Search Results for: Cao interview

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 4

Surprisingly, my favorite Cao quote from the fourth and final installment isn’t even about North Korea: “In general, U.S. cities frighten me, after 7 p.m. all the white people go home, and black people and beggars take to the streets.” Cao also talks about Robert Park. Once again, thanks to Enzo Reale for allowing me to publish this. Please visit his blogs at 1972 and Asiaeditorni, or on Twitter.

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...

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,...

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...

Tim Shorrock spreads disinformation about biological warfare in Korea. That makes him a disinformant.

If you’re unfamiliar with self-described Marxist and journalist Tim Shorrock, consider yourself fortunate. But if you’re on Twitter and you’re interested in Korea, you’ve probably run across his tweets. You might even have been blocked by him. And while the world is wide enough for all sorts of kooky viewpoints (as Mao said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” as he pulled the cord and started his lawnmower), Shorrock was one of the first “journalists” to whom Moon Jae-in gave an...

Commence Primary Ignition: Treasury zaps the Bank of Dandong for laundering Kim Jong-Un’s money

And so, the “maximum pressure” we’ve been waiting for begins in earnest. Yesterday afternoon, the Treasury Department announced a series of legal actions against Chinese enablers of North Korea’s proliferation, smuggling, and money laundering. First, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control froze the assets of two businessmen and a shipping company. One of those businessmen, Sun Wei, was the sole shareholder of Mingzheng International Trading, the Chinese company targeted in this recent civil forfeiture action. The shipping company was sanctioned for...

China breaks N. Korea sanctions it says won’t work because it’s afraid they’ll work

In yesterday’s post, I linked to reports suggesting that China’s failure to agree on the terms of a new U.N. sanctions resolution responding to North Korea’s latest nuclear test may be motivated by a desire to wait out the end of President Obama’s administration. This theory would only make sense if China figures it can get better terms from President Trump next year, but my post pointed to evidence of the opposite of this — that what we know so...

North Korea, secondary sanctions, tertiary impacts, and the coming death spiral

As I write today, rumors are swirling through the South Korean media of defections and purges involving so many North Korean diplomats, spies, minders, workers, and other officials that I haven’t had the time to either keep up with them or sort out the conflicts in those reports. I’ll try to do that by this time next week, and identify any patterns I see in them. In the meantime, an intriguing story by the Daily NK elucidates how well-targeted sanctions can drive disloyalties and fissures...

Andrei Lankov doesn’t really know if North Korea sanctions are working

It’s no secret that I’ve been a skeptic of “engagement” with Pyongyang from the very beginning, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Andrei Lankov. His Korea Times columns, his book, and his other writings on social, historical, and political matters have been so useful that I often cite them, despite his unrealized predictions or the silly things he occasionally writes. His view of engagement isn’t just the conventional approach of wheeling a catapult up the DMZ and flinging bundles of unmarked...

Obama sanctions Syria’s Russian enablers (but not North Korea’s Chinese enablers)

Let’s resume this week’s “why not North Korea?” theme with a pithy summary of where we stand today. The Obama Administration has frozen the assets of Syrian, Iranian, and Sudanese (but not North Korean) officials for human rights violations. It has frozen the assets of Iranian and Syrian (but not North Korean) officials and entities for censorship, and fined the enablers of censorship in Sudan, Iran, and Syria (but not North Korea). Treasury has frozen the assets of nearly all of the leaders of Belarus and Zimbabwe (but...

China helps N. Korea nuke up & break sanctions, then says sanctions don’t work.

Two weeks ago, the Obama Administration’s point man on North Korea policy told Congress that sanctions are hurting Pyongyang. I must confess to some skepticism. [Ski lift made in China.] Instead, the evidence suggests that North Korea’s rich are getting richer, and its poor are staying poor. Materially speaking, the capital’s elites have never had it better, and openly buy imported consumer goods with dollars. Marcus Noland also sees evidence that, whatever the official statistics tell us, Pyongyang’s palace economy...

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

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...

How Barack Obama let Kim Jong Un get away with censoring and terrorizing America (updated)

Last December, after the FBI and the National Security Agency concluded that North Korea’s Unit 121 had hacked Sony Pictures and threatened the Americans who wanted to see “The Interview,” President Obama publicly accused North Korea of the cyberattack and threat, and promised a “proportional response” to it. On January 2nd, the President signed a new executive order whose potential was sweeping, but whose actual effect was “symbolic at best.” In practice, the designations under the new executive order amounted...

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...

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. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~...

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...