North Korean Officials Flood to China, Possible Mass Defection
koreabang.com
koreabang.com
I wonder sometimes if these sorts of things are 'leaked' to see if anyone inside the country will flinch and take action, sometimes I wonder if they are wishful thinking on the part of people would like to see the PRK gone. It is always unsettling though to have a nuclear power that is quite unstable near a critical resource to the work (S. Korea). So emphasizing that instability is a great tool for news services to ratchet of the fear views.
Lets consider three possible scenarios:
1) I its a hoax.
Ok, so far (5:30PST) the mainstream press hasn't picked it up (and they would if they had any sort of confirmation). Who benefits? Asia Press?
2) Its disinformation.
So if the PRK "leaked" this to flush out malcontents in the PRK, how would that work? Would people who read this self identify as potential targets and head for the hills? (Thus calling them out as targets for the current government)
3) Its "real"
And there are a bunch of high level military and diplomatic personnel in China waiting to be processed through into the country. What is the PRK reaction? Anger? Retailiation? Do they do something stupid and try to kill their missing minions in China?
All it does it raise questions.
China: http://www.chinasmack.com Indonesia: http://www.indoboom.com Russia: http://www.russiaslam.com Japan: http://www.japancrush.com Korea: http://www.koreabang.com
They're possible asylum seekers in a nominally allied state, who've (supposedly) fled a totalitarian regime that's shown no compunction about assassinating critics abroad. I can see why they'd not either make their location known, nor wish to talk to foreign media.
And that's assuming the story is true.
Are North Koreans brainwashed any more than a U.S. citizen? Here in Norway the opinion seems to say: No.
But who are we to judge?
The most "indoctrination" we do in America is perhaps having children in school recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag every morning.
I'm sorry, but America doesn't "brainwash" people remotely to this level:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307937/North-Korea-...
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/north-korea-death-ca...
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4885931/north-...
If you think America does, you are mistaken. I'm not judging right or wrong, only that people often don't choose in their own best interests. Especially if their frame of reference is horribly skewed from blatant government brainwashing.
For example, an American citizen can read your claims about America's flaws. A NKian can't.
NK propaganda is "we have the highest per capita income".
The only thing I can think of that would keep them in check is that their family is being held hostage, but that would also make all of them extremely motivated to become double agents?
[1] These themes are hit upon in some of the "inside NK" lit, I especially liked "A Year in Pyongyang." A bit dated, but NK nonfiction holds up well with age, and it's all free online: http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang_1.html
[2] Former NK spy: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/29/former-north-korean-sp...
As it turns out the North Korean spy program is actually surprisingly successful. It has been responsible for everything from terrorist attacks that have downed airliners (Korean Air Flight 858) to assassination attempts on the South Korean Prime Minister (Blue House Raid, Rangoon bombing) to abductions of foreign nationals so that they can be used as teachers or laborers in North Korea.
And that's aside from their covert weapons trade including trade in missile and WMD technology. Iran's long range ballistic missile systems, for example, are based mostly off of DPRK technology.
Gosh, why doesn't everyone want to have the same ruling government, the same local culture, and the same new iPhone? Bellies will be full too!
Based on my limited experience of Korean culture (I have a dozen or so Korean friends) the number of Koreans who would willingly choose to live a primitive lifestyle is....minimal.
How much do you know of North Korea? Are you under the impression their culture is the same as the South's? Do you think the spies live a primitive lifestyle? Do you think these athletes live a primitive lifestyle? http://www.funis2cool.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/north_k... How many people in Pyongyang do you think live a primitive lifestyle? And if they suddenly learned of the outside world (assuming they were completely ignorant beforehand!) they would probably notice the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the unjustly imprisoned -- in other words, the same types of problems, if perhaps of different local magnitudes. They might also notice a bunch of problems they don't have. They may even just see some of their own problems as caused by the West and reinforce their distaste.
My point is that it's ridiculous to suggest one's way of living will be instantly recognized as superior by someone else one assumed to have an inferior lifestyle. It's also ridiculous to imagine no one in North Korea actually believes in the legitimacy of the government and its goals.
Korean culture is at least 2,000 years old, and yes, it's quite homogeneous.
"They would probably notice the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the unjustly imprisoned"
What in the world are you talking about? Their entire country is an impoverished prison/slave-state, and it's estimated that 2-3 million North Korean people starved to death as recently as the 1990s.
So, yeah, I'm pretty sure they'd see the outside world as superior.
Too bad they're not given the chance to make that decision for themselves, isn't it?
A good rule of thumb on whether people actually want to live in a country: go to the border and check to see how many of the guns are pointed inward.
That South Korea allows people to leave if they want, while North Korea doesn't?
That millions of North Koreans have been starved to death or otherwise murdered by their own government?
Sorry, those are facts, your attempts to change the subject notwithstanding.
For you to just say, "i know a few Koreans" and "they are 2 thousand years old and therefore predictable" are the generalizations i mentioned.
I am not arguing that NK is doing anything right. Far from it. I just happen to have some familiarity with the subject (my uncle is an adopted Korean refugee, i live in a place that is 30%+/- Korean, i can read more than a web page). It is an ugly problem, but it is the way it is now because of the US and China. Both the North and The South have had dictators and have caused unnecessary trouble to the other. As an American, i want to stay on the side of human rights and personal liberty. Through that lens, both governments are shit (...as well as US and most of Europe.)
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Also:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Korean_peninsula_at_n...
"Both the North and The South have had dictators and have caused unnecessary trouble to the other"
The fact remains that South Koreans are allowed to leave the country, and North Koreans aren't, your attempts to spin some kind of bogus moral equivalence between "dictators" notwithstanding.
[Edit]Excellent links. So much reading to do. Thank you. If the argument of which side of Korea is Better Korea, then it is obvious that it is the South. If the argument is about which side of Korea is Best Korea, then there is no debate.
I can't imagine that the honeymoon period lasted all that long, given what the Nazis did in the Ukraine. Are you a crazy person?
Amish children aren't Amish. You have to choose to be Amish as an adult, they are exceedingly strict about that.
edit - If the Amish did mysteriously find themselves in charge of North Korea all of a sudden, by the rules of the Amish within about a year or so, depending on the harvest, there would be a very small Amish state in the middle of a brand new country that would rather confusingly now be called England.
Yes, actually. During Rumspringa, they choose whether they want to be members.
Or did you think your current culture is somehow special and the best one ever?
It's utterly disgusting how people call everyone else's culture except their own "brainwashing". Religious? Brainwashed. Atheist? Brainwashed. Likes sports? Brainwashed.
The only time you can legitimately call "brainwashing" is in a culture where there is one "master" person, and everyone else is utterly obedient to them.
To wilfully distort their view on reality deserves a pejorative term, in any case. I guess it's being done by adults who are victims of the same process themselves.
And what exactly makes you think that your view on reality is the super best most correct and perfect one?
From their point of view you are the one with a distorted view on reality and perhaps your children should be taken from you before you warp them.
Do you really not see this? Or are you so stuck in your viewpoint that it's utterly impossible for you to imagine anyone having a different viewpoint?
I know what you are trying to say, and I am old enough to both have experience with people looking down on and attacking my culture, and to see young adults run away in fear because of idiotic notions instilled in them by their culture. I have seen how a lot of control over these kids is through misuse of the kids' trust in their elders.
THEIR ability to see other viewpoints has been damaged beyond repair, for many of them for most of their life. And thus their culture is maintained.
Anyway, enough of this.
I got your point, but it is sad to see how pervasive the western dominance ideology is, as illustrated by someone calling you insane for being unexpected. Interesting, but largely sad.
North Korea is not some peasant utopia that just wants to be left alone, it is a nuclear armed totalitarian state that constantly prepares its citizenry for a ficticious total war.
As for your self titling of we amerifats are just convinced we have it better, well, this belies a core truth, many people suspect you might well have it better simply by so many people in your culture being able to get so fat.
There is a massive difference from a society trying to live simply and one in abject poverty due to mismanagement by a series of crazed mass murderers.
You seem to know very little about the Amish, as everything you have stated about them is Wikipedia grade generalities. They do not need to imprison anyone, as they could just kick anyone out. The system is staggeringly effective, especially if you raise people to believe they belong somewhere but the must make the right series of choices to stay where they belong.
North Korea actually is a peasant utopia that wishes to be alone. (largely peasant population, check. a completely fanciful view of their existence in regards to the world at large, check. wishes to be left alone, infini-check.)
>NK is a nuclear armed totalitarian state that constantly prepares its citizenry for a fictitious war. I should email your previous comments to Kim Jong Un; he could use them as justification for sabre rattling. Your observation could be applied to Israel, Pakistan, India, China, and the United States. If you subtract the Nuclear capability, it could be said about every nation on earth with a standing military. The point of a standing army is not the wars you fought, but the ones you will fight.
>...being able to get so fat. There are fatties everywhere. It boggles the mind.
>...by a series of crazed mass murderers. I want to be very clear about this, and i do not want you to be confused about what i am saying:
You are a shill and a simpleton, and you may not play with my blocks, because i do not want to have to wash off the stupid that will inevitably get all over them from your copious amounts of naivety.
...stupid duck.
sniff
Democracy isn't perfect, but neither are people when you get down to it, I mean, I used to be annoyed with how rubbish a lot of stuff is, but the more I pay attention to how people actually are, the more cheerfully impressed I am that anything works at all.
A typical example: in 1998, Chosun Ilbo led a witch hunt against a liberal historian (Choi Jangjip) based on one of his history paper contained the phrase "...thus Kim Il-Sung made the historic decision of invading South Korea." Chosun Ilbo's rationale: only good things can be called "historic". Choi just described Kim's invasion as a historic decision. Clearly he thinks North Korea was right in starting the Korean War: he's a commie!
Apparently the Korean wikipedia has a whole article on the shitness of Chosun Ilbo: http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%A1%B0%EC%84%A0%EC%9D%BC%EB%...
These "conservatives" also have been saying North Korea will fall any day since Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, so take their "instability warning" with a grain of salt. Somehow the NK government keeps defying everybody's hope that it would die (or change) someday.
The fear of North Korean support within South Korea from the left leaning group is well founded. Recently, a member of the national assembly was found to have been part of a group called RO (Revolutionary Organization, how original) and evidence of coordinated sabotage on sensitive infrasturcture in case a war breaks out with the North. RO was found to have been in contact with North Korean agents in the United States.
It's no wonder the 'red scare' is very real in Korea. The list of spies currently operating in South Korea is in the unknown figure but widely suspected to be hiding in plain sights (if a national assemblyman was actively promoting terrorism, imagine where else they could be).
Various professors and educational board in South Korea have been caught attempting to change the history of Korean War by putting North Korea in a favorable light.
The list goes on and on.
However, I would agree Chosun Ilbo is the most right wing out of all.
I think that there is even more chance of collapse in Korea because of the recent purge (Jang was China's go-to-guy, practical and a moderate), Kim Jong Un would be unbridled and trigger happy and that their revenue streams have taken a toll. All the more reasons to build
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/shocking-new-res...
I have NO DOUBT what so ever that there are thousands of spies in S Korea working for N Korea, because of money/ideology/stupidity.
Come on people, the ex national assembly now being tried as a spy REFUSED to sing the S Korean national anthem in national assembly hall, claiming S Korean govt wasn't legit or something of that line. Of course when he was finally exposed and under threat of prison, he sang the S Korean national anthem just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellion_plot_of_UPP_against_S...
In other words, there are a bunch of clueless South Koreans who sincerely believe that they are the pawn of North Koreans, the devil incarnate, the antithesis of freedom and all they are doing is to pave way for North Korean invasion. Or something like that.
* For some inexplicable reason, those "leftist" presidents thought it was very important for South Korea to have modernized military. The result was "Military Reform Plan 2020" (국방개혁 2020), drafted in 2005, which planned to purchase and/or develop billion dollars worth of modern weapons, including submarines, helicopters, aegis destroyers, and what not.
The conservative pro-American president Lee Myung Bak largely put a hold on this plan. Who need modern weapons when you have your "blood-ally" America who will always stand by you and think of you first? They even practically begged the Americans to keep wartime military command of the whole Korean military. (It's a little dirty secret of South Korea: when any war breaks out here, the US generals automatically assumes control of all our military power. What kind of "conservatives" advocate handing the whole military chain of command to another nation?)
By the way, about those "Revolutionary Organization" (yeah, they are a bunch of clueless pro-NK idiots), so far the court decided to reject many of the evidences brought by prosecutors, saying they don't constitute legal evidence. It was clear from the onset that the whole scandal was politically motivated at a very convenient timing (or, rather, a very inconvenient timing, as South Korea's NIS has been under heavy fire for having generated 22 million(!!) tweets during the last presidential election, to sway public opinion and disparage "leftist" candidate Moon. The finest display of patriotism from our "conservatives".)
