In Pyongyang, men are locking themselves in the bathroom to download … - " /> In Pyongyang, men are locking themselves in the bathroom to download … - " />
Home  >  Propaganda

Category: Propaganda

August 20, 2014

In Pyongyang, men are locking themselves in the bathroom to download …

 I hear that’s not all they’re downloading (ahem). ” the deeds were done from the Ryugyong-dong district – also the place where all my hits from North Korea come from – a “neighbourhood in the northeast of Pyongyang … which contains … the Pyongyang International Communications Centre” and Koryolink’s main office. So that’s why. On reflection, I suppose Martyn Williams is probably correct in identifying foreigners as the most likely culprits. You know what this means, of course: Pyongyang may be the only city in Asia where...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion
August 19, 2014

One of the few examples of potentially effectively engagement by foreign governments …

in North Korea is being shut down by the regime after being outed. The Diplomat reports that the unsecured wireless networks of foreign embassies had allowed North Koreans living nearby to access the internet without restriction, and that the hunger of North Koreans for that information was so great that it caused something of a housing boom in those neighborhoods. Now that the security forces know about this, they’re cracking down, and forcing embassies to secure and password-protect their signals....
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Subversion
August 15, 2014

Pyongyang, as Leni Riefenstahl might have seen it*

Last week, a slick new video of Pyongyang by Rob Whitworth and JT Singh infected many writers and readers who don’t know much about North Korea with the Madonna Syndrome, defined as the illusion of entering virgin territory actually while plodding along a tired, well-worn, loveless, and morally ambiguous path in the footsteps of Dennis Rodman. The chirpy reaction of Washington Post blogger Abby Phillip was typical: A new video aims to show a different side of Pyongyang. It is...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Propaganda
July 31, 2014

Refugees, geeks to join forces at “Hack North Korea”

The Human Rights Foundation, “a New York-based group that focuses on closed societies,” will host a two-day “hackathon” this coming weekend to “harness the technical prowess of Silicon Valley to come up with new ways to get information safely into North Korea.” The event’s title is “Hack North Korea.” Several prominent North Korean defectors will attend the event including pro-democracy activist Park Sang-hak, former North Korean child prisoner Kang Chol-hwan, media personality Park Yeon-mi and Kim Heung-Kwang, a former professor...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Subversion
July 30, 2014

China shuts down exhibition by North Korean satirist

IF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT WONDERS why its own people find its modern cultural output stultifying, then maybe it shouldn’t stultify quite so much: A North Korean defector known for his satirical paintings on North Korean society was forbidden from holding a rare exhibition in Beijing on Sunday, with Chinese police officials removing his artwork shortly before the exhibition began. The painter from North Korea with the pseudonym Sun Mu, who fled the North in 1998 and resettled in South Korea in...
Categories China/Refugees/Subversion
June 23, 2014

North Korea Perestroika Watch: Crackdowns on food, information, borders intensify

OFK readers likely have offered a diverse spectrum of adjectives to describe the views expressed on this site, but one that most of them would probably affirm is “contrarian.” After Kim Jong Un’s coronation, it was briefly fashionable to perceive him as a reformer. I argued that little substantive evidence supported this theory, and cited evidence that His Porcine Majesty was closing down the border, statistical evidence that refugee flows to the South had fallen dramatically as a result, and...
Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Subversion
May 12, 2014

N. Korea doubles down on racism (plus, our latest op-ed at CNN.com)

Evidently, North Koreans are unfamiliar with The First Rule of Holes:     Pyongyang, May 12 (KCNA) — The spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry gave the following answer to a question put by KCNA on Monday accusing U.S. officials of pulling up the DPRK over its residents’ criticism of Obama reported by its media:     The resentment expressed by individuals of the DPRK at Obama recently was a proper reaction to him who malignantly insulted and slandered the dignified DPRK during his...
Categories Propaganda/WTF?
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 3, 2014

AP outraged about free speech in Cuba

Is the AP a cabal of closet Marxist-Leninists or just the supine courtesan of every tyrant who lets it open a bureau in his kingdom? Either way, I really don’t understand what drives its corporate conscience. On one hand, it recently criticized the Obama Administration for “propaganda” photos. On the other hand, it did this not long after putting on an exhibition of actual propaganda photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Now, the AP has released a breathless...
Categories AP Watch/Censorship/Subversion
April 1, 2014

