Korea: Real change or the cycle of bluff?

North Korea watchers are split on what the outcomes of the latest diplomatic activities on the Korean peninsula will mean.  There was the usual, tiresome, anti-Trump kneejerk reaction to his threats to the DPRK, which of course follow the DPRK's missile and nuclear tests, all of which breach UN Security Council Resolutions.  Trump rightfully declared that no regime oppresses its citizens like North Korea.  Liberty in North Korea gives you more on this, which I wont repeat.  It's a regime that controls movement of its people not only to leave this prison state, but to leave your own town.  It runs gulags in which it incarcerates entire families for the political "crimes" of one (that mean elderly relatives down to babies).  It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of this, but it's also important to remember that this ISN'T a priority internationally.  

So let's be clear about what the DPRK is.

• Totalitarian regime with unrivalled levels of control on media, speech, movement of people compared with virtually any other country.  There is little internet access, almost no access to broadcasts from outside the country, and very few ever have permission to travel outside the country.  There is very little private enterprise, with what there is being restricted to informal (but tolerated) market stalls.  All other retail and trading activities are undertaken by the state, and economic activity is directed by central planning with limited use of price as a tool to manage demand and supply.
• Highly militarised, with a standing army of 1.1 million (and over 8 million reservists) out of a population of around 25 million, with the military taking around 20% of GDP.
• It is the creation of the USSR, which entered the northern half of Korea near the end of World War 2 as the US entered the southern half, as Japan withdrew its imperial forces.  Japan had occupied Korea and treated it is a vassal state since 1910, treating Koreans in many cases as slave labour.  The UN sought to hold elections across Korea, but the USSR refused to allow the holding of an election in the northern half.  The south held elections, and the Republic of Korea was formed, with the first President Syngman Rhee.  The north declared the Democratic People's Republic of Korea shortly thereafter, with a Stalinist system led by Kim Il Sung.  At the end of the 1940s the US withdrew from south Korea, and Kim Il Sung was given approval from Stalin and Mao to reunify Korea under a communist system, starting the Korean War.  After three years of bloodshed, including UN intervention on the side of the south (led by the USA), the war ended roughly at the same point as where it started.  The DPRK declared "victory" as it claimed the south started the war, led by "US imperialism".  
• The USSR instituted Kim Il Sung as Supreme Leader of the DPRK, with a Constitution and party/state structure mirroring that of the USSR at the time (under Stalin).  Kim Il Sung was a minor guerrilla fighter who led a small band of resistance against the Japanese, before fleeing to the USSR where the Red Army schooled him in Stalinism.  

However, it is important to remember what it tells its citizens:

• They are the luckiest people in the world with (as Barbara Demick's book was titled) "Nothing to Envy in the world".
• South Korea is a "puppet regime" run by the USA as a slave colony of fascism, where the people revere the Kim dynasty and ache for reunification under their leadership.  South Korea would quickly reunify with the North if the US imperialist withdrew their "troops of occupation", but the USA treats its south Korean "subjects" like the Japanese used to.
• Kim Il Sung led an army which was responsible for liberating ALL of Korea from Japanese imperialism, and he entered Pyongyang to adoring crowds grateful for his feats of military acumen.  Kim Il Sung was the most intelligent, skilled, amazing, adoring and generous man of all history, he is admired globally by billions of people, and his works are consumed by them and inspire their own feats.   
• Other countries are either impoverished or comprise a small rich elite that take advantage of a mass of downtrodden workers, who are all impoverished, without the wondrous goods and free housing, healthcare and education of the DPRK.  
• The Korean War was NOT started by the DPRK, but by the USA wanting to aggressively turn all of Korea into a slave colony.  The US has always wanted this.

Kim Jong Un's number one priority is regime survival.  This has two elements.  One is protection from foreign attack (primarily the US, seeking to destroy its nuclear arsenal) and the other is internal revolt.

Kim Jong Un may have a big ego and be ruthless, but he is no fool.  For decades, the DPRK relied on the Cold War to ensure that it didn't really fear any US attack, because that was deterred by the USSR.  However, with US military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein, to support the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and to strategically attack military sites in Syria, there is real fear of the US (particularly under Trump, compared to Obama), striking the DPRK.

Yes Kim Jong Un knows the US fears the DPRK striking back, not so much with nuclear weapons, but with a massive conventional attack on south Korea, which may also include chemical and biological weapons (it is widely believed that the DPRK has all three primary types of WMDs).  However, he also knows that the US and south Korea can easily defeat the DPRK on the battlefield with conventional weapons and if nuclear weapons were used by the DPRK, Pyongyang would almost certainly be levelled by a similar response.  He is as deterred by the devastation and scale of death as the US is, so he is keen on lowering of tensions.

His survival also needs protection from internal revolt.  The only institution capable of doing this is the military.  Mass revolt by the population is almost inconceivable, as the whole country outside Pyongyang faced starvation during the late 1990s and there was little sign of resistance.  However, shortly after Kim Il Sung's death in 1994, his widow (who was not Kim Jong Il's mother, but his stepmother) apparently sought to get the military to stage a coup against Kim Jong Il (widely thought of as a lazy psychopathic playboy), but failed.  His response was the "Songun" (military first) policy that effectively sidelined the Korean Workers Party as the centre of authority, making the military the priority of the party, the state and the economy.

This is where the rational interest of denuclearisation, reduction of tension and peace on the Korean peninsula faces a conflict of interests with those of the Korean People's Army.  Kim Jong Un will know that if he significantly reduces the economic commitment of the state to the military he risks the military taking over.

So he has TWO choices, assuming that ignoring the military isn't an option.

1.  Don't demilitarise at all.  Re-enter the familiar cycle of detente, with rhetoric of peace.  Conduct no more nuclear tests, even allow unprecedented levels of inspection of the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site (which is already destroyed) and seek a lowering or ending of economic sanctions. It will not dismantle its existing arsenal, but it will buy time for trade and investment.  It will demand that the US withdraw from south Korea before anything else happens (despite claims to the contrary) and after a period of a year or two of more trade, the cycle of sanctions and threats will recommence.

2.  Corporatise the military.  Sign a peace treaty, get US assurances of non-aggression, but retain WMDs and a formidable defence capability, but redirect the defence sector's activity more towards trade and the (black) economy.  Let the army run businesses, allow limited foreign investment in factories and infrastructure and become rich.   The military can then be part of a pseudo-capitalist reform programme that enriches those within it, enables it to upgrade its own equipment and grow the economy.  This will also mean that the current elite can enrich themselves through a mild form of liberalisation and capitalism.  Think China in the 1970s, but don't go too far down that path.

For as long as the Kim clan lead, the Kim Il Sung myth needs to be sustained.  That means that the big lies of the regime must be protected.  North Koreans can't know that their brethren in the south live with a level of prosperity AND freedom that they could hardly imagine.  So don't expect very much loosening of trade and travel between north and south.  South Koreans will be able to visit very carefully managed resorts (and be expected to spend a lot of hard currency), but north Koreans wont be travelling.   The tight control on media, movement of people and information will have to be maintained, otherwise it risks the broad mass of the population who are neither in the military nor the elite, asking questions and demanding to live more like south Koreans.  They'll want the houses, the clothes, the electrical goods, the cars, the freedom.  All of that will bring down the DPRK, particularly if the military split.  

So what do I think will happen?

I think there will be a lot of talk.  I think the US will demand, as a bare minimum, full inspection and verification of the dismantling of the DPRK's nuclear arsenal and concrete steps to build confidence between the sides.  That could mean allowing unrestricted family reunifications across the border,  greater travel from the south to the north, trade and investment, and allowing cultural and sporting exchanges.

However, the DPRK only wants three things: the US to withdraw from south Korea, a guarantee to not be attacked and an end to economic sanctions.  It can't afford to open up, so it is stuck.  

By no means should Trump agree to US withdrawal from south Korea without a least full verifiable dismantling of the nuclear weapons programme, and ideally also chemical and biological weapons (if the DPRK opens those up then it will be a transformative change).  Although it could certainly agree to a non-aggression treaty based end to the war, it still needs to maintain deterrence against conventional attack.   However, what should not be neglected is the push for closer interaction between the Koreas at the personal level.  I'm far from convinced that Kim Jong Un is doing anything other than playing for time, cementing his reputation in the north and pushing to get economic sanctions eased to help enrich the elite of his regime (and encourage some investment.

He is stuck between the legacy of his grandfather (and father's) web of deceit and the military's position to overthrow him.  The China reform option isn't really there.  However, let's take the calming of tensions as a good thing and hope that it's an opportunity to break the regime open a bit more.  The more that happens, the better the chances for the millions north of the DMZ.

Korean People's Army soldier flees for freedom over the DMZ, gets shot

A bit of context.  

The two Koreas are divided by the DeMilitarised Zone (DMZ) which is actually one of the most militarised zones anywhere in the world.   I've travelled on the road to the DMZ from the northern side and you can see that very road (in the DMZ) up till he passes a checkpoint at around 1:07.  That is the first indication he is not authorised to drive in the DMZ.  Before that is a major north Korean tourist landmark in the DMZ as the location where the Armistice that halted the Korean War was signed (called the DPRK "Peace Museum" naturally).   It is in the heavily forested area to the right side of the footage up till the checkpoint that he is seen passing.  When I was there, there were several tour coaches located on this road, they are not visible here, indicating no foreign tourists were at the DMZ on this day (had there been, it may have stopped them as there are likely to be more guards on such a day).

At 1:18 you can see the panic as he passes the checkpoint although slowing down to cross Bridge 72 (still on the northern side) into the northern half of the Joint Security Area.  That is effectively when he has moved from the northern part of the DMZ into the concentrated JSA.  No more than 35 guards are permitted to be on duty, for each side, in the JSA.  At 1:33 he is in the JSA.  By this point, he will have caused a major panic on the northern side as he will have been keenly observed.  By 1:55 he has passed Tongil Gak, which is the northern side meeting house where joint meetings between both sides are held on an alternate basis with the southern equivalent (Peace House is the southern side equivalent).

At 2:00 he passes the Kim Il Sung "signature" monument which was installed shortly after he died in 1994.  The myth is that his last statement the day before he died on 8 July 1994 was this one, of course seeking reunification (ignoring that few on the southern side want a reunified personality cult led slave state like exists in the north).  Shortly after that he drives towards the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), which is effectively the boundary of control between the two Koreas.  It is then he stops driving near a Korean People's Army building on the MDL.  At 2:28 the shot shifts to see the reaction of soldiers from the northern side in front of the main DMZ buildings on the northern side running to see what is going on.

At 2:55 you can see his vehicle is stuck, he is fewer than 10 metres away from the other side.  At 2:58 he escapes the vehicle and runs for it, while being shot at by the Korean People's Army (KPA) soldiers. At 3:02 another image shows him on the southern side running for "Freedom House" the southern side main building.  At 3:12 one KPA soldier is seen crossing the MDL, which is a big no-no, in pursuit before he remembers and runs back.  Footage for a while after that shows KPA soldiers rallying in panic, but from 4:59, southern (Republic of Korea) soldiers crawl to recover the injured defector.  Crawling out of fear that the KPA ones might shoot them.

That's it.  The KPA is among the most well fed organisation in the north, it's curious that the number of army defectors has been growing in recent years, as news of the outside world trickles in via DVDs smuggled in via China of life in the south.

North Korea's internet shutdown? So?

Whilst much of the media has parroted reports that the "DPRK's internet has been shut down", few actually specified the source for this, nor did they explain how meaningless this is without the explanation that 99.99% of the population has absolutely no internet access.

You see the DPRK's internet connection is restricted to a privileged subset of the ruling elite.   Virtually none of the DPRK's population outside Pyongyang and the Chinese border town of Sinuiju is even aware of the Internet.   A tiny proportion of the population has PCs, and the extent to which they are interconnected, it is through Kyangmyong - the local intranet which largely exists to distribute government material and approved content.  

So,  the consequences for almost everyone in the country are nil.  The consequences for a fraction of the ruling party and army elite are inconvenience.  

The authority for this is also not a DPRK source.  The Korean Central News Agency is a source for the news that the DPRK wants to present to the world, but domestically its content is quite different. Domestically, there is no awareness of the internet, although reports about Kyangmyong exist to demonstrate how technically adept the country is.  However, NKNews.Org has reported that there appears to have been a compromise of the country's external connections, although this isn't hard to do:

North Korea’s connection to the internet is relatively fragile, indicating that it would not take a particularly sophisticated attack to knock the DPRK offline.

“There’s nothing clearly evident which points to U.S. involvement … there has been talk amongst the [non-government-aligned] hacking classes of reprisals,” Frank Feinstein NK News chief technical officer said.

“This sort of thing could be pulled off by a collective or handful of individuals, rather than a state power very easily,” Feinstein added.

So a technically unsophisticated dictatorship with very few connections to the outside world,  for a system that serve the Kim family, and the top echelons of the party and military, was weakened.  

I've seen no reports noting that its brethren in the south, one of the world's most connected country's, could easily undertake such an attack.   

The real story is that the DPRK is under almost constant internet shutdown.  It is the world's least connected country, not due to poverty, but because of deliberate government policy.

Closing down its international connections, which it appears to have used to attack systems in other countries, and which are largely reserved to an elite that actively prevents the free speech and information it offers from reaching almost anyone else, is not a bad result.

The petulant man-child running the place, aping his sophisticated grand fraudster grandfather, is trying to flex his muscles to show to the military - the real source of power and threat to power - that he is up to the job.   Embarrassing a Japanese corporation in the USA over a film that pokes fun at him would have a been a top job for the Pyongyang hackers.  

In truth, he runs a country where he can't expose too many skilled young computer technicians to the technology that it can't easily access (due to sanctions) or the internet, or else they will find out a little too much about the lies told to them through school and the media - without rewarding them all very handsomely indeed, or keeping the under draconian control.

That's not a formula for building ICT capabilities to seriously take on south Korea or the USA, set aside companies that are weak in the computer security.   It should not be difficult to confine the child's ambitions.   China, on the other hand, is another story.

Murderers, thugs and cowards

Taliban, Cuba's ruling thugs and Sony Pictures respectively.

On the Pakistani Taliban, it is telling what it takes for the Pakistani Army and Government to actually take this evil group seriously and seek to wipe it out.  For previously the policy was "let" the Taliban run the north-western provinces and for all major parties to support negotiating with "moderate elements" (i.e. the ones that only murder infidels, not Muslim children).  This is why Osama Bin Laden lived in comfort in Pakistan, as the Pakistani Army had essentially appeased the local Taliban. The fact that one of Pakistan's greatest financial and military supporters over the decades, the United States, had had thousands of its citizens murdered by this outfit, was irrelevant.   Furthermore, even the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai for daring to support the education of girls, didn't animate the misogynistic theocratically minded rent-seekers in the Pakistani government.  It has taken hundreds of children to be murdered en masse, for there to finally be some effort taken to wipe them out - as they should.

For the negotiate with the Taliban, as with ISIS, is like seeking to negotiate with the Nazis for a peace where they continue to rule over some people, or to agree with a mafia over the territory they can still bully people over, or to agree with a pedophile cabal that they can only rape children within a certain area.  It's morally bankrupt, because the only winner in a compromise between good and evil, is evil, particularly when you have the means to defeat it at little relative cost compared to letting it be.

So if there is anything positive that could ever come from hundreds of children and their teachers being murdered in cold blood, is that it turns enough Pakistanis against the Pakistani Taliban, and provides the testicular fortitude in the government and army to hunt down, and defeat every last one.   In that mission, Pakistan should have the full support of those that fear a Taliban takeover the most, including India, the United States, the UK and yes, Iran.  For, as a nuclear weapon state, Pakistan, as very flawed as it is by any measures of political and individual freedom, and more flawed as a corrupt state of pilfering mediocrities, it is nothing compared to what it would be like if ruled by the pedocidal Taliban. 

Thugs being appeased, is one way of looking at President Obama deciding to make friends with the dictatorship on his doorstep, Cuba. This is easy to be critical of, because Cuba is not introducing political or civil freedoms, and is not introducing any form of liberal democracy.  It is just freeing some political prisoners.  In exchange it gets diplomatic recognition, direct telecommunications and greater freedom of movement of Americans into Cuba.   Does it provide succour to a despicable regime?  Yes.  However,  there is little doubt to me that, on balance, this is good for freedom in Cuba.  Why?  Because the more Cubans get contact with their relatives and friends from the United States, and receive money and goods from them, the more they will understand how utterly stultifying their regime is.  The main negative of the policy will be that the key beneficiaries of any liberalisation of trade will be the thugs in charge and their families, who they will grant favours to.  

However, even if this is so, the regime's monopoly on power will not be strengthened by heightened corruption and the enrichment of an elite which gained and sustained power on the basis of everyone being equally impoverished (not that the party elite were denied privilege, but the Castro mafia is not known to be anywhere near as self-aggrandising and enriching as its ideological soul brothers in other dictatorships).   Greater contact with the outside world is a good thing, and while the trade embargo will not be removed without Congressional approval on the US side (which seems far from likely), the liberalisation that does occur, will enable Cubans to taste more of capitalism and freedom than they can at the moment.   If the trade embargo is lifted, then the regime will no longer have the excuse of the embargo for the relative poverty in the country, and more will be able to tell their stories of a derelict health system (despite how much it is lauded by leftwing activists), and how harassed they are by officials.

So, on balance, liberalising contact with Cuba is a good thing.  For it leaves restrictions on the country coming predominantly from the Cuban government side.  Yes, it looks like Obama is rewarding a dictatorship for doing little, but you must think beyond that.   Eastern Europe was undermined more by greater liberalisation of contact with the West, than by maintaining tight restrictions on it.   Cuba too will change, and on balance this is one step towards this.

Cowards.  The word to describe Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the cinema chains refusing to show The Interview.   It's astonishing, that a bunch of hackers, probably led from Pyongyang, but also likely to include some paid in China and elsewhere, can frighten a company that is part of a conglomerate with a turnover 50% greater than north Korea.

Yes.  Sony had turnover of around US$70 billion in 2014, whereas the DPRK's reported GDP (on a purchasing power parity basis) was US$40 billion in 2011.  What the hell should they be scared of?

Do they fear more cyber attacks? Well talk to banks, talk to the US IT giants that fear cyber attacks more.

Do they fear physical attacks?  Oh please.  "Team America - World Police" upset the Kim mafia when it came out, and the regime can't even control this. The DPRK has little record of engaging in international terrorism outside Asia, so it is difficult to envisage that it could convincingly pay anyone in the United States to perform such acts.  

More importantly, the film makes fun, pokes humour out of a regime that prohibits such humour. One of the first acts of any authoritarian regime is to ban parodies and comic depictions that "dishonour" its leading thugs, which of course dishonours them by doing so. 

So it is very important that this film be released and shown, and for people to go watch it and laugh. Laugh at the fat hedonistic boy king who got a fine Western education, has Western tastes, who loves NBA basketball and instead of sharing this wisdom and expanding the potential of the people he inherited from under the jackboots of his father and grandfather, he's put on a new pair himself.

His father at least didn't have the excuse of knowing as well as he does, about the outside world, for the short brat was scared of flying, so hardly travelled outside the country at all.  He proudly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to stay in power for fear the army would overthrow him.  

So the fat boy king is now emulating his grandfather, who is one of the great frauds of the 20th century.  He deserves to be laughed at, and Sony is doing a disservice to the people of Korea, and indeed the people of Japan threatened by north Korea, and to the USA, which stopped all of Korea being under the Kim family crime syndicate (and indeed helped transform Japan into a country that could allow Sony to be established and thrive).

So if Sony Pictures is too gutless to distribute this film - sell it - let someone with courage show it, and shame on those who refuse to do so, out of fear of a bunch of upstart north Korean kids trapped at the basement of a monument in Pyongyang (well that's where I saw banks of unexplained PCs well connected before the door was slammed shut on me). 

Where is the so-called peace movement now?

The Times reported that the US Administration is claiming that the Syrian target hit by Israeli airstrikes in September 2007 was a nuclear reactor supplied by North Korea.

North Korea of course has developed nuclear weapons, in defiance of promises to the international community. It utters rhetoric constantly calling for death to the USA, Japan and south Korea. It has now been caught selling nuclear technology to Syria.

Syria is an enemy of Israel, sponsors terrorism, invaded and ran Lebanon as an extension of itself for years.

However, that doesn't matter.  

It isn't the United States, United Kingdom or any other Western liberal democratic state.  

It is basically a rule of thumb that if anti-Western autocracies engage in war-mongering, it doesn't get the so-called peace movement excited.  They excuse it because "well the USA has nuclear weapons", granting moral equivalency between a regime that brutally suppresses dissent and does not permit independent media or protests, and the relatively free West.

Update

On Syria it is more palpable.  The so-called "peace" movement happily rallies thousands to march against Western intervention in Syria, but never protest against Russian arming and assisting the Syrian regime, or Qatar or Saudi doing the same to the rebels.

No, you see "imperialism" is just ok for Arab states, Iran, Russia or indeed any country that doesn't share the political or cultural background of the Western world.

As it was in the Cold War, when the so-called "peace" movement constantly rallied against Western military spending and activity, and never protested the Soviet bloc, or China, is how it is today.

So-called "peace" activists are blind to militarism and violence from dictatorships that aren't allied to the West.  They are simply reconstructed anti-capitalist fans of violent revolution, and their self-styled calls for morality and peace are transparently vacuous.

Gareth Morgan once made fun of North Korea

As a footnote to the recent saga of Gareth Morgan and the DPRK, I happened to find this... (you see North Korea watchers do collect material referring to the country)

You see, oddly enough in 2000, Gareth Morgan did find the pejorative, stereotyping of north Korea to be just fine when he was writing a column for the NBR. 

I suspect (and indeed there is evidence that) the DPRK is not very adept at researching those who seek Visas for travel there.   I doubt this column would have helped.

  In fact he used it to compare to the Clark Government, which is of course great fun for libertarians, but is in the same boat as "it's like Singapore".

His view then was that the DPRK is "the last surviving example of socialism gone horribly wrong", which doesn't exactly match the glowing image of farms and the economic struggles being seen to be due to the "economic blockade".

He said "everyone is in the same boat, they're starving", a view reversed by getting to see the people made available on the self-selected, but approved route.  

He talks then of the ruling elite having "expropriated heaps of money from the people to keep themselves and a few cronies in comfort".   Not a peep about this now.

"This Stalinist amusement park would suit someone like Tony Simpson in Jim Anderton's office"  and to think of what he called me when I pointed out the nature of this regime and system.  He already knew.

Now I have this column because I liked it, it was amusing, and it showed a cursory awareness of the totalitarian nightmare of the country, and the economic catastrophe it is.

Today...

Gareth Morgan seems to back down by erasing the past

Throughout the history of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Orwellian maxim that "he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future" has be.en the backbone philosophy to justify the personality cults that have led the country.   I've written about this already in the past few days.  Quite simply it would be a bombshell for many in the country to learn that Kim Il Sung's role in defeating the Japanese was that of a small guerrilla leader who achieved a handful of tactical victories before fleeing for his life to the USSR, and that the USA had a dominant role in rolling back the Japanese.  Similarly to know that it was Kim Il Sung who launched the war that devastated the entire peninsula, and that it was only because Mao was willing to supply so much cannon fodder that his Stalinist regime survived.  

Gareth Morgan's exploits on his blog have been rewritten, as is his right, here.

He has said:

We welcome your thoughts to improve the quality of discussion. If you think you can value with news, data, or research you are welcome to contribute.

Please be respectful of others opinions. Abusive or defamatory comments are not welcome and comments are moderated.

Pot kettle. He has since removed his libel threat and his lengthy ad-hominem attack on me which started with a diatribe against ad-hominem attacks.  He has edited many of my comments extensively, and has done the same to his own, adding in one:

"I am in no way sympathetic to the form of governance in North Korea."

Sure had a lot of us fooled.  

There is much more in the language now used in the edited comments to suggest a more reasonable interpretation for what he saw.  Had he said all that in the first place, there would be far far less to criticise him about.   

He has still helped to feed the DPRK's propaganda machine of course - that horse has bolted.

However, so have his original comments. 

I am sure that the reporting by Not PC, Whaleoil and Kiwiblog has helped him realise that he had precious few friends beyond Marxist conspiracy theorists and the regime itself in taking me on, and his own outpouring of ill considered anger (including thinking he knew about my education and belittling it) in response to my bitterness at him, has been erased.

He has also edited my comments, whereby I express my incredulity at what he originally said.

I suspect that is the closest I will get to an apology and a withdrawal.  A victory of sorts?

Of course, it is highly entertaining that it comes in the form of an Orwellian rewriting of opinions.  However, it is his blog.  I actually do believe in private property rights.

However, despite his valiant efforts, this little episode can't be so easily erased from history, for many others have seen and repeated them.

I look forward to seeing whether the MSM takes him on when he finally returns to NZ, for his original comments and behaviour in being confronted with the absurdity of them, have exposed weaknesses.   He hasn't the humility to apologise.

I'll leave it to you to decide as to what it says about the man.

"Prison camp? Nothing could be FURTHER from the truth" Gareth Morgan on the DPRK

The Australian Federal Government owned ABC is clearly a tool of Western propaganda to demonise the DPRK.  The ABC picks some highlights from what he has said...

""the imagery that you get from this almost concerted effort to demonise the place...it that it must be like one massive prison camp, nothing could be further from the truth."

Yep except from virtually no one being allowed to leave the country, and the comprehensive internal passport system, with military checkpoints at the entrance of most towns (he didn't notice this?). Except for the actual gulags.  Except for the compulsory adoration of the four person personality cult. Except for the secret police, the red guards, the compulsory weekly self-criticism and neighbourly criticism sessions.  Except for the complete absence of private property regarding home ownership. Except for the complete prohibition on any publishing that isn't by the state.  Except for the death penalty for listening to broadcasts from the outside world.

"preconceptions that the people are starving are actually not true. He says the group found people were eating well and local crops were healthy."

Western propaganda then.  He saw it all, got to visit any villages he asked.  That campaign a few years ago "let's eat two meals a day" was misreported.  What he saw was a fair reflection of what was real.

Farming is self-sufficient, labour intensive but very productive.

Throughout the famines in the Ukraine in the 1930s and China in the 1960s, visitors were shown productive farms and statistics indicated growing production.  Sure north Korea has no famine now, but to swallow the "very productive" claim is naive.

The problem is that the country's sanctions mean there are no reserves - a facet Gareth Morgan says could lead to famine.

Oh so it would be fine as a totalitarian centrally planned economy then?  China shouldn't have decollectivised farming, that was obviously foolish.  It's all the fault of the foreigners.  Convenient, and swallowing the party line once more.  Of course why are there sanctions?  Those nuclear weapons it promised to dismantle in exchange for help in developing a nuclear power generation facility, which it then developed anyway?  The constant exporting of missile technology to Iran, Syria and other rogue states that threaten Western allies?

because of the sanctions they are isolated.

Yes, not at all a country that isolates itself is it?  Such an open engagement allowed  between its people and the world.

Mr Morgan says that Koreans dress well noting that ladies wear gumboots with heels on them.

Noticing the important things.  

He says interaction between the group and ordinary North Koreans proved quite difficult.

Finally, a hint of acknowledgement of the core problem.  

Unlike in South Korea where people are free to chat he says that people in North Korea are all organised in work parties but say they did manage to meet a few North Koreans when they were at a beach resort.

The workers' paradise ensures even those of the lowest standing get to go on beach holidays right? Oh, maybe it's just more members of the elite?

The group were escorted throughout North Korea by a huge motorcade including a car with loudspeakers telling everyone what they were doing.

Yes the country is full of loudspeakers.  Did Jo understand what was being said?  Was it telling people what to do as well?  We may never know.

Gareth Morgan threatens me with libel.... and insults me.. *shrugs*

No.

No self reflection.

No addressing of the core questions and issues.

Wilful blindness?  Or does he simply not believe that what he saw was carefully selected?  Or does he have a cunning plan that he isn't mentioning? (!)

I don't know.. but let me have a go, respecting that he no longer wishes me to engage on his blog.  So I will respond to his comments, which say a lot in view.  Particularly an unwillingness to read.  He deleted my responses to the halfwits who claim the DPRK is "misunderstood" and even apologise for Assad.  That is "spam". 

Yes.. really.

Gareth Morgan thinks I am ignorant about the DPRK

Yes, really. 

See my response.

I'll take him on anyday about Korean history, and as long as he doesn't use the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang edition of History of Korea, he might have a chance.  However I doubt it.

The man who claims that reporting the facts about the DPRK is a "beat up" and "completely wrong".

The man who says they are "wonderfully engaged, well-dressed, fully employed and well informed".

I doubt he got to meet anyone with English that wasn't pre approved, so he couldn't seriously "engage", and I very much doubt if he was able to freely talk to anyone without others being present.  

Well dressed?  Well he didn't meet this girl, because she is dead, she was "fully employed" hunting rats and looking for grass for survival.

Well informed?  Yes, thinking your founding leader saved the country, that the USA started the Korean War and the country's poor economic performance is due to a blockade, and south Korea is a poverty ridden colony of the USA - really well informed.

It's lack of international money he bemoans, but then borrowing from Western banks and simply defaulting doesn't exactly make for a credit rating worth glancing at.

Then Jo Morgan has been tricked well.  17 minutes of naive observations that the Korean Central News Agency wouldn't be ashamed of using, seemingly interviewed by Nick Tansley - former ZM Wellington clown.  Not a high calibre journalist.

She talks about the wonderful local produce!  The wonderful "muscular" young men, and how south Korean journalists said young men in the south were getting obese.  She seems to bemoan the "Western softness" of Seoul.

She talks about how everyone is expected to do some manual work - fabulous and how fit they are.

She blames the manual labour on "sanctions", swallowing the state propaganda.

She "reckoned" 50-60% have cellphones, but then that was those she saw - the elite.  She dismissed bans on foreigners using cellphones as "just a rule for foreigners", not because it risked live reports of what goes on.

She was gobsmacked - rightly - about the Arirang Mass Games (which are a remarkable spectacle), although again thinking it reported the "history" of the country, rather than it being propaganda and a symbol of how people are only important if they are in a mass collective action.

"You can't tell me these people are miserable" from seeing members of the elite singing and laughing together.  No they aren't Jo.  No.  

"They seem well fed" says the woman who didn't spend time on Google Earth to note the burial mounds for the starving.  

"our escorts were making sure we didn't get lost"  Too funny.  Really.  Seriously, not there to ensure you didn't go explore on unapproved routes?

"The people want their children to be able to ride down into the south, they want reunification" Yes, they do, but the regime doesn't want it, unless it involves it being on their terms - which they know will never happen.

Finally, Gareth thinks division of Korea is due to "great powers".  It was originally, for the USSR installed Kim Il Sung in the north, against the UN mandated declaration of the Republic of Korea as the government of the whole peninsula and resisting the (admittedly very flawed) elections that were meant to be the basis for a new government.  Korea could be reunified tomorrow, except the regime in the north doesn't want to surrender its slave state that sustains a tiny elite, and the south doesn't want to be a slave state.

It's not about foreign powers, unless you believe the withdrawal of US troops (one deterrent to north Korean aggression, which is demonstrable)

NKNews (subscription once you read more than the minimum number of articles) reports on the trip.  

Gareth says "the farms are perfect. They have no pollution”, 

the standard of living was probably like south Korea "20 years ago"... astonishing.  

