September 5, 2017

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)
September 4, 2017

… and Kim Jong-Un got the bomb, and we all just lived happily ever after.

Since North Korea’s sixth* nuclear test, I’ve already read several analyses concluding that North Korea now has the bomb for good, and that we might as well give up on denuclearization — as if Pyongyang’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal ends with us all living happily ever after together. You can only believe that if you either haven’t read much North Korean propaganda — or choose to ignore it, just as much of Europe ignored the words Hitler wrote in Mein...
Categories Korean War II
August 31, 2017

Do you own any clothing made in North Korea? (Answer: Don’t be so sure.)

The U.N. Security Council is reportedly considering a variety of new sanctions against North Korea over its latest missile test, and according to Reuters, a ban on textile exports is among the sanctions under consideration. For a few years, we’ve known that the export of textiles (or textile workers, who labor under sweatshop conditions for little or no pay) is increasingly lucrative for Pyongyang. I don’t need to explain that historically, textile work has lent itself to particularly exploitative labor...
Categories Human Trafficking/Sanctions
August 30, 2017

Speaking out for the North Korean people is more than a full-time part-time job

For months, I’ve heard rumors that the Trump administration isn’t fond of special envoys, and quietly, some of us fretted that the administration was planning to eliminate the job of Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea. As it turns out, Tillerson isn’t doing exactly that: The functions and staff of the special envoy for North Korean human rights issues would now fall under the office of the under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, who will...
Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights
August 28, 2017

State Department issues new reports on N. Korean gulags, religious repression

Last week, State issued two new reports on North Korea. The first of these reports, mandated by section 303 of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, terms itself a report on North Korea’s prisons. In fact, it only describes the worst tier of them — the dreaded kwan-li-so, or political prison camps, several of which are places where the condemned never leave. CAMP 16 HWASONG 41.314103,129.342054 There is little information available on the total control zone Camp...
Categories Human Rights/Religion/The Camps
August 23, 2017

FBI, Treasury & DOJ hit N. Korean enablers with secondary sanctions, forfeitures

Two months ago, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) released its groundbreaking report, “Risky Business,” which used open-source business records to trace the 5,233 companies that (according to C4ADS) comprise nearly the entirety of North Korea’s “limited, centralized, and vulnerable” financial networks in China. At the time, I speculated that we hadn’t heard the last word from the FBI, the Treasury Department, and Justice Department, and yesterday, my suspicions were confirmed. First, Treasury designated a series of North Korean, Chinese, and Russian...
Categories Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions
August 22, 2017

Latest cases of chemical proliferation remind us why Kim Jong-Un must go

The first mid-term report of the U.N. Panel of Experts should be out any day now, and among its revelations will be yet more evidence that Pyongyang is helping Assad gas his own people: Two North Korean shipments to a Syrian government agency responsible for the country’s chemical weapons program were intercepted in the past six months, according to a confidential United Nations report on North Korea sanctions violations. The report by a panel of independent U.N. experts, which was...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
August 21, 2017

Whatever happened to North Korea’s agricultural reforms? Just what I expected.

Starting around 2012, with a boost from an AP Pyongyang guided tour and some optimistic (but thinly sourced) analysis from Randall Ireson, Andrei Lankov, and others, a consensus formed among the pro-engagement school of North Korea watchers that Pyongyang was finally striking out on a bold new course of reform in an area of obvious need — its agriculture sector. In practice, the “reform” amounted to breaking up big collectives into smaller ones, and allowing collective farmers to keep and...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 11, 2017

The North Korean people didn’t elect Kim Jong-Un. Stop threatening to bomb them.

