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February 7, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 2

Following Part 1, here’s Part 2 of Enzo Reale’s interview with Cao. This week, Cao informs us that North Korea’s public distribution system is in perfect working order, that there are no concentration camps in North Korea, that Kim Jong Il eats the simple peasant fare as everyone else and does not in fact live in a palace, and that every single North Korean agrees with every decision the government makes. Surely I exaggerate, you say. No, Cao actually says,...
Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
January 30, 2010

Eagerly Awaiting Eric Sirotkin’s Fact Check

A year after President Obama’s inauguration, North Koreans continue to step forward to slander the Workers’ Paradise and act as willing agents of neocon propaganda about North Korea’s political rehabilitation system: Life under the regime took its toll on Kim’s family. Her parents died of hunger at Yodok, she said. One son accidentally drowned there. Another was executed in 1989 while trying to escape from North Korea. Kim’s husband was taken to a separate camp, which she calls “a place...
Categories Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
January 29, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 1

I know what you’re already thinking: Alejandro Cao de Benos, that fat Spanish guy who runs around North Korea in a Mao suit, gave you — a guy who advocates the violent overthrow of the North Korean regime — an interview? Don’t be silly. Cao gave the interview to Italian freelance journalist and OFK reader Enzo Reale, who kindly offered to translate the full four-part interview into English and allow me to publish the whole thing here, which I’ve done...
Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
January 12, 2010

Peace Through War, as Explained by Christine Ahn

I see Kim Jong Il is broke again: Fifty-seven years after the end of the bloody Korean conflict, always unpredictable North Korea on Monday proposed a peace treaty to formally end the hostilities. The communist state suggested that once a treaty was underway, it would return to the stalled six-party talks to end the regime’s nuclear ambitions. But first, North Korean officials say, they want international sanctions imposed last year to be lifted immediately. The proposal was met with skepticism...
Categories North-South/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
January 6, 2010

Yes, Selig Harrison, North Korea Cheated

The revelations about North Korea’s highly enriched uranium program had already been falling like the snow on Seoul this week, and then I saw this: North Korea appears to have started a uranium enrichment program soon after it agreed in a 1994 deal with the U.S. to dismantle its existing plutonium nuclear weapons program, South Korea’s foreign minister said Wednesday. Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan’s remark, if accurate, suggests North Korea had no intention of giving up its atomic ambitions when...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Useful Idiocy
December 25, 2009

Korean-American Activist Crosses Into North Korea (Updated)

Oh God, not again. Reuters is reporting that Robert Park, a 28 year-old American, has walked across the Tumen River from China to the North Korean town of Hoeryong, which is infamous for being both the birthplace of Kim Jong Il’s mother and the town nearest to Camp 22. Park’s apparent objectives were (1) to get himself arrested and (2) thereby raise global attention about North Korea’s brutal political prison camps. Rest assured that Park will accomplish Objective Number One....
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Robert Park/Useful Idiocy
December 10, 2009

H1N1 Outbreak in North Korea Defies Perfection of Its Universal Health Care System

The outbreak is serious enough that North Korea has ended the school year prematurely, but still isn’t acknowledging the outbreak, though there are posters springing up advising the people to practice basic sanitation (though I wonder how many have clean water). The Daily NK suggests that shortages of coal and firewood to heat the schools are another reason for the closures. Shockingly, North Korea’s superior universal health care system hasn’t been effective at stemming the spread or diagnosing H1N1, according...
Categories Health & Disease/Useful Idiocy
December 10, 2009

My, How Times Have Changed: Human Rights Edition

South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission made itself infamous during the Roh years for the tangled logic by which it condemned America for overthrowing the genocidal Saddam Hussein, yet concluded that North Korea’s concentration camps, infanticides, smothering repression, and starvation of its subject were none of its concern. To the few of us who were then paying attention to any of this, the HRC became an international laughingstock and a symbol of the Korean left’s hypocritical anti-Americanism, its easy collaboration...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Useful Idiocy
December 1, 2009

Hiding North Korea’s Health Decline

According to a new report by the U.N. Population Fund, the socioeconomic gap between the two Koreas continues to widen: South Korea’s infant mortality rate ranked seventh in the world with four deaths out of 1,000 births while the North slid to 133rd place from last year’s ranking of 99 with 47 deaths per 1,000. The Stalinist state recorded a higher death rate of women from complications related to pregnancy and labor with an estimated 370 cases per 100,000 live...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Useful Idiocy
November 4, 2009

Christine Ahn: Above Criticism! (Or, “Help! Help! I’m Being Repressed!”)

Christine Ahn is feeling picked on, reports the Oakland East Bay Express, an alt-lefty rag with a room-temperature circulation.  Writer Kathleen Wentz informs us that Ms. Ahn guards the privacy of her views jealously when she’s not on CNN, a book tour, the lecture circuit, or hectoring congressional staffers: As a longtime peace activist and progressive, Christine Ahn was used to being on the ideological fringe. But even she wasn’t prepared to be red-baited and called a supporter of dictatorship....
Categories Media Criticism/Useful Idiocy
October 28, 2009

“Under the Warm Care of a Relevant Organ?”

A South Korean man who worked at Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor unit and more recently at a pig farm has defected to the North by walking across the heavily mined border, the communist state’s media said on Tuesday. [Reuters] Something tells me he’ll be dreaming of those little piggies soon enough. “He is beside himself with joy for having accomplished this heroic deed,” the North’s KCNA news agency said. It identified the defector as Kang Dong-rim, 30. “He is now under...
Categories Defectors/Useful Idiocy
September 24, 2009

Unfortunately, This May Mean He’ll Stay in Washington Instead

John Kerry has no immediate plans to go to Pyongyang, despite months of rumors that he was trying to invite himself there. One can only hope that the Obama Administration sent a young White House staffer to sew Kerry’s trousers to his chair. You might question whether helping a foreign enemy advance its tyrannical world view and sideline the U.S. government in negotiations is smart diplomacy, but for Kerry, it’s a well established practice. It could have been just like...
Categories Useful Idiocy
September 19, 2009

Bill Clinton: “What I Was Trying to Do Was Not Smile and Not Scowl”

So he said on the Daily Show yesterday, on his photo op with Kim Jong Il. The Puffington Host has video here. Of greater interest to me personally is whether a medical professional will ever get around to diagnosing Bubba as a sociopath. I once had a lengthy discussion about this subject with a psychologist whom I was considering as an expert for my defense team. Similar musings on Kim Jong Il, here.
Categories Diplomacy/Useful Idiocy
September 15, 2009

And Yet, Christine Ahn Wants You to Know that Sanctions Kill North Korean Babies

Italian customs recently confiscated 420 bottles of expensive liquor on their way to North Korea. Italian newspaper Vivere Ancona said customs in the eastern port city seized 150 bottles of brandy and 270 bottles of whisky in containers destined for North Korea at the end of last month. The confiscation follows a UN Security Council ban on the export of arms, high technology and luxury goods to North Korea after the communist country’s nuclear test in May. The liquor is...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy