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Category: Propaganda

June 5, 2009

The Fury of the Smoking Manure

USA Today has a long, interesting, and amusing read on North Korean propaganda, including some extensive quotes by B.R. Myers.  Read the whole thing on your own, but I can’t resist quoting this: In a wild rhetorical flourish during a 2003 confrontation with the United States, state radio charged that the Earth itself was furious at the Americans and that even “piles of manure in the fields are fuming out smoke of hatred.”  [USA Today, Paul Wiseman] I, for one,...
Categories Humor/Satire/Propaganda/Unintended Humor/WTF?
April 14, 2009

Open Radio Comes Into Its Own

Open Radio for North Korea is getting plenty of publicity recently, and it’s also cranking out plenty of interesting reporting about (and often from) North Korea. First, I’ll link to a CNN interview with Open Radio’s founder, Young Howard, a/k/a Ha Tae-Keung a story on Open Radio at the L.A. Times. By far the most popular program for Howard’s station is “Unsent Letters,” which broadcasts messages from outsiders seeking to get word to friends and family in North Korea. It’s...
Categories Deprogramming/Drugs & N Korea/Kremlinology
March 23, 2009

Collapse of N. Korea’s Planned Economy, Rise of Markets Improve Food Supply

North Korea’s government, for reasons that are not clear, has begun allowing cash transactions for food imports, and the result is a significant increase in food flowing into North Korea’s ports: As a result, Shinuiju harbor is witnessing a mass importation of rice and flour from China for the first time. The amount of food imports, which started to increase in early February, has reached its peak in late February and early March, importing 800 to 1,000 tons of rice...
Categories Deprogramming/Famine & Food Aid
February 18, 2009

Succession Rumors Spread Inside North Korea

There may or may not be any truth to rumors that third son Kim Jong Un will the figurehead successor to His Porcine Majesty, but word seems to have spread inside the kingdom: The source said, “People who have secretly been listening to South Korean radio seem to be circulating these stories but the Party in Pyongyang has not issued a special decree about it. Many people have an interest in the successor issue, so the rumors have been spreading...
Categories Deprogramming
February 7, 2009

Unifiction Ministry Reverts to Form

It’s official: the Unifiction Ministry should have been abolished after all: The Ministry of Unification announced Wednesday that it would ask police to investigate anti-Pyongyang activist leaders if they press ahead with their plan to launch propaganda leaflets and North Korean banknotes across the border to the North. A ministry official, along with a representative from police, met with organizers planning to launch the anti-North Korean leaflets, activists said. The two organizers who met the ministry official were Choi Sung-yong,...
Categories Activism/Appeasement/Deprogramming/Famine & Food Aid
February 3, 2009

Happy Birthday, Fat Boy

Activists who send leaflets to North Korea by balloon to denounce its totalitarian government said Monday they plan to include local currency as an incentive to pick up new propaganda to mark the birthday of leader Kim Jong Il. [….] Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon renewed a warning Monday that the activists could face jail or fines if they send North Korea money without government permission. But the activists said they were ready for any punishment, adding leaflets and currency...
Categories Activism/Deprogramming
December 15, 2008

Kaesong Worker Defects

So, I was wondering, just how popular is the Workers’ Paradise among its hand-picked proletariat, that is, those able to pass the best family history, background, and loyalty screening the government of North Korea can manage? Not very, evidently: A North Korean defector who escaped from an inter-Korean industrial complex in the border city of Kaesong where she was employed remains in a third country, a South Korean activist here said Wednesday. The 27-year-old woman, whose identity was withheld for...
Categories Deprogramming/NK Economics
December 7, 2008

Well, that’s just dumb

Activists have decided to suspend those propaganda balloon launches that were actually starting to have a tangible impact on the North Korean military right as they’re doing their winter training exercises. The balloon launches seem to have been pure P.R. brilliance. Instead of moderating their tactics, the activists ought to keep pressing on with more brazen ones. Imagine the effect a shower of these leaflets would have on Kim Jong Il’s birthday parade in February.
Categories Activism/Defectors/Deprogramming
December 4, 2008