I’m already on record on the topic of threatening war against North Korea: it scares our friends more than our enemies (who assume, correctly I hope, that we’re bluffing). If we want to threaten the thing our enemies fear most, threaten to sow the seeds of the revolution that the people of North Korea desperately need. Nukes aren’t much good in that kind of war, and China would never tolerate their use so close to its borders. If we can’t resist threatening...
Categories Korean War II
August 10, 2017

God and Eric Hoffer in North Korea (Pt. 2)

For the reasons I described here, if a resistance movement ever arises in North Korea, it will almost necessarily draw its essential inspiration and cohesion from Christianity. It requires extraordinary inspiration for anyone to sacrifice her individual interests for collective interests, and it is almost inevitably messianic faith — in Christianity, Islam, or Marxism in its various idealistic or pseudo-nationalist variations — that has supplied that inspiration to adherents of revolutionary movements. Pyongyang obviously knows this, which is why its...
Categories Religion
August 9, 2017

Washington sounds ready for a trade war with Beijing over North Korea

Just as our diplomacy with Pyongyang has always failed because we were unwilling to induce a regime-determinative economic or political crisis there, our diplomacy with Beijing over North Korea (and other differences) has always failed because we were unwilling to attach a high enough cost to its willful support for Pyongyang’s proliferation. As Professor Lee put it, Beijing will not enforce sanctions against Pyongyang “unless the costs become unbearable on China.” A trade war, needless to say, would hurt both...
Categories China
August 8, 2017

How censorship is leading Korea to ruin

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] Last year, I wrote a post, which I fear is already becoming prescient, about how North Korea could plausibly win the Korean War. In condensed form, the strategy involves Pyongyang leveraging its nuclear, cyber, and chemical weapons supremacy...
Categories Censorship/Propaganda
August 5, 2017

UNSCR 2371: Text and commentary (see update)

Today, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2371 unanimously. The text is in black, my commentary is in blue italic. PP1: Recalling its previous relevant resolutions, including resolution 825 (1993), resolution 1540 (2004), resolution 1695 (2006), resolution 1718 (2006), resolution 1874 (2009), resolution 1887 (2009), resolution 2087 (2013), resolution 2094 (2013), resolution 2270 (2016), resolution 2321 (2016), and resolution 2356 (2017), as well as the statements of its President of 6  October 2006 (S/PRST/2006/41), 13 April 2009 (S/PRST/2009/7) and 16...
Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
August 2, 2017

The freeze fantasy: Don’t tell us to talk to North Korea if you aren’t listening to North Korea

A weird logic prevails among certain North Korea-watchers, to whom Pyongyang’s every violation of the many disarmament agreements it has already signed becomes “fresh” evidence that we must pay it to sign yet another disarmament agreement. Thus, every time Pyongyang launches a missile or tests a bomb, we can expect a new crop of op-eds making shopworn and increasingly oblivious arguments for a freeze deal that Pyongyang has said — clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly — it doesn’t want and won’t...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
August 1, 2017

Propaganda in the age of Kim Jong-Un: A discussion with Professor B.R. Myers

What follows is an email discussion between myself and Professor B.R. Myers of Dongsoo University, author of “The Cleanest Race” and “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” and keeper of the Sthele Press blog. At the end of the discussion, I thought readers might enjoy reading it, and Professor Myers graciously agreed to let me print it here. ~   ~   ~ Stanton: A few weeks ago, a commenter at my blog cited your work as evidence that North Koreans probably still...
Categories Interviews/Propaganda/Racism/Subversion
August 1, 2017

Maximum pressure watch: North Korea, sanctions & diplomacy

The nature of human beings is to remember dramatic events longer than methodical processes, even when the methodical process may be of equal or greater importance. That may be why North Korea watchers remember the September 2005 action against Banco Delta Asia but tend to forget the greater part of the strategy that action served: sending Stuart Levey, Daniel Glaser, and other officials on a world tour to warn bankers and finance minister to cut their ties to Pyongyang or...
Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
July 31, 2017

WaPo editors ask, “What if sanctions don’t work?” … and answer correctly.

Regular readers know by now how many keystrokes I’ve spent at this site and in print in various places citing the evidence that sanctions against North Korea were largely a sham until last year, and could work if we enforced them in earnest. Still, the editors of the Washington Post ask a question that even the most strident sanctions advocate must consider: ONE SCHOOL of North Korea experts has been arguing for some time that sanctions will never induce the...
Categories Sanctions