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Category: Korean War II

June 8, 2020

The N.Y. Times, the Ningpo 12, Minbyun & Yoon Mee-hyang: The Story Behind the Story

Warning: This one is a long read. There are a lot of threads to pull together. In the end, I believe the implications for South Korea’s democracy, the human rights of North Koreans, and the accuracy of the news you read are grave enough to justify the effort to write (and hopefully, to read) it. ~   ~   ~ Since the announcement of their group defection in April 2016, this blog has paid close attention to the case of the Ningpo...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column
August 24, 2018

Why the domestic troubles of Trump & Moon are grave news for Koreans

POLITICIANS DO THEIR WORST DIPLOMACY WHEN THEY’RE WEAK AT HOME. SCANDAL TEMPTS THEM TO SEEK GLORY ABROAD. The hyenas of the world’s ecosystem see them limp and decide to prey on them, or on the calves they can’t protect. Of Mr. Trump’s troubles, you already know plenty that I need not repeat here. Whatever your view of those troubles, they aren’t going away, and if you correctly acknowledge their political element, they’re apt to be more serious next January. The...
Categories America/An Alliance?/Korean War II/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
August 22, 2018

If the deal-maker didn’t make a deal & the peace-maker didn’t make peace, could Twitter be wrong?

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually believe that Agreed Framework III proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. It often seems that everyone on Twitter but me belongs to one of these tribes, which despite...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
June 11, 2018

Guest Post: Blue House Chief of Staff Im Jong-seok vs. Dr. Ji Man-won: Im sues Ji for defamation; Ji sues Im for National Security Law violations

The following guest post is submitted by Dr. Tara O. While I’m writing about the Circus in Singapore, Dr. O informs us about far more consequential things for Korea’s future. ~   ~   ~ On May 31, 2018, Im Jong-seok (임종석) (age 51), the Blue House Chief of Staff, sued Dr. Ji Man-won (지만원) (age 75) for defamation. Im also sued a small, online independent news outlet called Newstown (http://www.newstown.co.kr/), which publishes Dr. Ji’s work, and others for defamation at the same time. Dr. Ji,...
Categories An Alliance?/Censorship/Democracy/Korean Politics/Korean War II/The Fifth Column
May 31, 2018

Guest Post: Journalist preemptively jailed for libel in South Korea, a prosperous OECD country

The following guest post is submitted by Dr. Tara O. ~   ~   ~ The Committee to Protect Journalists’ map shows that 262 journalists were imprisoned in numerous countries around the world in 2017. The Republic of Korea was not on the map as one of those countries . . . until now. With the jailing of Byun Hee-jae of a small independent media outlet Media Watch (www.mediawatch.kr) on May 30, 2018,South Korea, a prosperous OECD country, took a step back by...
Categories Censorship/Korean War II
May 29, 2018

Guest Post: A Hostile Takeover of MBC, a Major TV Broadcaster in South Korea

The following guest post is submitted by Dr. Tara O. ~   ~   ~ Controlling the narrative through the information people receive is one of the key steps in influencing people’s thoughts and behaviors. Influencing the media is important in this regard. The Moon administration in South Korea has taken over control of Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), with help from the labor union, the National Union of Media Workers at MBC Headquarters (전국언론노동조합 MBC 본부), which is under the umbrella of...
Categories Censorship/Korean War II
May 9, 2018

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean Society/Korean War II/North-South/Sunshine
May 3, 2018

Guest Post: Irrational Exuberance Redux: North Korea and its nuclear weapons, goals, and intentions

[The following guest post is submitted by Dr. Tara O, the author of this book, and whose bio you can read here.] Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, called the overvaluation of the dot-com market “irrational exuberance” in 1996. The term was used again to describe the housing bubble of 2004 through 2007 by Yale Professor Robert Schiller. Now, here is another situation ripe for the term—the expectation that Kim Jong-un will give up his nuclear weapons. This irrational...
Categories Korean War II/Sunshine
May 2, 2018

North Korean Freedom Week is the next test for free speech in “free” Korea

A FEW OF US WILL ALWAYS STUBBORNLY INSIST THAT WE DISREGARD THE LIVES AND DIGNITY of North Korea’s oppressed people at our own peril. We argue that there can be no verified disarmament of a North Korea that remains a closed society, no security in its promises as long as it mendaciously denies the existence of its prison camps, no lasting peace as long as it holds human life in contempt, no reunification between a liberal democracy and a tyranny...
Categories An Alliance?/Censorship/Korean War II/Sunshine
April 23, 2018