Leaflets Balloons Prove Effective as Weapons of Economic, Political Warfare

It shows you the woeful condition of modern South Korea that some would show up to defend slavery and oppression from the non-violent propagation of truth to the oppressed. I can understand why, to a man whose life has been stolen from him by that oppression, that proved to me more than he could bear. This is the point at which things ceased to be non-violent: Here, encapsulated in one incident, is the ugly future of reunification. And the longer...
Categories Deprogramming/The Fifth Column
November 26, 2008

Activists to Resume Leaflet Balloon Campaign

A wave of free publicity, courtesy of the governments of North and South Korea, has made the leaflet balloon campaign has been a great success. Why quit now? Activists for human rights in North Korea on Tuesday vowed to keep sending propaganda leaflets to the North even though the government has asked them to desist. The announcement was made by Park Sang-hak, head of Fighters for Free North Korea and Choi Sung-yong, president of Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea....
Categories Activism/Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics
November 22, 2008

The Power of Truth

Freedom rises over Korea, into the air over the most oppressed and darkened place on earth. The video clips that follow are from the BBC, Al Jazzeera, the Voice of America, and New Tang Dynasty Television. The people who are launching these balloons are, in large part, North Koreans who could not live — or stand living — in their homeland, and who can find no other means to connect with those they left behind. Others are South Koreans whose...
Categories Abductions/Activism/Defectors/Deprogramming/Human Rights/Human Trafficking
November 20, 2008

The Safety Dance

In my scrapbook from my Army days in Korea, I still have a leaflet, courtesy of “the protector of our race’s destiny,” declaring that “North and South shall bask together in the glow of General Kim Jong Il’s embrace.”  That leaflet was given to me by a sergeant in my unit, who found it outside Gate 7 of Yongsan Garrison in Seoul found one day after morning PT formation.  Where in the Armistice agreement does it say that only one...
Categories Activism/Censorship/Deprogramming
July 20, 2008

The End of Sunshine

Don Kirk has some straightforward observations about scholars in Washington, who, remarkably enough, are  still  debating how North might reform its economy, as though the  decade-long Sunshine experiment had never happened.  Kirk saves his most acerbic observation for one of the participants in a recent seminar: Probably no Washington think-tanker has been quite so divorced from reality of late, at least in public utterances, as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. In a recent commentary he held up Vietnam as...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics
April 5, 2008

Watching Porn in Pyongyang (Part 2)

Because man cannot live on diverted food aid and crystal meth  alone: The demand for X-rated movies among North Korea’s high cadres is so great that a single VCD sells for 50 US dollars. The latest publication of Good Friends, a North Korea-related aid organization, tells the story of Mr. Park, a resident of Hyesan, Yangkang Province. Mr. Park was arrested for making copies of South Korean adult movies–called “colored movies” in North Korea–and selling them in Pyongyang. Despite the...
Categories Deprogramming/Inside NK/Korean Society
March 26, 2008

Radio and Reciprocity

SOMEONE IN CHINA IS RECORDING NORTH KOREAN RADIO broadcasts in English and posting the audio online. If you’re interested in keeping up with  who’s being idolized or purged, or whether songun is in or out, this should be interesting listening.  I listened long enough to hear the North Koreans call on all South Koreans to bow down before the Great General and Lodestar of the Nation, which is funny until you realize that 23 million people have to bear this...
Categories Deprogramming/Terrorism (NK)
March 10, 2008

Wall Street Journal Video on the N.Y. Phil Visit

The reporter, Evan Ramstad, covers Korea regularly and does a good, balanced report in his narration. Bonus points for anyone who can identify the background music. Update: Keep pedalling! Their plane hasn’t taken off yet! We were feted with multi-course dinners of salmon, crab gratin, lamb and pheasant. Our breakfast buffet was decorated with ice sculptures and included foods meant to cater to American palates. OK, some of it was a little weird, like the banana and tomato sandwich. But...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming
March 4, 2008

Nazis Loved Classical Music

OK, I lied.  But Sonagi’s post and the piece she links here inspire further thought. And of course, plenty of us who aren’t Nazis also love classical music.  So when Lorin Maazel says, “in the world of music, all men and women are brothers and sisters,” I wonder if he knew that Auschwitz had an orchestra, too, or why:  The orchestra played at the gate when the work gangs went out, and when they returned. During the final stages of...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming