Search Results for: Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview

February 12, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 3

This week, Cao informs us how he maintained his porcine figure even as he watched North Koreans starve to death all around him, and explains that The Great Confiscation was designed to foil widespread foreign counterfeiting of the North Korean won, for which there would seem to be as much incentive as inventing imitation tofu. Cao also says that the food situation in North Korea these days is just peachy, which is rather remarkable statement, given that not even Kim...

Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
February 11, 2010

China: We Have No Dissidents!

CHINA declared on Thursday it had ‘no dissidents’, just hours after a Beijing court upheld an 11-year jail term for one of the country’s top pro-democracy voices. ‘There are no dissidents in China,’ foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters at a regular news briefing. [AFP, via Singapore Straits Times] Either they just strayed into Alejandro Cao de Benos’s alternative reality, or I just didn’t know they’d been there all along.

Categories China/WTF?
February 7, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 2

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

Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
January 29, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 1

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

Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
May 27, 2015

Gloria Steinem was right about isolation (of South Africa)

Gloria Steinem can look back on a life of activism that has built deep reserves of good will among many people. Steinem must have spent heavily from those reserves last week, when Women Cross DMZ attracted largely critical media coverage (and I suspect, an even more critical public reaction). As NK News informs us, its events were stamped from the same propaganda assembly line as those put on for the clown-shod Quisling Alejandro Cao de Benos. To what end would...

Categories Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
August 15, 2013

Open Sources, August 15, 2013

HAVES AND CAN’T HAVES:  Two million North Koreans have “authorized” cell phones; meanwhile, the regime is cracking down on the unauthorized kind.  I default to skepticism of any self-serving claims that a transaction involving the government of North Korea will result in social or political changes in North Korean society, but Orascom may be the one exception I’m willing to acknowledge.  I don’t think any state can monitor that many phones, and in a society where money can buy anything, more...

Categories Anju Links
March 29, 2013

Open Sources, March 29, 2013

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR PROFILES Alejandro Cao de Benos, who was interviewed for OFK by our friend Enzo in 2010. For a starving country, North Korea certainly does a brisk trade in size 52 extra-fat uniforms. What’s most striking about Cao’s claims that North Korea has no hunger or human rights violations isn’t their blatant mendacity, really. It’s the fact that a KCNAP consumer could easily believe every word of it. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~...

Categories Anju Links
December 13, 2010

From Cradle to Grave, So Goes the Expression

There is no food emergency in the country now and things can only get better. — Alejandro Cao de Benos Theresa forwards confirmation, via the Daily NK, of my worst fears for a 23 year-old woman who all but recited her own obituary for the guerrilla cameras of Rimjingang: “It was discovered that, without a home, she had been wandering in the market and on the streets, before dying in a corn field,” the Asia Press spokesperson explained, “Since then...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/NK Military
June 4, 2010

How Al Jazeera Translates “Fair and Balanced” into Arabic

I had to see this for myself to actually believe it: Bjornar Simonsen, one of Alejandro Cao de Benos‘s obergruppenführers in the Korean “Friendship” Association, qualifies as an authority on North Korea in the eyes of Al Jazeera. But just to keep things objective and balanced, Al Jazeera puts Bjornar up against … John Feffer. You may not want to watch this if you’ve eaten processed meat or dairy products in the last hour or so, particularly if you have...

Categories Media Criticism/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy
February 10, 2010

10 February 2010

Some perspective for those of you in Washington now: the weather right now in Verkhoyansk (55 below, as I write this). As a native of South Dakota, I never thought I’d see this place get a respectable blizzard._____________ An interview with Ha Tae Keung, a/k/a Young Howard, of Open News._____________ North Korea tries to keep the lid on dissent, which Alejandro Cao de Benos assures us does not exist._____________ The Korea Herald interviews Todd Zitin, the creator of Korean News...

Categories Anju Links
January 9, 2000

The Alternative Reality of Christine Ahn

Dave at No Illusions wants to know more about Christine Ahn, the North Korean apologist (and American, as it turns out) whose views OhMyNews found worthy of the extensive interview I linked and fisked below. Even a cursory exploration of Christine Ahn’s views immediately raises questions about the honesty of OhMyNews’s coverage of her, given its failure to disclose that she is an active member in a pro-Pyongyang organization based in Oakland, California. Who Is Christine Ahn? North Korea is...

Categories Uncategorized
January 8, 2000

The Alternative Reality of Christine Ahn

Dave at No Illusions wants to know more about Christine Ahn, the North Korean apologist (and American, as it turns out) whose views OhMyNews found worthy of the extensive interview I linked and fisked below. Even a cursory exploration of Christine Ahn’s views immediately raises questions about the honesty of OhMyNews’s coverage of her, given its failure to disclose that she is an active member in a pro-Pyongyang organization based in Oakland, California. Who Is Christine Ahn? North Korea is...

Categories Uncategorized