Think maybe 50 years ago, the last time north Korea and south Korea were roughly equals in per capita income.  North Korea WAS the rich half of Korea, south Korea the poor peasant half... 

Capitalism made south Korea one of the top 20 economies in the world and now up with developed countries.  

Shame Gareth is still admiring the system that has trapped, literally and economically, the people of the north in a 1960s timewarp.

I look forward to him admitting he is wrong, confessing he didn't know as much as he wished, and sorry for saying things complementary about a country that has such a vile government.  I look forward to him noting that much of what he was told in the country was false and they were probably shown only what was permitted, in order to show the country in the best light, and that it sends shivers down their spines to think of children being in gulags today.

Really, I do...

North Korean history lies

Given Gareth Morgan's affection for the country once described as "a place where George Orwell's 1984 was taken not as a warning, but as a textbook manual as to how to run a country", I thought I'd point out some of the biggest lies perpetuated by the regime in Pyongyang.  The saddest thing about it, is that I doubt if most of the elite even know this.  

These are lie the Kim gangster family have generated and it starts with:

- Korea was liberated from the Japanese imperialists by a group of loyal anti-Japanese patriots led by Marshal Kim Il Sung.

No, it was liberated by the United States, with the USSR having a tiny role at the very end.  Kim Il Sung spent the last four years of WW2 in the USSR.

- Kim Il Sung founded the Korean People's Army when he was 21.

No, it was founded in 1948, which was acknowledged until he decided in the early 1960s to rewrite history.

- Kim Il Sung arrived in Pyongyang greeted by hundreds of thousands grateful he had liberated the country.

No, he was brought in by the Red Army and trained to be their stooge.

- The Korean War was started by the US imperialists.

No, Kim Il Sung got authorisation from Moscow and Peking to launch the attack.  Soviet records prove that Stalin gave the approval.

- The Great Fatherland Liberation War (Korean War) was a great victory.

No it was a stalemate.  The military demarcation line is roughly where it was when the war started, so nothing was gained, but millions were killed.

- Kim Jong Il was born on the sacred Mt Paektu where he saw his father and mother preparing as they fought the Japanese.

No, he was born near Khabarovsk in the USSR.

- South Korea is a country of abject poverty and despair.

You know the truth. 

- South Korea is run as a colony by the US to use South Korean as slave labour

South Korea has long been independently minded, and has been a fairly robust liberal democracy since 1988

- Most of the world is wracked with crime, corruption, poverty and slavery, the people of Korea have nothing to envy

....

- The reason the DPRK has economic problems is because of the blockade by the US imperialists.

The reason is because it is the most centrally planned Stalinist state left on the planet, with market signals having little influence compared to the whims of the gangster family running it.

- Kim Il Sung is renowned worldwide as a genius and great man, who fought hard for the right of countries to be independent and people to be liberated.  Millions around the world worship his works.

Yes, well, need I say more?  Besides a few useful idiots, he's a laughing stock.

- Kim Jong Il is similarly renowned.

"Team America"

- The "arduous march" (mass starvation 1995-1998) was due to the US imperialists and some bad weather.

It was due to the diversion of economic effort to the military as Kim Jong Il sought to avoid a military coup after his father's death, and the storms that destroyed crops broke the back of the state farming sector.

- The United States and Japan are constantly seeking ways to invade and occupy north Korea

The US and Japan are deterring a north Korean attack and have no interest in any occupation. However, the regime does maintain a constant "we're on the brink of war" footing.  Read Orwell's 1984 to understand that.

- All of the Korean people love Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and just wish reunification of the country

Most Koreans despise them, and few south Koreans want reunification on north Korean terms.  Many fear the cost of rebuilding a broken country, but many also are deeply distressed by the division of families

- Korean reunification would happen if only the US withdrew its bases from south Korea

It might, because north Korea would feel more free to invade

SO that is a start. I wonder how many of these myths Gareth has swallowed?

Gareth Morgan becomes propaganda tool for the child torturing fiefdom of the Kim family: UPDATED 2

When Gareth Morgan's group got permission to enter the DPRK by motorcycle I was surprised, but then it is being accompanied every step of the way in the country.  I was also surprised when he got permission from both the DPRK and ROK sides to cross the DMZ.  I think the DPRK is also surprised by this, as it has several times used crossing as a propaganda trick, knowing the other side would arrest and detain anyone undertaking it (those who do it are typically DPRK sympathisers after all).  

So now he is in the country, and not surprisingly the New Zealand media is reporting none of it, even though North Korean media actually is.  Unless some celebrity is involved, or it involves a sports team or a disaster, then it isn't of interest.  Of course he'll get coverage when he returns, but it will be of the "wow amazing wasn't that cool" type of questioning.

You see Morgan's group is now being used for propaganda and this slave state will milk the propaganda value of peace loving sympathetic Westerners coming to learn about their country's "history" and how they struggle against the yoke of foreign aggression (when all of the aggression comes from the mafia family that runs the place).  

Gareth Morgan is now a tool of a slave state.  I doubt he'll ask about children being kept in gulags.  

The state/party daily newspaper has a photo of him on its visit here and here.  It reports on Morgan's group learning about the country.

His visit has included paying reverence to the murderous war-mongering Kim Il Sung, who set up the abominable personality cult led slave state that it is today, started the Korean War, and has manufacturer such a complicated web of lies about the place that it is difficult to know where to start.

For a start Kim Jong Il wasn't born on Mt Paektu, he was born in Russia in Khabarovsk.

Kim Il Sung did not lead a gang of guerrilla fighters based at Mt Paektu to led the Korean people to victory against the Japanese, he did led a small group based in Manchuria that tactically fled to the Soviet Union, where he was when Kim Jong Il was born.  Kim Il Sung was a Soviet selected stooge put in place to follow Stalin's order and occupy the land.  He successfully took all he learnt in the USSR and then some, started the Korean War and ended it building a cross between Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.

So if you want to follow Gareth Morgan, read the Rodong Simnum and the Korean Central News Agency, or listen to Voice of Korea's English broadcasts online, which are reporting on these adventures (all pretty much similar).

Meanwhile Porirua based Anglican pastor Don Borrie continues to felch the regime, and it continues to render his reputation to be equally vile.

UPDATE:  So the West needs to "rethink" North Korea now, says Gareth.  It wasn't just a motorcycle trip. His head has gone soft and he has taken in all the lies and thinks they are awfully nice folk.

The thing is, the guides are.  The people you see are nice, as they are privileged members of the elite painstakingly trying to make sure their country is seen in a good light.  

You don't need to try to demonise north Korea.  He claims it isn't a great big prison camp, but who gets to leave Gareth? Who gets passports?  What about the domestic passport system that ensures no one can leave their village or town unless they belong the elite? 

He talks of how everything is tidy and clean and everyone has a job. The Potemkin world he got to see. Escorted the whole way, he claims everything he saw was real, and told was real. 

He then touts the Democratic Confederal Republic of Koryo reunification scheme (not by name) of Kim Il Sung as the solution to reunification, except for removing US troops from south Korea.  Naively thinking the north Korean regime actually could survive any extensive contact by north Koreans of south Korea, but also wanting China to protect the slave state's sovereignty.  He even uses the language that has been uttered in DPRK English language propaganda since the 1970s over this.

Gareth talks of why he and his wife could travel across Korea, but Koreans couldn't.  Yet North Koreans can't own motorcycles and drive anywhere they want in the north.

Until now I thought he was just a bit naive and actually would come out and acknowledge that he didn't know what was true, what wasn't and what he was shown and not shown.  No, the fool appears to have swallowed the Kim gang fiction hook line and sinker, and not only that, is even endorsing the sustenance of the regime by giving it propaganda.

Matt Nolan has questioned his wisdom here.

I question his sanity.  

Imagine if he had travelled through Pol Pot's Cambodia and did this, or Nazi Germany in 1938 talking about how misunderstood the proud German people were and they only want more living space and to be reunified with Germans in Czechoslovakia, and it isn't a prison camp, the stories about the Jews are lies, demonising them.

Well Gareth - you kind of did that.

Go get your head examined, and if you're sane, here are some books to read

(UPDATE - he has read some unspecified books about the horrors of the regime and said he has no reason to question them.  It would have been balanced had he acknowledged this publicly instead of telling me on a comment on his blog)

Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan  (for life as a child in a gulag)

Kim Il Sung - the North Korean Leader by Dae Sook Suh (for the best historically accurate and well researched account of Kim Il Sung's REAL life and what he did to fight the Japanese (a little) and what he says he did (saved the nation) .

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia by Andrei Lankov an excellent report of how the country has changed and contrasts with the USSR, by an academic who lived there over decades and has fluency in Korean, Russian and English.

I still think despite reading some books and believing they are true, his behaviour is astonishing.  I don't understand it.

I STILL think he should...

Apologise to the hundreds of thousands who are in prison camps, including the thousands of children. Apologise to the millions dead because this regime preferred to build a mausoleum and deny farmers the right to grow more than tiny private plots of vegetables outside state and collective farms, leaving mass starvation in the 1990s.

Next time, take a holiday somewhere else interesting, but don't start describing how homosexuals in Iran have a happy life, or women in Saudi Arabia have such freedoms we don't understand, or how the people of Zimbabwe love papa Bob Mugabe.

Better yet, whatever you do, just shut up. The last specks of your credibility have been flushed well and truly down the basement toilets in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun (resting place of the DPRK's "eternal President").

North Korea - what's going on?

When I started studying north Korea it was the early 1990s, and few were paying attention.   Nobody paid attention then, and few pay attention now to the horrors of the totalitarian slave state that it has been for over 60 years.   The name - Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) - says much in itself.   Governments that use names to deliver messages about how utterly devoted they are to "the people" are  naturally quite the opposite.

The adjectives thrown about by the mainstream don't do justice to the place.  Stalinist?  No, the extent and efficiency of the  cultural revolution, the rewritten history and the personal cult far exceed that of Stalin, and it has now gone into two subsequent generations.   Dictatorship?  That bland term doesn't really highlight the totality of control in the DPRK.  Life there is under constant surveillance.  Totalitarian?  The DPRK should be the dictionary definition of it.

Much of the media coverage of the place focuses on how amusing it is to have a strongman leader, legions of soldiers goosestepping, and now how it is a bit of joke that he threatens to attack the United States.  Yet the DPRK isn't that funny for those living there.  

Why is the peace movement so quiet about Korea?

North Korea threatens to start a war with the United States, threatens with bellicose rhetoric to attack with nuclear weapons, to wipe out the enemy.

What do you get from the so-called "peace" movement and the political parties which so rabidly go on about nuclear weapons?

Nothing.

The Green Party is completely silent about north Korea.  Just imagine if it were the United States, or even the UK or France threatening to attack another country.   Just imagine if any nuclear weapons state was happily and gleefully testing nuclear weapons, to show off that it shouldn't be messed with.

The leftwing blogs similarly have largely little to say.  The Standard ignores it.  Real estate agent Martyn Bradbury's outlet ignores it. Idiot Savant ignores it.  

Tim Selwyn thinks that the regular US/ROK military exercises are a "provocation", as if close allies facing a proven holder of all types of WMDs shouldn't make a show of strength as a deterrent.   In fact he just wants New Zealand to not be involved, even though New Zealand fought bravely with the UN-led forces in the Korean War to defeat north Korea's attack on south Korea.  He appears to grant moral equivalency to US and DPRK forces, while criticising the DPRK for being crazy, he doesn't think it is "ok" to support a close ally and major trading partner, the ROK, in deterring Pyongyang.  His rabid anti-Americanism gets in the way of him supporting New Zealand willing to oppose one of the worst dictatorships in modern history.   

Internationally, Greenpeace is silent.

I don't believe most on the left support the DPRK, for it would be akin to supporting the Khmer Rouge, Mao, Stalin or Hitler.  The regime is reprehensible, and commits acts against its own citizens that are sheer horror.   Find another regime that imprisons small children in gulags for the political crimes of their family.

Yet it is that sheer horror that should unite them in opposition to the regime.  There should be protests outside DPRK embassies, there should be peace marches, there should be effigies of Kim Jong Un burnt in the streets.

But nothing.  Surely the left aren't sympathetic to this slave state?

No, I am sure most are not, but they are fickle because the DPRK wants to take on the great Satan - the USA.   So it doesn't really matter if warmongering dictators threaten to attack US targets, for the so-called peace movement presumably thinks they are "fair game".

What happens if the bluff is real?  What happens if there is an attack, will the left claim it is ok for the US to respond?  What if a north Korean nuclear, chemical or biological warhead is released on south Korea?  Will the left/peace movement believe it is ok to respond in kind to utterly destroy north Korea's military capability?

I doubt it.

