Search Results for: gotterdammerung

July 7, 2017

Stop talking about bombing North Korea. Talk about the revolution it desperately needs.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.  – Sun Tzu On the Fourth of July, I had a long talk with a Famous Person who would probably prefer that I not mention his name here. He’s famous (or infamous — your mileage may vary) for his association with a foreign policy philosophy described as “neoconservative,” whatever that means. Like many Famous Persons, this person’s public image is an injustice to his actual views, which sounded...

Categories Resistance
February 18, 2016

What the U.N.’s new North Korea sanctions resolution should (and should not) do.

Yonhap reports that the U.S. and China have made progress toward an agreement on a draft U.N. Security Council resolution. Although we’ve seen few hints about exactly what sanctions China is willing to sign up for — much less enforce — China is paying lip service to the notion that North Korea must pay a “necessary price” for its behavior. Has Xi Jinping relented in his unprecedented stubbornness, or was it always China’s plan to relent after stalling us, in the hope that...

Categories China & Korea/Class Warfare/Diplomacy/Sanctions
February 19, 2015

More food for hungry North Koreans is not “bad news” for sanctions proponents.

I don’t always agree with Scott Snyder’s views, but I’ve always enjoyed reading his work. In almost every case, I’ve found it to be well-researched and objective. In a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations, Snyder cautiously concludes that North’s cereal production is “stable and improving” — from 5.93 million tons last year to 5.94 million tons this year, a more generous characterization than the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report he cites, which calls North Korea’s food production “stagnant.”...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
April 5, 2010

North Korea Reaffirms Plans to Close Markets

If you’ve read a spate of recent reports and op-eds in places like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal recently, you might have acquired the impression that The Great Confiscation was a fiasco that caused panic, chaos, and an unprecedented swelling of discontent. The North Korean government wants you to know that all of this is all a brigandish, flunkeyist fabrication: ”In the early days immediately after the currency change, market prices were not fixed, so markets were...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
March 29, 2010

29 March 2010: The Relevance of Human Rights

The Chosun Ilbo calls on South Korea to treat human rights like a serious issue, after years of the opposite: It is time to make things extremely difficult for North Korea unless it takes at least some steps to improve the human rights situation. “It is time for the highest level of the UN, the Security Council, to step up,” Muntarbhorn said. The Security Council members — the U.S., China, the U.K., France and Russia — must tackle North Korea’s...

Categories Anju Links
October 3, 2009

We Are All Neocons

Don Kirk, writing in the Asia Times, concludes that however North Korea behaves toward its neighbors at any given moment, it is determined to get our money and keep its nukes. That’s not an astonishing conclusion for any intelligent analyst of North Korean behavior, but Don’s writing is always worth a read. I try to refrain from predicting whether North Korea’s next move will be provocation or the North Korean equivalent of a “charm offensive,” since the options aren’t mutually...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
July 14, 2009

On Second Thought, Let’s Not Talk to Our Enemies Without Preconditions!

As someone who openly seeks the violent overthrow of the regime by cultivating and arming an internal opposition, I never thought I’d see the day when the Obama Administration moved to in a diplomatic direction at least as extreme as mine, and possibly more so: American diplomatic efforts on North Korea are coming under fire within the Obama administration from officials who consider talks futile and instead want to focus on halting the regime’s trade in nuclear weapons and missile...

Categories Diplomacy/Uncategorized/Washington Views
October 20, 2008

Generalissimo Kim Jong Il Is Still Not Dead

If there really was a special announcement played for the diplomats and shadowy “trading company” officials at North Korea’s embassies and consulates yesterday, it may have been about sign-ups for intramural softball or the results of the fantasy football pool.   We did learn that the  Great General offered this on-the-spot guidance, which, for once, I wholly endorse: “get a haircut, hippie!”   Like so many recent reports from North Korea of late, however,  the latest ones  fall sadly short of our...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
July 3, 2008

Anju Links for 3 July 2008

STARVING NORTH KOREAN WOMEN TURN TO PROSTITUTION:  “Around stations in big cities, you can see many pimps affiliated to inns . . . .  They approach pedestrians, euphemistically saying that “˜I am selling a bed,’ or “˜selling a flower.’”  Sadly,  some of those forced to survive this way are children.  IT’S CAUTIOUSLY ENCOURAGING to hear USAID official John Brause say something like this about the first shipment of U.S. food aid to North Korea  since 2005:  The agreement to provide...

Categories Anju Links
January 8, 2007

Will John Negroponte Put Some Steel in Our Korea Policy?

If so, it would be good news. I’ve argued on this blog that the G.W. Bush policy isn’t really that different from the Bill Clinton policy on the fundamentals. Both shared the same set of  essential beliefs: that North Korea has a genuine interest in disarming, for the right price; that such a disarmament is achieveable, verifiable, and enforceable; implicitly, that North Korea’s nuclear proliferation can be contained; implicitly, that North Korea is more dangerous if its regime is destabilized...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
October 24, 2006

‘Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.’

Reports the Australian: An  underground resistance movement in North Korea, capable of smuggling out videos of executions and staging violent acts of defiance, has emerged as the Kim Jong-il regime faces international sanctions for testing a nuclear bomb. Let’s contain our exuberance long enough to ask ourselves if it’s irrational.  Break this down into its components.  I do believe that  organized networks of guerrilla cameras, missionaries, and people smugglers  are  operating; that  they’re increasing  their reach inside North Korea; and...

Categories Resistance
October 15, 2006

U.N.S.C.R. 1718: Who Won, Who Lost (Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 13)

John Bolton: Winner. I’d like to hear John Bolton’s critics deny that, as with Resolution 1695, he has wrung far more effectiveness from the U.N. than we had come to expect. Not only should we confirm this man, pronto, we should clone him. Madeleine Albright never got results like these. The United States: Winner. We got everything we really wanted here: help constricting Kim Jong Il’s financial arteries the right to search his ships and planes. an embargo on the...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Geopolitics/Japan/Japan & Korea/Money Laundering/U.S. & Korea/WMD
June 12, 2004

Freedom, Eclipsed

When the state loses the will to enforce the rule of law, the conditions are ripe for the eclipse of democracy. The younger generations are seduced by a quicker path to power, and the older generations lose faith that the system is worth defending. Just as Weimar Germany let Berlin descend into chaos and Gotterdammerung, it is happening in Seoul today. Are there any South Koreans (hint: the brave woman in this photo is a North Korean defector) who are...

Categories Uncategorized
June 11, 2004

Freedom, Eclipsed

When the state loses the will to enforce the rule of law, the conditions are ripe for the eclipse of democracy. The younger generations are seduced by a quicker path to power, and the older generations lose faith that the system is worth defending. Just as Weimar Germany let Berlin descend into chaos and Gotterdammerung, it is happening in Seoul today. Are there any South Koreans (hint: the brave woman in this photo is a North Korean defector) who are...

Categories Uncategorized
March 10, 2004

What We Can and Must Do About North Korea

We started a fascinating discussion today at freenorthkorea.net, in which I responded to arguments against firm action in North Korea because of Iraq. Just as North Korea had once been an excuse for inaction in Iraq, Iraq is now an excuse for inaction in North Korea. The true agenda is thus revealed as inaction in both. I edited my comments for coherence and organization and post them here, in the hope that they will provoke more thought. How Should We...

Categories Uncategorized