410개의 게시물을 찾았습니다.
Well, there are still some folks among us who feel obliged to promote N.K. stuff in the "progressive"/independent media, such as IMC S.K.
The latest hype produced in the the Dear Leader's kingdom and promoted by some writers: "N.Korea's brandnew linux operating system: Red Star"
"Not only does North Korea have 'its own Internet' – a national information network independent from the US-based Internet regulator – it also has an operating system, developed under by order of Kim Jong-il.", the IMC S.K. piece (actually it's just a copy of a report published in the Russian RT) says.
"Russian student Mikhail, who studies in the Kim Il-sung University... bought his copy for about $5 in an information center 5 minutes walk from the university dorm."
Wow, ONLY $5??!!
But - surprise, surprise!! - "The OS is not popular (yet?)", according to the article.
The possible reason - IMO - why it's "not popular (yet?)":
- The average N.Korean worker making 2,500 (NK)won a month
- Last week's exchange rate USD-won: 1 : 2,500
- The current price of 1 kg rice: 1,300 won in Pyongyang (in other parts of the country: up to 1,500 won)
Ultimately I'm sure that the average worker - as a citizen of the "Paradise of the Working Class"(!) - doesn't cares about "Red Star OS", because he/she can't even dream about an own computer...
Somehow related article:
☞ 2 thousand N.Koreans have starved to death... (Hankyoreh, 3.06)
"Good News" from Pyongyang, resp. the (North)Korean "People's" Army (via today's KCNA):
KPA Panmunjom Mission Vows to Buildup Nuclear Deterrent
A spokesman for the Panmunjom Mission of the Korean People's Army issued a statement Sunday in connection with the fact that the U.S. and the south Korean authorities finally set about the DPRK-targeted Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint military maneuvers.
The maneuvers clearly indicate once again that the U.S. and the south Korean authorities are the harassers of peace and warmongers keen to bring a war to this land.
Under the prevailing situation the Panmunjom Mission of the KPA is authorized to state as follows:
The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will no longer be bound to the Armistice Agreement and the north-south agreement on non-aggression (*).
There is no reason whatsoever for the DPRK to remain bounded to the AA and the non-aggression agreement now that the other belligerent party scrapped the AA and the other dialogue partner reneged on the non-aggression agreement.
The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will, therefore, legitimately exercise their force for self-defence, unhindered, just as they had determined to do.
The process for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will naturally come to a standstill and the DPRK bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defence given that the saber-rattling is proven to be nuclear war exercises and maneuvers for a war of aggression against the DPRK in its nature.
It is an inviolable right of the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK for self-defence to counter with powerful nuclear deterrent the U.S. nuclear offensive means threatening the territorial waters and air and land of the DPRK on account of exercises.
The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will be left with no option but to exercise merciless physical force as the rival is set to do harm to the DPRK no matter how dear peace, national reconciliation and cooperation are to it.
It is their stand to settle accounts with the rival by actual use of military force if it does not wish neither to conclude a peace treaty nor have reconciliation and cooperation.
All DPRK-U.S. and the inter-Korean military dialogues will be suspended as long as the DPRK-targeted war exercises go on.
It is illogical to sit face to face with the dialogue partner, who brings dark clouds of a nuclear war while leveling its gun at the other party, and discuss "peace" and "cooperation" with him.
The U.S. and the south Korean authorities should bear in mind that their reckless military acts will bring them nothing but bitter disgrace and destruction.
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201003/news07/20100307-04ee.html
* Sounds like a f*cking great idea (and a lot of fun)!!
Finally this begs the question: If NK (once again) "vows to buildup nuclear deterrent", about what TFH they wanna talk in Beijing ("6-party-talks")???
Related article:
☞ N. Korea puts forces on combat alert... (Yonhap, 3.08)
Wishful Thinking and the (F*cking) Reality
While Clinton sees signs of progress for the 6-Party Talks, according to Yonhap (2.26) it might well be that the reality is a bit(^^) different, as D. Kirk assumes in the following piece, published in Asia Times (2.27):
Conflicting priorities on North Korea
Professor Wang Jisi of Beijing University may not speak for his government, the Communist Party or his country, but his view of efforts to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program provides a startling note of realism that seems to have escaped non-Chinese negotiators.
"The DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea - North Korea] will keep going nuclear, period," he told a small audience here this week. "There is no other endgame, at least from Pyongyang's point of view." That's the kind of blunt declaration that United States and South Korean nuclear envoys do not seem capable of making or even thinking, to judge from their public utterances.
United States envoy Stephen Bosworth while on a swing through the region repeated the mantra of urging North Korea to return to the six-party talks and promised that all topics would be open for discussion. And South Korea's negotiator Wi Sun Lac, meeting Bosworth after both of them had conferred with China's negotiator, Wu Dawei, in Beijing, talked about "the need for the parties to resume six-party talks".
Both the Americans and the South Koreans acknowledge, however, that the whole process remains stuck on North Korea's insistence on conditions that have no immediate chance of acceptance. These include the demand for a Korean War peace treaty - a deal the North couples with the withdrawal of the remaining 28,500 US troops from the South - and an end to United Nations sanctions imposed after its long-range missile test and then its nuclear tests last April and May.
Just in case anyone doubted the North's position, the North Korean military came out with an appropriately tough statement warning of the consequences of joint US-South Korea war games scheduled for next month. It was one thing to vow to "mercilessly destroy the bulwark of aggression", as the Korean People's Army warned, but another to promise "all offensive and defensive means, including nuclear deterrent".
Nobody expects North Korea to drop any atomic bombs from its decrepit fleet of MiG fighters or attach a nuclear device to one of its vaunted missiles. In fact, it's quite uncertain whether North Korean engineers and scientists have actually figured out how to deliver a warhead. Nonetheless, the statement would seem to leave one clear point: North Korea intends to remain a nuclear power.
Wang Jisi, delivering a paper at a forum in Seoul on North Korea's nuclear problem, expanded on his realistic outlook - one that is difficult to dispute unless you're either a US or South Korean negotiator or an academic equally prone to wishful thinking.
Wang did not have to refer specifically to Bosworth's mission to Pyongyang in December to get across the futility of it all. From all that has gone before, he said, "It is hard to imagine any genuine progress on denuclearization - even if North Korea-US contacts were upgraded or the six-party talks were to be resumed soon."
Wang did not claim any real inside knowledge of what North Korean leader Kim Jong-il talks about in meetings with the generals he commands from his pinnacle as chairman of the National Defense Commission, the center of power in Pyongyang. For that matter, he did not let us know if Kim talks to his generals at all. For all anyone knows, maybe he just tells them what to do and think, they bow in assent, and that's it.
"It is almost impossible for outsiders to know whether there were any debates within the North Korean leadership about the pros and cons of going nuclear," he said. Why bother, was the rhetorical implication. "Even if there had been any doubts and hesitations," he said, clearly "the perseverance to attain nuclear weapons is serving the leaders' interests very well".
The logic was simple, from Wang's perspective. "Achievement of nuclear arms should help consolidate their position at home and increase diplomatic leverage," he said. "They feel little increased military pressure while they know how to take one step forward in nuclearization and then pause to show an ostensible readiness to negotiate over denuclearization."
All the while, as Wang noted, humanitarian aid and economic assistance continue to flow into the North.
The degree to which Wang reflects the outlook of Wu Dawei and others in Beijing is not exactly clear, but it seems more than likely that he gets to lecture at home and abroad as both analyst and a messenger of high-level thinking. Looked at that way, Wang's pessimism about North Korea giving up its nukes comes across as a sign of what Beijing sees as a higher priority, that is, propping up the North Korean regime against the danger of collapse and chaos. Wang got that point across too with a candor that's not readily apparent in narrow official pronouncements from Beijing.
"Unlike other partners," he said, in a jibe at the Americans and possibly the South Koreans, "Beijing would look at a possible political implosion in North Korea in most negative terms." For that reason his government "would never try to destabilize that country or join others" in attempting "to do so".
Indeed, he added for good measure, it was "a consensus among many observers in China that the Pyongyang government, with the social order it maintains, may survive for a long time to come" in view of "traditional friendship" between Beijing and Pyongyang, a not-too-subtle allusion to Beijing's rescue of North Korea in the Korean War, as well as "shared interests".
Not that China is supporting whatever North Korea does. Reports persist that China is anxious somehow to tamp down North Korea's nuclear ambitions, to discourage the North from another nuclear test that many observers here are predicting will happen this year - and to engage in serious, effective economic reform.
Japan's influential national daily, Asahi Shimbun, for instance, this week cited diplomatic sources in Beijing as saying that China had responded with "an unexpectedly harsh reaction" to the North's nuclear test of May 25.
"The Communist Party of China told North Korea to reform and open up its economy, end its hereditary succession of political power and abandon its nuclear development programs," said Asahi, attributing those sweeping demands to party sources. It was against this background, said the article, that Kim Jong-il's third son, Kim Jong-un, visited Beijing while his father eased up on disastrous economic reforms.
Wang's remarks, however, may not have convinced influential North Korea-watchers in Japan and the US. The differences were apparent at the same forum, held at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think-tank financed in large measure by Hyundai money and led by Han Sung-joo, a former foreign minister noted for his moderately conservative views.
Evans Revere, president of the Korea Society in New York and a former diplomat with a long background in Korea, Japan and China, warned that "China could be forced to make hard choices between traditional support for its ally/partner and a new approach".
Nor did Revere seem all that happy about the outlook of South Korea's government. He did not seem impressed by President Lee Myung-bak's repeated declarations that North Korea must give up its nuclear program as a precondition for the aid the North was accustomed to receiving in the decade of the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation initiated by the late president Kim Dae-jung in 1998.
The South "will need to decide whether it must now get tougher", said Revere, while the North "must ask itself whether intransigence risks sowing the seeds of even further isolation".
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/LB27Dg02.html
Enjoy the weekend reading!!
PYONGYANG JOURNAL (source: Asia Times, 2.25/26)
Happy birthday, Comrade Kim
By Pepe Escobar
It's a cold, crisp, sunny morning in the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and there could not be a more important game in town. Billboards bearing the numbers "2.16 [February 16]" - usually decorated with huge red flowers - are all over the place. The flowers are the only splashes of full color against drab grays and browns. They are of course kimjongilia, a modified begonia programmed to bloom exactly on - when else - 2.16.
For Pyongyang's 2 million or so residents, it's time to party. Today is the 68th birthday of the general secretary of the Worker's Party of Korea, chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army - comrade Kim Jong-il.
Kim Jong-il, aka the Dear Leader, has been the maximum leader of North Korea for almost 12 years now. But he's not the president (the titular head of state is the chairman of the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, Kim Yong-nam.) A key reason is that he's not very fond of the endless, obligatory diplomatic round of meeting foreign heads of state.
The relentlessly apocalyptic Western media narrative would lead one to believe that on this eventful day the citizens of what is routinely depicted as a "Stalinist/communist/terrorist/totalitarian/insane/rogue/axis of evil gulag" would be one step short of showering a battery of commemorative missiles over South Korea, Japan or the west coast of the US for that matter, not to mention conduct another nuclear test. Reality though bears no "axis of evil" overtones.
Holiday on ice
The day starts with an early morning visit to the imposing bronze statue of president Kim Il-sung - aka the Great Leader, the father of the nation - on top of Mansu hill. It is officially 20 meters high (and certainly looks bigger). At the end of the Japanese colonial period, this site housed the largest Shinto shrine in Pyongyang; thus the Great Leader's statue had to be no-holds-barred imposing.
Everyone and his neighbor seems to have come, bringing flowers, bowing respectfully, and always arriving in neatly arranged groups, from soldiers and high-ranking officials to village elders and the very good-looking traffic ladies in their blue winter jackets. Higher ups arrive with their wives in black Mercedes or Audis, the men in black suits, the women sporting extremely elegant and colorful versions of the Korean national dress.
Then it's off to an international figure skating exhibition - not competition - that includes athletes from England, Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus and even a Russian, who was a bronze medalist in the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, a favorite of the crowd. Call it Pyongyang's counterpart to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. The real stars though are the locals skaters, kids included, and their apotheosis routine bearing the North Korean flag and the Juche flag - with its hammer, sickle and flame, symbolizing workers, peasants and intellectuals who, according to Kim Il-sung, are "the true masters of society", as "creators of both material and spiritual wealth".
Next stop is the 14th Kimjongilia Festival - a wacky, dazzling flower extravaganza with arrangements offered by everyone from military organs, ministries, national agencies and cooperatives to businesses, overseas Koreans, international organizations and foreign embassies, all featuring the hybrid red begonia (not the national flower of North Korea though; that's the magnolia). The "flower of Kim Jong-il" was created by a Japanese botanist in 1988, symbolizing, according to the official narrative, "wisdom, love, justice, and peace". The Great Leader Kim Il-sung, of course, has his own flower, the Kimilsungia.
The hall is absolutely packed. Everyone seems to have a portable digital camera that somehow materialized from China, and whole families and reams of schoolchildren are eager to pose for a flowery photo of ruby red Kimjongilias enveloping globes, displayed under depictions of high-speed trains, under emblems of the Dear Leader himself and even flanked by mini-replicas of Taepodong missiles.
Then it's time for a mass open-air dance in a square flanked by government buildings - well, not really "mass"; a few hundred couples, the men in dark suits and the women in white, jade green, light pink, cream or black chima (skirt) and jogori (blouse), the "evocative of the fairies in the heavens" Korean national dress. They are all dancing to traditional songs blared to ear-splitting level by what could be dubbed the North Korean version of the Jamaican sound system.
The few steps are very simple, involving a bit of handclapping; the few gaping foreigners are welcomed to join the fun. The locals perform it all stone-faced, although not robotically. Sex in North Korea is not exactly in the air. Schools are segregated by sex. Even holding hands in public is considered very improper behavior. Unmarried single mothers are virtually non-existent (but if it happens, the newborn is meticulously taken care of by the state - just as Korea war orphans were.)
The highlight of the day is synchronized swimming - in an arena in the sports village. The elaborate ballets, performed by dozens of teenagers, rival China's. Kimjongilia panels adorn the arena. Party elders and higher ups get the best seats. The foreign figure-skating stars are also attending. The highlight is a stunning aquatic socialist ballet featuring a native siren in red swimsuit.
That's it; then socialist formalism dissolves, and the locals are off to dinner with relatives, mostly using the metro (two lines), or the aging, mobile works of socialist realism that are the local buses and trams. Some folk may eventually go bowling in the state-of-the-art Pyongyang Golden Lane Bowling Alley (45 lanes in fact; a detailed diagram on the wall shows the itinerary followed by Kim Il-sung on its inauguration day, and even all the spots where he stood). One fact though stands out; all through these merry proceedings, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il himself was nowhere to be seen.
To be or not to be
Kim Jong-il was born on February 16, 1942, in an anti-Japanese guerrilla camp near Khabarovsk, just across the border from Manchukuo in occupied China. By this time, both his parents had been fighting the Japanese occupation for no less than 10 years.
All trap doors in secretive North Korea seem eventually to lead to what is in fact the royal Kim family - whose Shakespearean saga, if ever brought to a TV mini-series (maybe a Chinese or Hong Kong investor?) would undoubtedly enthrall a global audience.
The Dear Leader's father Kim Il-sung, over six feet tall [1.82 meters] and sporting a broad forehead (a big thing among Korean mothers), was charisma personified. His mother, Kim Chong-suk, widely revered as the ultimate anti-Japanese heroine, was less than five feet tall, pear-shaped, always in guerrilla fatigues, with a round, wide, smiling face, friendly but not very well educated. Kim Jong-il looks more like mom. And to put it mildly, that has made him extremely uneasy all his life.
While he was still a boy, Kim Jong-il suffered two terrible traumas; the accidental drowning of his younger brother in 1947, and the death of his mother in childbirth in 1949. That's when - sporting a state-issued polyester summer uniform and plastic shoes - he started going to gender-segregated elementary school.
Fast forward, and the plot thickens. The focus now is on Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-il's son - and until recently heir not-so-apparent (for years he's been living in China on and off). And also on Li Nam-ok, Kim Jong-il's daughter, adopted by him to tutor and play with his beloved son. She is from an aristocratic landowning family from, well, the enemy, South Korea. And although she was born - and lived - with a silver spoon in her mouth, inevitably there would come a day when she would rebel.
The great love of Kim Jong-il's life is and has always been his mistress, the ravishing - and also Southern aristocrat - Sung Hae-rim, the absolute top North Korean movie star. She happens to double as Li Nam-ok's aunt. And it gets even juicier - she is Kim Jong-nam's mother. This means Kim Jong-nam, a possible future DPRK leader (but by now bypassed by his youngest half-brother Kim Jong-un) is technically an illegitimate son.
Kim Jong-nam, tall and handsome like his grandfather Kim Il-sung, grew up much like Pu Yi - the last emperor of China; hyper-protected, hyper-pampered and in fact cloistered in the most cloistered society on the planet. At first he was educated by palace tutors, and had a court attending to his every whim. Meanwhile Li Nam-ok was developing different roles; at first she was his playmate, then his teacher, till finally she became his sister.
And here lies a crucial plot twist; these brother-and-sister royals lived virtually their whole early life as strangers in their own land. That's definitely, deeply imprinted in the psyche of a possible future North Korean leader.
Later as teenagers, both Kim Jong-nam and Li Nam-ok were sent to expensive secondary schools in Geneva - with the inevitable corollary of partying with the rich and famous in Paris. That's when la dolce vita made Li Nam-ok "betray" North Korea. Now she believes that even Kim Jong-il himself regards as nonsense the monolithic official narrative of post-1912 North Korea - the year the father of the nation, Kim Il-sung, was born.
Arguably the best informed source available anywhere on Kim Jong-il is Li Nam-ok herself, through her Breaking North Korean Silence: Kim Jong-il's Daughter, A Memoir, written by Imogen O'Neill. Here one learns that the Dear Leader is very intelligent and very sensitive - a prudish and rather shy guy who'd rather stay at home and work in his pyjamas, as indeed he does.
He is not the socializing type - he'd probably rather drop dead than join Facebook. That in itself would explain why he didn't make a public appearance on "2.16". Like a grand maestro, Kim Jong-il apparently orchestrates all manner of North Korean spectaculars but is bored to tears to show up. He also seems to
have a sharp comment about everything - solutions included - and is capable of mimicking virtually anyone. And - very important - he loves to laugh.
He apparently quit smoking a few years ago and drinks basically at formal occasions. Surprisingly for many, he is said to be not at all fond of the non-stop hero worship. In a very Korean manner, he's a family man, whose company he prefers to anybody else's. He seems to keep Joseph Stalin's timetable - waking up in the middle of the night, working through the early morning and sleeping before noon. He used to like partying, when his 20 or so preferred guests indulged in beer, imported French cognac and ginseng whisky. But then the system's elite can do the same in selected Pyongyang hotels.
As much as he may dislike the DPRK's massive bureaucracy, he could not but be acutely aware of his own - and the state's - security; he only trusts his close relatives. The top commanders in charge of Pyongyang's security are four brothers who are in-laws to Kim Jong-il's sister. In a nutshell, Kim Jong-il seems not to suffer fools, nor sycophants, gladly; he'd rather listen to honest straight-shooters, a rare commodity in his circle.
It comes as no surprise that Kim Jong-il could never be immune from the seductive soft power of American and Western mass culture. He's an inveterate fan of Western post-modernity. Thus the array of Sony LED televisions in every room of his many palatial abodes, which means that Kim Jong-il may tune in to every trashy offering on Japanese, South Korean and American cable. He surfs the Internet every day and is very well informed in a variety of issues. He's a collector with an immense video and DVD library. especially from Hollywood. He loves classical music but also the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Pink Floyd (there's a fabulous black and white photo of Kim Jong-il in 1977 with rebel hair and dark glasses. What would be his Western role model then? Joe Strummer of The Clash? Would he be listening to White Riot?)
And then there's his fleet of over 20 cars, including American brands but most of all his now iconic black armored Mercedes S-600 with tinted windows, sometimes glimpsed in Pyongyang's boulevards (but not on this 2.16).
Whether or not he's the Dr Evil portrayed by Western corporate media, what is certain is that Kim Jong-il urgently has to sort out plenty of turbulence rattling the DPRK.
The house the Great Leader built
Close observation of Pyongyang reveals that the North Korean system may be now like an overlapping maze of Chinese boxes - some more elaborate than others, but all very circumscribed in trying to defeat the law of gravity and keep their relative privileges. The "law of gravity" in this case is an economy that's been in chronic crisis for the past two decades.
Kim Jong-il's official "military-first" policy means heavy weaponry benefits from 25% to 30% of North Korea's annual budget (well, the US shifts 19% of federal spending and 44% of tax revenues to the Pentagon; the Iraq and AfPak wars, both funded by borrowing from foreign powers, have cost each American family $25,000, according to Canadian media). But the crucial problem is that the army now has become more important than the Worker's Party, which in a socialist system spells certified disaster for the toiling, loyal masses. The party still regiments no less than over a third of the DPRK's adult population.
The massive bureaucracy has acquired a life of its own. The historically centralized, and bureaucratically planned, supply of goods and services by the state sometimes breaks down to a halt at the local level. There's a tremendous generation gap/shock between the old Korean War (1950-1953) revolutionaries and the baby boomers - the North Korean version.
The only Great Leader that North Korea ever had has been dead for almost 16 years - and the official narrative can be seen as a perpetual meditation/mourning of this loss. And there's one confrontation after another with the United States.
Kim Jong-il must think that North Korea definitely is not Somalia; this is a much more developed and modern economy. But what is it, exactly?
The house the Great Leader Kim Il-sung built from scratch could possibly be described as an ultra-nationalist, family values, Confucian corporate state. It is Confucian in its profound respect for the family and its respect for a supposedly enlightened, learned elite. Chu Hsi, the founder of neo-Confucianism during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) would arguably feel at home in the DPRK.