Moon Jae-in’s vision for reunification means One Slave Korea

LAST DECEMBER, I PUBLISHED A SURPRISINGLY CONTROVERSIAL HYPOTHESIS that Korean War II would not be a conventional war, but is a hybrid war to alternately cajole and coerce South Korea into gradual submission to the North’s hegemony, aggressive implementation of a series of joint statements, and eventual digestion into a one-country, two-systems confederation. I argued that this plan would only work if a sufficiently submissive government in Seoul yielded to Pyongyang while going only so far and so fast as...
Categories Appeasement/Korean War II
April 16, 2018

“Liberal” South Korean government blocks filming of Thae Yong-ho’s speech; article reporting it vanishes (Updated)

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices … in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for...
Categories Censorship/Defectors/Democracy/Korean War II
April 6, 2018

South Korea’s “liberal” government is trying to censor the North Korea policy debate in America

IT’S WEIRD HOW A TL/DR POST I PUBLISHED IN 2014 ON THINK TANKS, PROPAGANDA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Korea suddenly resurrected itself to relevance twice in two days, almost four years later. As you may recall from that post, in 2005, the Korea Foundation suddenly pulled its funding from the American Enterprise Institute after its in-house magazine, The American Enterprise, published a special edition about the current wave of sometimes-violent anti-Americanism in South Korea during and after the 2002 election that swept...
Categories Censorship/Korean War II
January 8, 2018

Guest Commentary: How Pyongyang’s reunification plan outlived Seoul’s

The following commentary is submitted by OFK contributor Rand Millar. ~   ~   ~ For most of the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century Germany was perceived by most European nations as the primary security hazard in Europe on account of its expansionist ambitions. In the aftermath of its defeat in the First World War, Germany was forbidden by the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty from fortifying the left bank of its Rhineland territory or...
Categories Korean History/Korean War II
December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...
Categories Fiskings/Korean War II
December 4, 2017

Korean War II: What the Joint Statements tell us about Pyongyang’s strategy

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell On June 15, 2000, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il signed a joint statement agreeing to seek “independent” reunification and an inter-Korean coalition government. It was not the first joint statement between North and South. This relatively modest one from 1972 calls for “both parties [to] promote national unity as a united people over any differences of our ideological and political systems.” In retrospect, this was...
Categories Diplomacy/Korean War II
November 20, 2017

S. Korean Unification Minister: Hey, maybe Kim Jong-un would use his nukes to reunify Korea under his rule

Atypically, the most unserious person in a left-wing Korean administration turns out not to be its Unification Minister. In an interview with Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal’s Seoul Bureau Chief, Cho Myoung-gyon concedes that Pyongyang may indeed have grander ambitions than defending itself against the Yankee hordes: Mr. Cho also said that he was alarmed by increasing signals that North Korea sees its nuclear arsenal as a way to achieve its decades-old dream of unifying the Korean Peninsula under...
Categories Korean War II
November 7, 2017

The Moonshine Policy failed because Kim Jong-un demands surrender, not engagement

Just before Air Force One took off for Tokyo, the New York Times printed a story by Choe Sang-hun, mourning for Moon Jae-in’s failure to revive the Sunshine Policy, wallowing in self-pitying nationalism, and pinning most of the blame for this on Donald Trump ” not Moon, for failing to read the U.N. Security Council resolutions before promising initiatives that would violate them, not Korean voters who don’t trust Pyongyang and don’t want a revival of the Sunshine Policy. Choe...
Categories An Alliance?/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
November 2, 2017

A top defector risked his life to tell us of Pyongyang’s plans & vulnerabilities. The media put its own words in his mouth.

Before I get to what Thae Yong-ho did not say at CSIS on Tuesday, and when he testified the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, let’s start with what he did say. By now, you probably know that Thae was North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. before he defected in August 2016. This week, Thae made his first visit to the U.S. I could not have been more impressed or moved by his words. Do yourself a favor and bookmark...
Categories Defectors/Korean War II