May 25, 2010

That’s More Like It: South Resumes Propaganda Broadcasting to North Korea

While most of the reporting has focused on the rather futile gesture of blaring propaganda from loudspeakers, it seems that South Korea is doing something else that’s more likely to reach a wider North Korean audience: South Korea’s military resumed radio broadcasts airing Western music, news and comparisons between the South and North Korean political and economic situations late Monday, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military also planned to launch propaganda leaflets by balloon and other methods...
Categories Propaganda/Subversion
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew.  Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor.  The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 — unless...
Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
May 24, 2010

President Lee Announces Weak Response to Cheonan Sinking

We have always tolerated North Korea’s brutality, time and again. We did so because we have always had a genuine longing for peace on the Korean peninsula…. But now things are different. North Korea will pay a price corresponding to its provocative acts,” he said. “I will continue to take stern measures to hold the North accountable. — President Lee Myung Bak After this, President Lee explained that his government will adopt the following measures as a response to North...
Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
May 19, 2010

Kim Jong Eun Becomes a Focus for North Koreans’ Anger

Interesting report from the Chosun Ilbo: Nonetheless, starving families are said to have swarmed local party headquarters and protested, and even local party officials are openly complaining. Provincial party officials in Chongjn, North Hamgyong Province, and Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province, effectively stopped working, telling party headquarters there is nothing they can do if there is nothing to eat. With rumors spreading that Kim Jong-un led an unpopular “100-day struggle” and “150-day struggle” that pressed people into service on the farms...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Resistance
May 18, 2010

“Decisive” Evidence Implicates North Korea in Cheonan Sinking

As news reports suggest that an international investigation will soon announce that North Korea torpedoed the Cheonan, South Korean military sources are leaking information that, if true, seems reasonably conclusive: “In a search using fishing trawlers, we recently discovered pieces of debris that are believed to have come from the propeller of the torpedo that attacked the Cheonan,” a high-ranking government source said Monday. “Analysis of the debris shows it may have originated from China or a former Eastern-bloc country...
Categories Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Korean Politics/Useful Idiocy
May 18, 2010

Balloon People Keep Up the Pressure

“We’re going to send 500,000 propaganda leaflets, 1,000 CDs showing footage of a skirmish between South and North Korean Navies in waters off Yeonpyeong Island, 1,000 radios, and 3,000 one-dollar bills on three to four occasions until June 7,” said Choi Sung-yong, the leader of a group named Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea. “We have to let North Koreans and the international community know that the explosion of the Cheonan was a terrorist attack launched at Kim Jong-il’s orders....
Categories Propaganda/Subversion
May 17, 2010

17 May 2010

Did China Refuse Aid for Kim Jong Il? I’ll believe that when North Korea runs out of money for yachts, cars, and glass for the Ryugyong Hotel. At most, they may have delayed it to express their annoyance over the sinking of the Cheonan. This could also be disinformation for the foreign press. ___________________________ China will supply North Korea with cheering fans for the World Cup so that Kim Jong Il can keep his people at home. Remember, it’s all...
Categories Anju Links
May 17, 2010

Someone Isn’t Feeling That Unification Spirit (And We’ll Find Out Who!).

North Korea threatens to cut off access to Kaesong over leaflet balloons, which don’t just carry leaflets anymore: The head of a North Korean delegation to inter-Korean defense talks sent a letter to the South which read, “Despite our repeated requests, the South Korean government goaded and tacitly permitted activists to send propaganda leaflets that castigate our ideology and regime, small radios, US$1 bills and DVDs [via helium balloons] from May 1.” An anonymous South Korean official speculates that the...
Categories North-South
May 17, 2010

North Korea Calls Israeli Foreign Minister an “Imbecile”

North Korea has reacted, and predictably, to the allegations of the Israeli Foreign Minister that it’s arming terrorists: A spokesman for Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry described Lieberman as an “ultra-rightist” and “an imbecile in diplomacy.” The spokesman, quoted by the North’s official news agency, said Israel was itself being criticized for its nuclear program and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. He also said it would never pardon Israel for “daring slander the dignified (North) by faking up sheer...
Categories Axis of Evil/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Terrorism (NK)/WMD
May 17, 2010

Global Outrage as African Animals Are Treated Like North Korean Human Beings

It’s not just elephants that Zimbabwe is capturing and shipping to North Korea: Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has ordered that two of every animal species in the Hwange National Park be sent to North Korea as a gift to that country’s leader, Kim Jong Il. [Johannesburg Times] Conservationists say the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, will send a modern-day ark, containing pairs of giraffes, zebras, baby elephants and other wild animals taken from a national park, to a zoo in...
Categories Africa/Interviews/Refugees/WTF?
May 17, 2010

North Korea Cracks Down on Border Crossings Again

Open News reports that North Korea’s latest crackdown on border-crossing has made it difficult to get out of the country for any price: Around the mid-1990s when North Korean defectors first emerged, the fee for crossing the river was 300-500 Yuan, about 50,000-80,000 Korean Won. The fee for crossing the river continued to rise as more and more North Koreans were escaping. In early 2009, the fee was 5,000-6,000 Yuan (800,000-1 million won), which is a 10-fold increase compared to...
Categories Border Control/Refugees