As for nationalism, it manifested himself, for instance, by the choice of a "pure" indigenous language, based on an alphabet invented by King Sejong in the early 15th century, and thus not contaminated by either English or Japanese.
But the most striking aspect of North Korea's official narrative is that no less than five millennia of very rich history are condensed and everything is telescoped to April 15, 1912, the birth date of Kim Il-sung ("the day of the Sun") and the ground zero of the juche (pronounced chuch'e) idea.
Juche was Kim Il-sung's indigenous remix of Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism inflected with heavy boosts of Confucianism and metaphysics. On face value, juche means "self-reliance" and independence, not only in ideology and politics but also in all matters economic. Juche was in action already in 1955, when the DPRK declared its independence from the USSR, and again in the mid-1960s, when it reaffirmed its independence from both the USSR and China. It was to a great extent by formalizing juche that Kim Il-sung was revered all over the developing world as one of the great 1950s icons of decolonization.
Bruce Cumings, arguably the best American scholar on North Korea, gets straight to the point: "The term is really untranslatable; the closer one gets to its meaning, the more the meaning slips away. For a foreigner its meaning is ever-receding, into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. Juche is the opaque core of North Korean national solipsism."
In his own book On the Juche Idea (1982), a perennial best-seller at the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il seems to break away from the DPRK's irredeemable solipsism to trace a surefire path for economic development. He writes that "heavy industry with the machine-building industry as its backbone is the pillar of an independent national economy". This in turn will "accelerate the development of light industry and agriculture", and it must be coupled with "solving the problem of food on one's own through successful farming".
In sum: "If one is to be economically self-sufficient and develop the economy on a safe basis and with a long-term perspective, one must depend on one's own raw materials and fuel sources."
Is it working? Not exactly. Kim Jong-il has roughly a little over two years to turn things around - amid insistent rumors about his health and his succession - and, in official terminology, "open the gate to a thriving nation in 2012", when there will be a massive national party to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Great Leader Kim Il-sung.
So no wonder in the end he had better things to do than show up for his own birthday party. But a few nagging questions remain. Considering his background and his tastes, does he ever feel like escaping from his own fortress? Does this certified recluse harbor the subversive thought of going to a mall somewhere in the West and watching a disaster movie in a cineplex, just like anybody else? Or ultimately would this movie buff - author of the quite decent On the Art of the Cinema (1973) - rather be the star in an alternative plot?
PYONGYANG JOURNAL Part 2:
☞ Happiness rolls over us like a wave
PYONGYANG JOURNAL Part 3:
☞ The last frontier of the Cold War
I'm positive that the "Dear Leader" will really love the following f*cking great idea (published in today's Chosun Ilbo, probably Kim Jong-il's favorite S. Korean newspaper):
Kim Jong-il 'Could Be Indicted at Int'l Criminal Court'
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il could be hauled before the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity if South Korea and Japan can prove that North Korea abducted their citizens during a bizarre campaign in the 1970s and 80s to find trainers for spies.
Kwon O-gon, the vice president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, made the remarks at the first human rights and environment convention under the sponsorship of the Korean Bar Association in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province on Monday.
"Under ICC rules of procedure and evidence, it's impossible for the court to investigate or indict North Korea on its own, because North Korea is not a signatory to the Rome Statute," Kwon said. "But South Korea and Japan can ask the ICC to place Kim on trial if they are determined, because crimes like abuse of South Korean POWs and abduction of South Korean and Japanese citizens took place within the territories of the two countries, which are signatories to the Rome Statue and are within ICC jurisdiction."
"Under the rules, the ICC can handle only crimes that have taken place since 2002, but it could be argued that the crimes are still in progress because the North has refused requests from South Korea and Japan to repatriate the abduction victims."
"Basically, the ICC handles individual criminal responsibility, so a mere allegation that a leader is feeding and clothing only himself while his people are starving doesn't necessarily incriminate him. In this case, there would have to be careful investigation of facts," Kwon said. "It's essential to present evidence that Kim Jong-il was aware of the criminal activities, and planned and gave orders himself to carry them out."
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/02/23/2010022300311.html
Yesterday the "entire Korean nation" (according to the North Korean/Choseon CentralTV) celebrated the 68th birthday of Kim Jong-il (aka "The Dear Leader", "The Brilliant General", "The Sun of the 21st Century" etc. etc...)
In celebration of this "epochal event" Kim Myeong-cheol(*) wrote: "As 2012 approaches, the supreme leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong-il, has established himself as the most peerless national hero in Korea's 5,000-year history - a 'super' Kim Il-sung", in his article "Pyongyang hails 'iron-willed' Kim Jong-il" (MUST READ!!) for today's Asia Times(HK).
Although that piece reads like complete trash, I'm sure that the author means business!!
* Kim Myeong-cheol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North Korea, including "Kim Jong-il's Strategy for Reunification". He has a PhD from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Academy of Social Sciences and is often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea, according to A. Times.
Related articles:
☞ North Korea marks Kim's birthday (al-Jazeera, 2.16)
☞ Kim Jong Il Death Watch: Birthday Edition (OFK, 2.16)
Yesterday's TOP "news" stories by KCNA:
☞ DPRK in Festive Mood
☞ Youth and Student's Dancing Parties Held
☞ Newspapers Observe Kim Jong Il's Birthday
Well, from time to time it's quite entertaining and exciting to read stuff like the following piece, published in yesterday's Observer(UK):
Inside North Korea: the ultimate package tour
The world's most notorious socialist(*) state is a land of haywains and empty highways, unlit cities and undimmed reverence for the Great Leader
The strangest of all the very strange things about the strangest place on earth, North Korea, is that it's surprisingly easy to go there. Or at least, not as hard as it somehow ought to be. I'd always thought that it was only marginally less difficult than going to the moon or, say, Eton, but my amazing revelation is this: type "North Korea" and "tourism" into Google, and you'll find Koryo Tours, a British-run, Beijing-based travel firm. A couple of clicks and a certain amount of cash later, and you, too, could find yourself on a vintage Russian jetliner heading towards the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
It's impossibly exciting. And when Paul, the Australian sitting next to me, remarks, casually, that Air Koryo is considered unairworthy by the EU, it becomes, perhaps, just a little too exciting. But then some rousing martial music strikes up over a crackling intercom, and air stewardesses wearing what looks like jet-age vintage – white gloves, natty hats, red lipstick – bring around the in-flight reading material: the Pyongyang Times. The highlight of a recent firework spectacular, I learn, was a sky-writing display that read "Down With Imperialism", although the top story concerns a visit by Kim Jong Il to the new September 26 Breeding Pig Farm. "The country's economy is growing remarkably through a series of big events in the flame of the new revolutionary upsurge," he notes.
But then the flame of revolutionary upsurge is burning strongly among us, too. There are 21 of us, from all parts of the globe, most of us reasonably well-travelled, with the exception of Dan, a twentysomething Canadian, who has selected North Korea for his first ever trip abroad. ("No, Dan," I hear someone say, possibly myself. "In other countries, you are allowed to leave your hotel without being officially accompanied by a government guide."). And we're all as excited as puppies.
Because barely 1,500 people a year visit North Korea. Or, to put this in context, several thousand fewer than make it to the British Lawnmower Museum. Collectively, we know more about a strimmer once owned by Joe Pasquale than we do about the nation that last May announced it had carried out a second successful underground nuclear test. And as we land on an empty runway, and walk into an empty terminal, it feels like not unlike entering a fold in the space-time continuum. Not least because our mobile phones are immediately confiscated. The investment bankers in the group (we have three of them, two of whom have been recently made redundant – there's obviously something about having experienced the distintegrating edge of capitalism that makes North Korea an attractive holiday destination) look like they might cry.
And yet, for what the West calls a rogue state, and George Bush the most easterly point on the axis of evil, it doesn't seem very evil. It takes a while to clear customs, not because our belongings are searched or we're interrogated about the purpose of our visit, but because, as becomes clear when we see the luggage carousel, we're the only passengers who've failed to pack at least two flat-screen TVs. And when we finally meet our guides by the departures board (there are none until three days' time), they're smiling expansively: an older man, Mr Lee, and a pretty young woman in a fashionable coat, Miss Kim.
We trundle along empty roads towards Pyongyang, a "model" city of Soviet-style blocks and grandiose boulevards where only citizens with special permits can live or even visit. Miss Kim tells us the name means "flat land", and "the weather is neither too hot nor too cold with adequate precipitation". It's just getting dark when we reach our hotel, the 47-storey, 1,001 room, Yanggakdo, built on an island in the middle of the Taedong river. There are perhaps three or four rooms with lights on. But then this is more than in most of the apartment blocks we pass because, of all the things that North Korea is short of, it's most short of electricity. There's a famous satellite shot of the Korean peninsula at night(**), a dark puddle in a sea of light. Our hotel has electricity, but by 10pm, from the magnificent revolving restaurant, the city simply vanishes from view. Poof! Like a cheap trick in a pantomime. Now you see it, now you don't, although it's there again next morning, shimmering in the crisp winter light.
The upside of having no electricity is that because there's very little industry, there's very little pollution, and as we travel south out of Pyongyang, towards the Demilitarised Zone, almost no traffic. It's a four-lane highway, the key route south. With no cars. We stop at a roadside service station and are mesmerised by the lack of traffic: a bicycle passes. And some time after that, a unit of soldiers marches past in what was meant to be the fast lane. Because if you want to go somewhere in the DPRK, you walk. Everywhere, criss-crossing the countryside, across fields and dirt roads, people are walking. Who knows where they're going? I scrape the ice off the inside of the bus window and peer out but the North Korean hinterland is an unknown, mysterious place. We know almost as little about North Korea as the North Koreans know of us.
This state of affairs isn't helped by the fact that journalists are banned. The last two to enter the country illegally were imprisoned until Bill Clinton intervened last year and negotiated their release. I have special, rare dispensation as a travel writer because Nick Bonner, the founder of Koryo Tours, believes that the more the world engages with North Korea, the more North Korea will engage with the world. And because I've agreed in advance that I shan't write about North Korea's human rights record or in any way insult the Dear Leader. It's strongly impressed on all of us before we leave that if we misbehave, it's not us but our guides who'll bear the brunt of any "repercussions".
I've been allowed in as "a travel consultant" and in this capacity I'm happy to report that visiting North Korea is surely one of the greatest holidays on earth. You will see only what everyone else who goes to North Korea sees: which is what the North Korean government wants you to see. In this, it reminds me of Hello! magazine. I've always marvelled at how celebrities, given editorial control, choose to portray themselves. And so it is with North Korea. You may not get to see the "real" North Korea, but this "unreal" North Korea is a fascinating thing in and of itself. Because this is tourism at its most perfected. It's like a cruise ship. Every minute of every day has been pre-formulated and it's beautifully worked out: from the €5 charge if you want to try the national speciality, dog soup, to the man with a video camera who follows our every move, and at the end of the tour produces a DVD of our visit set to martial victory music, and sells it back to us for €40 a pop.
What you get a sense of, most acutely, is the country's extreme isolation and paranoia, although after a few days in the country, it doesn't seem as paranoid as all that. "After President Bush named us as the axis of evil, he attacked first Afghanistan, then Iraq. Are we next?"