How to build a guerrilla communications network

Last weekend, while reading Popular Science, I stumbled on this fascinating article about how the Mexican drug cartel known as The Zetas used ordinary two-way radios and hidden antennas to build a sophisticated intra-national and international communications network that stretched from Guatemala to Arizona, facilitating drug smuggling and money laundering across its entire reach. The potential for nobler applications in North Korea is obvious. The prerequisite to the rise of any national resistance movement is the creation of a broad-based,...
Categories Subversion
November 27, 2013

North Korea approaching provocation phase of its “vicious cycle”

North Korea’s bipolar cycle is now familiar to most Korea watchers, including the President of South Korea. The North pursues its nuclear weapons capability with consistent determination in all phases of that cycle, but not always with consistent ostentation. There are periodic acts of satellite theater — a new excavation here, a new launch pad there, or steam from a cooling tower. Words vacillate between conciliation (often cryptic) and belligerence (but mostly, belligerence). You can’t really time North Korea’s cycles...
Categories Propaganda/WMD
February 27, 2013

Would Dennis Rodman have played Sun City?

Visit Pyongyang – An idiom used to describe a desperate plea for media attention (see also Jump the Shark) by a washed-up celebrity or politician (see Jimmy Carter, Bill Richardson, Ric Flair) who, lacking the residual talent to attract such attention by any other means or device, visits the one place on Earth where any publicity-seeker whose name is vaguely recalled by persons over 40 can be assured of making global headlines without being arrested, indicted, or otherwise worthy of...
Categories Human Rights/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy
February 6, 2013

Sometimes, a missile is just a missile

Every time North Korea tests a rocket, Hans Blix sheds a little tear and Ban Ki Moon’s fluffy white tail stops wagging, because North Korean rocket tests violate three U.N. Security Council Resolutions — 1695 (which bans “all activities related to its ballistic missile programme”), UNSCR 1718 (ditto, and requires N. Korea to “re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching”), and 1874 (which bans “any launch using ballistic missile technology”).  North Korea’s official response is that it is...
Categories Anju Links/Anti-Americanism/Propaganda/WMD/WTF?
May 12, 2012

Sticks and Stones

Sure, it’s creepy when North Korea teaches children to torment effigies of your president, but that’s the kind of insult a mature society learns to ignore.  The next time the North erupts in contrived outrage about some perceived slight to its leaders, just put that into perspective.  Words are just words, unless they’re threats. When North Korea communicates threats, we need to treat those like acts of terrorism and sanction them accordingly. North Korea’s jamming of GPS used by airliners,...
Categories Propaganda/Terrorism (NK)/WTF?
May 10, 2012

Report: North Korea’s Control of Information Breaking Down

For years, advocates of appeasing the North Korean regime have claimed that more “engagement” with its dictators would gradually change its character and moderate its belligerent and brutal tendencies.  U.S. policy expressed this hope in a series of failed agreed frameworks by presidents of both political parties.  These made no progress toward disarming North Korea, but did provide significant, regime-sustaining financial windfalls for Kim Jong Il.  South Korea’s version of this theory was its “Sunshine” policy, which was — you...
Categories Subversion
April 11, 2012

A New Approach to North Korea: Contain, Constrict & Collapse

Sometime in the next few hours, North Korea will launch a prototype for an intercontinental ballistic missile, in flagrant violation of three U.N. Security Council resolutions. The North Koreans announced the launch two weeks after agreeing to a deal to freeze their missile and nuclear programs in exchange for U.S. food aid. It now seems they will follow their missile test with a nuclear test. Traditionally, Chinese obstructionism delays U.N. Security Council action by about three weeks after a North...
Categories Diplomacy/Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/Subversion/WMD
January 27, 2012

Jabba the Kim among the Ewoks, or worst photo op ever

Maybe the Associated Press’s new vocation as a propaganda outlet for North Korea has a brighter side than I’d originally realized. Today, the AP brings us what must be the worst photo op ever, a barracks inspection by Kim Jong Eun. Where to begin? The unwittingly (I think) subversive decision to surround the morbidly obese kid — has he ever looked so fat? — with these lean, hungry leprechauns and their leathery, wizened officers? Posing him next to the their...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Propaganda/Unfortunate photo ops