But what's in it for China to pass them on to the South?
Also of course, general disclaimer: this may be misinformation by SK to help a perceived revolutionary tide.
Nah, I doubt even S Korean govt would welcome a reunified korea. The cost and turmoil will be enormous...
Alternatively, combining a modern, hi-tech, highly educated nation of 50 million with a nation of 25 million badly-educated, borderline-starving people, many of whom would never be able to adjust, would cripple the South Korean economy for two generations.
South Korea is an economic powerhouse now. Introducing an extra 50% population of which the vast majority are skilled only in subsistence-level farming with tools other nations abandoned a century ago will not be economically helpful. Maybe if South Korea was at the stage of development in which vast numbers of unskilled labourers underpinned the economy, it would be, but they aren't.
Firstly, that is a nonsensical figure. On what basis do you make a prediction that Korea would take two generations to recover from unification? It has been split up for only slightly longer than that and if you look to history, entire empires have come and gone in the timespan of two generations. Also, it just sounds like more of the same that was said by people about the reunification of Germany.
I deliberately echoed the post I was responding to, but increased it, to illustrate that the original statement was devoid of evidence; in essence, the point was to emphatically and obviously have no evidence of timescale in order to highlight the absurdity of the original post's timescale. You did get the point, though, so I suppose it worked.
Regardless of the posturing of both sides governments, Korea is one country with a grievous split artificially placed between the two by the warring strongmen placed in their positions by superpowers with limited or non-existent information about the native culture.
I would also like to point out something we tend to forget here. The losses on both sides (excluding UN/Americans) were immense. The climate, terrain, and technology coincided to create massive casualties and widespread suffering. After a shaky armistice, the US just kind of left, but the war never ceased. We as typical Americans feel as if bygones should be bygones (we tend to be best friends with the countries we fight... afterwords, of course), but we oftentimes fail to take into account the massive list of dead.
Anecdote: i was hanging out with a Vietnamese friend from high school and we were (unaccountably) watching Rambo 7 or something (whichever one is the newest/most embarrassing) and we ere both growing increasingly uncomfortable. I kept making comments about cinematography and acting, whilst my buddy just grew more and more aghast. Finally we turned it off. I went on at great length about all the technical reasons i thought the film was poor. Finally, my friend pointed out the amount of Filipino extras that were slaughtered by that 'roided asshole with the wrecked face. And that was it. That was "all" that bothered him. I never really realized before that moment just how callus American storytelling is to the lives of Asians and their struggles. "We" literally killed so many Koreans and Asians in certain battles that left stacks of dead higher than a man stands. Untold numbers were left to die from maneuvers alone.
I do not say this to inspire guilt or launch a recriminatory flame war, but i think it is important that we all consider why the North is so damned sullen and obnoxious. The ear of blaming everything on "communism" needs to end.
Sure, as long as it's Not in your backyard...
>Korean Government Turns Its Back on Abandoned Babies
>Korean Woman Kills Stepdaughter By Force Feeding Her Salt
>Man Forces Three Runaway Middle School Girls into Prostitution
Wtf humans? Not that it compares to the atrocities in North Korea.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ko&tl=en&prev...
Often South Korean newspapers are the first to get news about North Korea as South Korean intelligence groups have good source of HUMINT gathered from North Korean defectors and officials willing to give up state secrets in exchange for safety and money.
There were notable cases of high ranking North Korean officials defecting to the South, for example Mr. Hwang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Jang-yop) and even Kim Jong-Il's relatives like Mr. Yi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_Han-yong) who was gunned down in an elevator while living in South Korea by North Korean agents.
You'd think they would maybe feed their people with the profits.
If they get that nuclear bomb in portable form, there is going to be hell with that child at the helm.
Can you supply a source for that claim? I've only read into the the Kim family a bit, but my impression was that most of the family members were educated in other socialist countries or somewhere neutral/friendly like Switzerland.
Even in their best case scenario, hundreds of nukes on ICBMs, the most they could count on would be a 'mutually ensured destruction' draw.
The only "winning" scenario they have is staying all bark, no bite. Maintaining the status-quo is the best they can do, which is why they've been doing it for decades.