The relationship with the US affects everything: it fuels juche, the ideology of self-reliance, and its strategy of songun, putting the military first, and explains everything from the lack of electricity to the "Arduous March", the famine in the late 90s when up to two million people died. It's not as bad as then, but the World Food Programme estimates a third of the population will go hungry this year without emergency aid. Our food, on the other hand, is plentiful and not bad. Even the dog soup is pretty good (half of us reckon it tastes like lamb; the other half, beef).
The highlight of the trip is a visit to Kim Il-sung's mausoleum, an encounter that must qualify as the greatest touristic experience on earth. (The "International Friendship Exhibition" in Mount Myohyang-san runs a close second. It displays the 223,579 gifts given to Kim Il-sung, including a stuffed crocodile in bow tie and waistcoat serving drinks, presented by the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua, and a Tolpuddle Martyrs plate from the British parliamentary Labour party.)
We're in our smartest clothes. Miss Kim lines us up in rows of four and we march solemnly through a security scanner and on to a travelator that spans an endless marble corridor until we reach the inner sanctum, where we form two perfect rows, take three steps forward on Miss Kim's command, and bow to a statue of Kim Il-sung, march down more marble corridors, through a wind tunnel (to shake the dust from our clothes), and into a darkened room holding the embalmed body of Kim Il-sung himself. Here we form six rows and step forward three steps at a time, to bow solemnly, not once, but three times, from three different directions.
Even then it's not over: in another marble chamber is an audio guide to the nation's reaction when the Great Leader died. "All people were rending their hearts! And weeping scalding tears that as they hit the ground fossilised and became glittering pieces of stone! It was as if the earth itself had died!"
Outside afterwards, groups of Korean women line up to have their photographs taken in front of the palace, and we watch as more than one brushes tears from her eyes. Kim Il-sung was the father of the nation; in fact, he still is, described in the constitution as the "eternal president", and this emotion isn't faked.
The trouble with North Korea, says Hannah, one of our English guides, is that people tend to see what they want to see. The Chinese see China; the Russians, Russia; Ferenc, a Hungarian in our group, sees a little bit of Hungary – like the pupils in the June 9 Middle School we visit, he wore the red scarf of the Young Pioneers when he was a boy. "My parents couldn't believe I was coming here," he says. "They were horrified."
Dan, the Canadian, sees "Abroad". (And it scares the shit out of him. I'm not sure he'll ever leave Winnipeg again.) And Peter, the 74-year-old Australian in our group, sees a battleground. I'm standing next to him when he lifts his trouser leg to show Miss Kim his bullet wounds: "That's where you buggers tried to kill me," he says. "Although, in fairness, I was trying to kill you lot at the time." He's the first Korean War veteran from "the other side" that Miss Kim and Mr Lee have met, and it's genuinely touching what a fuss they make of him. They pay out of their own money to upgrade him on the train on the return trip so that he's more comfortable.
It's a remarkable journey: like travelling through a Constable painting. There are oxen pulling carts, farmers unloading a haywain, children playing with a wooden hoop. It's so strangely innocent: a landscape that could be from any time within the last three centuries. It's four hours before I see the first car, and some time after that, we approach the border, where a charmless customs officer systematically goes through my camera and deletes half my photos. Beyond the Yalu river we see the towers of Dandong, a small provincial Chinese city that looks like a crazy modern metropolis. How can buildings be so tall and shiny, I wonder.
But then if there's one thing that going to North Korea teaches you, it's that everything, all of life, is just perspective.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/feb/14/northkorea
Related (MUST SEE!!):
☞ [주체99] Winter in Pyongyang (slideshow)
* i.e. the so-called 'socialist'... (!!)
** the mentioned 'famous satellite shot':
Of course this news isn't new anymore, but two days ago it has been the TOP STORY in the national (N.K./S.K.) and int'l media:
North Korea Release US Human Rights Activist
While everyone makes now a supposition what (TFH!?) changed R. Park's mind (remember that he wanted to stay in N.K., even in a 'gulag', "until the last political prisoner will be freed"!!) - one reader in The Marmot's Hole: "Testicle shocks will make a man say the darndest things." - I'm assuming that Park was from the very beginning a part of a (well done!!) PR aktion/campaign by WPK's propaganda department (^^).
Related articles:
☞ Desperation fuels North Korea's leniency (Asia Times, 2.06)
American Trespasser Interviewed
Pyongyang, February 5 (KCNA) -- As already reported, American national Robert Park was detained for trespassing on the northern border of the DPRK in December last year.
He was interviewed by KCNA at his proposal while he was under investigation by the relevant organ of the DPRK.
At the interview, he said that he was taken in by the false rumor spread by the West and committed a criminal act in the end.
Mr. Park during the 'interview': "The DPRK respects the rights of all the people
and guarantees freedom, a happy and stable life" (source: KCNA, 2.05)
He went on to say:
I trespassed on the border due to my wrong understanding of the DPRK caused by the false propaganda made by the West to tarnish its image.
The West is massively feeding "Children of Secret State", "Seoul Train" and other documentary videos with stories about non-existent "human rights abuses" and "mass killings" in the DPRK and "unbearable sufferings" of its Christians and the like.
This false propaganda prompted me, a Christian, to entertain a biased view on the DPRK.
So I didn't know what to do at that time. I just prayed and fasted and that was my initial response, but year by year more news reports, international media reports came and there were more videos saying the same thing, in fact, saying that it was getting worse, and so that's why I started to become more and more distraught. If there are people in concentration camps, if Christians are dying like this, if there is starvation I have to die with them. If I help them I would go to Heaven but if I don't help them I would go to Hell.
