang has threatened to cut all inter-Korean exchanges and has warned of a possible inter-Korean military clash in an angry protest over the leaflets, which denounce the North’s leader Kim Jong-Il as a dictator.
“The leaflets are worsening inter-Korean relations,” the group of businesses operating at Kaesong, an industrial complex just north of the border, said in a statement carried by Yonhap news agency.
“If the complex shuts down, it will further dampen the hopes of both your organisations and our nation,” the statement added, describing the site as the only remaining “reconciliation channel.” [AFP]
“Reconciliation” in this case means things that should not be forgiven, and wouldn’t be if the perpetrators were Japanese — the exploitation of slave laborers who aren’t even allowed to carry on conversations with their supervisors. These paragons of business ethics would have us believe that slavery for profit is leading us to liberation (which translates to “arbeit macht frei” in the original German). If you’d like to help support more balloon launches, send your tax deductible contribution to the North Korean Freedom Coalition.
MONGOLIA HELPING N.K. REFUGEES? “Former health minister and parliamentarian Lamjav Gundalai told a news outlet in Seoul that on average, 700 North Koreans who have fled the communist country arrive in Mongolia every year.” That would be news to me.
DON’T MISS THIS EXCELLENT GI KOREA POST on a new RAND study on North Korea, South Korea, and China after Kim Jong Il.
HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE ‘DEFECTOR GIRL BOXER?’
[A] girl whose family fled North Korea is breathing just a hint of new life into the sport by winning a world championship at age 17. In a soccer-crazed country, her hardscrabble tale has generated some headlines. [NYT, Choe Sang Hun]
IS ROH MOO HYUN about to do the perp walk? Really, how many ex-South Korean presidents aren’t convicts?