Why so neutral in the face of unspeakable evil?  Most on the left and in the peace movement accept it was right to fight Nazism.

Why is it not acceptable to deter totalitarian socialism, and to fight it when it attacks?

Is it just because hatred for the United States is stronger than anything?

Things to do during Earth Hour

I loathe Earth Hour.  I called it "onanistic vileness" or rather the act of utter wankers who have the luxury to claim moral superiority, because they can stop using electricity.

In 2009 I said:

Oh yes, the sheeple in the relatively free rich world (and even the relatively unfree middle income world like China) will have a jolly ol' time switching off our lights for an hour. Makes you feel better a bit of enforced poverty doesn't it?

The Ayn Rand Institute rightly points out how perverse it is to celebrate extinguishing light:

Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.

I've seen a city that has a constant earth hour - Pyongyang.  Dark, with lights in a few buildings, focused on the grotesque statues of the city's past Big Brothers, on the railway station and one or two other pockets of light.  It is dismal and dire.  To celebrate replicating this is unspeakably wrong.

Pity those who have no choice but to "celebrate Earth Hour".

Donate to LiNK - Liberty in North Korea.  Help people fleeing the darkness to experience light, heat and civilisation.

Otherwise, keep the lights on or maybe go for a drive.  Celebrate that a century ago, electric lighting was a delight, for being safer, brighter and opening up the evenings to more socialising, to reading, to enjoying more of life.    Celebrate that today, electric lighting is more reliable, safer and uses less electricity than ever before.

The future is not with those who would turn the lights out.

Dennis Rodman in Pyongyang is interesting for more subtle reasons

Had anyone said a week or so ago that ex.NBA basketball player Dennis Rodman would be hugging Kim Jong Un, all North Korea watchers would be thought it absurd.

Yet it has happened.

First North Korean leader to hug an American

Now I'm not going to go into what Rodman said, Curtis Melvin's blog - North Korea Economy Watch - has the best coverage, and you should watch George Stephanopoulos's interview with him, where he takes on Rodman talking about Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il being "great man" and slips into moral relativism.   Rodman is at best naive, and at worst a willing idiot for a despot.  If he reads the Human Rights Watch report, accepts it and visits Kim Jong Un again to discuss it, then he truly will have made a breakthrough unheard of before.

However, what it looks like is a young dictator happy to accept a childhood hero.  Kim Jong Un loves basketball, probably from his days from being schooled in Switzerland (unlike his father and grandfather, he has not been raised away from the West).   He's just pleased to have such fun, although he will probably have been made aware of the political significance of the move.

For a start it makes the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) look cuddly and friendly, and Rodman has been an almost perfect diplomat,  for the DPRK, in making the place look detoxified, somewhat.  The hope is it will put pressure on the Obama Administration to talk, shown by Rodman saying Kim Jong Un just wants Obama to "call him".  Seems simple right, but it is what the DPRK has wanted since 1953, it wants to sideline the Republic of Korea (ROK) in Seoul, which it considers to be illegitimate, and negotiate directly with the US, which it constantly claims as occupying south Korea.   Of course, Kim Jong Un knows this to be a nonsense, but the Kim regime's priority has always been to one-up the ROK.  Obama calling Kim Jong Un, weeks after the people of the ROK elected a new President - a woman no less - would be a huge snub to her.  A core component of US policy (and indeed Japanese and dare I say Chinese policy) is for the two Koreas to talk to each other.  The US role is to maintain a military deterrent (including nuclear) against the DPRK, as the ROK does not have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons (the DPRK has all of those).

So that wont happen.  Obama wont be calling Kim Jong Un.

The more curious element is the image above.  The DPRK is fervently racist, as described by Brian Myers in this book (although I disagree with some elements of it), with Koreans thinking they are pure and clean.  The regime has forced women who bear children of Chinese men to abort, it looks down upon non-Koreans, and has countless images depicting Americans as hooked nosed and dirty (reminiscent of how the Nazis portrayed Jews).

The idea that an African-American could touch, let alone hug a leader of the DPRK is utterly unprecedented.  The extent to which that image is disseminated in the DPRK is unclear (most north Koreans don't get television, as they don't get reliable electricity outside Pyongyang, so they will get reports from radio and newspapers).   However, while Kim Il Sung shook the hands of umpteen African dictators, the embrace given to an American sportsman would have been absurd (although he did meet Jimmy Carter and Billy Graham, they are hardly of the same ilk).

Perhaps Kim Jong Un thinks that Obama will listen to Rodman, because of racial brotherhood?  It seems a little absurd, but from a Pyongyang perspective could it be a factor?

I don't think what has just happened in Pyongyang is significant from a diplomatic point of view, I think it shows a young dictator having fun.   One who wants the outside world to come, on his terms, and wants to be noticed.  Just as noticeable is the significant boost to tourism, as there has been a dramatic increase in tours to the country.

That's a good thing, as the more exposure locals get to foreigners the better.  My hope is that if Rodman does go back, he can deliver a message from the US and ROK administrations (and he should visit the south before he visits the north again), which is one of wanting to defuse tensions and to encourage the north to actually open up and reform.   Bear in mind that absolutely nothing else has worked in the 21 years since the end of the Cold War, and it would morally wrong and futile to continue the endless cycle of talks, bribery, DPRK lashes out, sanctions, talks.

DPRK commences another round of bad cop, good cop

As was fully expected, Kim Jong Un has shown off that just because dad died, the DPRK still can pack a nuclear punch.  It follows the satellite launch in December of Kwangmyongsong 3-2, which is widely thought to have also been a display of rocket technology might that could be used to launch missiles.

Youth Hero Motorway approaching Pyongyang

It's useful to largely ignore the hyperbolic Western media on this, driven partly because the DPRK has understandably being caricatured as some weird insane little country with a silly leader who does crazy things.  I understand that caricature, but it is deceptively simplistic.  Weird dictatorship, bad man who likes showing off his military might, but as this week's Economist reports, the reality on the ground in the country is quite different.   For example, despite the rhetoric, it is comparatively easy (though not cheap) to travel to the DPRK.

You see, the DPRK has gone through a cycle of provocation, isolation, face saving dialogue, engagement and then provocation, since Kim Il Sung died.  It doesn't demonstrate a genuine desire to wage war with its neighbours, rather it is a technique to extract booty from them, like a truculent child who wants attention, and has a tantrum when you stop giving it any.

Trolley bus in Kim Il Sung square

You can't blame Kim Jong Un, because it worked for his father.