At last I made up my mind to go to the DPRK.
Upon trespassing on the border, I thought I would be either shot to death by soldiers or thrown behind bars, prompted by Americans' false propaganda about the DPRK.
However, the moment I trespassed on the border, the attitude of soldiers toward the trespasser made me change my mind.
Not only service personnel but all those I met in the DPRK treated me in a kind and gentlemanly manner and protected my rights.
I have never seen such kind and generous people.
People have been incredibly kind and generous here to me, very concerned for my physical health as never before in my life. I mean, my family, of course, is concerned about my physical health but people here have been constantly concerned and I'm very thankful for their love.
Another shocking fact I experienced during my stay in the DPRK is that the religious freedom is fully ensured in the DPRK, a reality different from what is claimed by the West.
Being a devout Christian, I thought such things as praying are unimaginable in the DPRK due to the suppression of religion.
I, however, gradually became aware that I was wrong.
Everybody neither regarded praying as something unusual nor disturbed it. I was provided with conditions for praying everyday as I wished.
What astonished me more was that a bible was returned to me.
This fact alone convinced me that the religious freedom is fully ensured in the DPRK.
I came to have stronger belief as I had an opportunity to attend the service in the Pongsu Church in Pyongyang.
I worshipped and there, there was the Jondosa, there, there was a pastor, there was a choir, they knew the hymns, they knew the word of God. That's why I was completely amazed. But I began to weep and weep in the Christian service because I learned that there are churches and Christians such as Pongsu Kyohoe (Church) in different cities and regions all throughout the DPRK. They worship, pray and preach freely the word of the Bible and Christ word. I've learned that in the DPRK people can read and believe whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want, that there's complete religious freedom for all people everywhere throughout the DPRK.
What I have seen and heard in the DPRK convinced me that I misunderstood it. So I seriously repented of the wrong I committed, taken in by the West's false propaganda.
I would not have committed such crime if I had known that the DPRK respects the rights of all the people and guarantees their freedom and they enjoy a happy and stable life.
I have felt shock, embarrassment, shame. Here I'm in the lands where people respect human rights and, not just respecting human rights, they have actually loved me and showed me more than just human rights. They have shown me grace. I repent and ask for forgiveness to the DPRK for my misunderstanding totally DPRK's reality and my criminal illegal behavior. Had I known the reality of the DPRK, what I've learned here, what I have been shown here, what I've been taught here, what I've been informed here by all the kind people here about the DPRK, I would have never done what I did on the December 25th and I repent and I'm very sorry.
Prompted by my desire to redeem the crime I committed against the government of the DPRK, I would make every effort to let those who misunderstand the DPRK properly know what I experienced here so they may have a correct understanding of it.
He, as a Christian, expressed his will to earnestly pray so reunification may be achieved and peace settle on the Korean Peninsula as early as possible.
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201002/news05/20100205-08ee.html
Related previous contribution:
☞ "Christmas Greetings" for the Dear Leader (09.12.27)
Weekend Reading (MUST READ!!):
A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought
By Christopher Hitchens
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.
I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more "total" than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state. But I was preoccupied, as are most of the country's few visitors, by the more imposing and exotic forms of totalitarianism on offer: by the giant mausoleums and parades that seemed to fuse classical Stalinism with a contorted form of the deferential, patriarchal Confucian ethos.
Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters(*), and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.
These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.
Consider: Even in the days of communism, there were reports from Eastern Bloc and Cuban diplomats about the paranoid character of the system (which had no concept of deterrence and told its own people that it had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in bad faith) and also about its intense hatred of foreigners. A black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang. North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime's main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea's food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subjects that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader.
Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.
The regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. Small wonder that each "negotiation" with it is more humiliating than the previous one. As Myers points out, we cannot expect it to bargain away its very raison d'etre.
All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the "wider" society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more "authentically" Korean.
Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.
http://www.slate.com/id/2243112
* For more please read also: "The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves..." (Reviewed by A. Lankov)
Related:
In the 1990s groups of neo-nazis visited North Korea (resp. its diplomatic mission/embassy in Berlin) by invitation. These were neo-nazis out of the most evil terrorist fascist groups existing in Germany. They call themselves “national socialists” and use the old fascist demagogy of a "national and social movement” and of “German socialism”. They wanted to get to know the “national socialism of Korea”. For example: By invitation of the “Academy of Juche Science” these fascists, who all are members of the “Society for the Propaganda of Juche Ideology in Germany”, visited North Korea in April 1995 for two weeks. They were even welcomed by a secretary of the ruling (North)Korean Workers' Party. Afterwards the fascists praised the “national socialism” of (North)Korea in whole Germany. (source: Unity & Struggle, Oct. 1997)
The following photo shows (allegedly!!) a North Korean girl visiting Mangyeongdae ('Kim Il-sung's birthplace' near Pyongyang):
In case the photo isn't just a fake:
Dear funny Jesus-lovin'(???) girl,
for sure you're a member of the "Kim Il-sung Socialist Youth League"!
So you should know that there's only ONE GOD and this is the Great Leader Kim Il-sung (and Kim Jong-il is his sole, legitimate son, aka Son of God)! And you also should know that you have to love no other than the Great Leader (GOD) and the Dear Leader (his f*cking son)!!
PS:
In case that you've no idea about the (f*cking stupid) writing on your t-shirt: Sorry but... Ignorance is no excuse in law! (^^)
Related stuff:
☞ NK Girl Wears 'I Love Jesus' Shirt (K. Times, 1.22)
☞ Jesus at Mangyongdae (N.K. Economy Watch, 1.19)
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