Nation-Building

Tim Johnson has a great detailed photo of the fabled Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. Probably the best shot I've seen yet, better than the one on the Wikipedia page for certain.

Watch this astounding video of the Arirang Mass Games in North Korea, which Tim Johnson calls " magnificent and chilling at the same time ." It's a visual example of the "mass mind" atmosphere within the DPRK. I am reminded of the fictional world of Camazotz, from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time . The Jong Il dynasty is the disembodied brain IT, which enthralls the population into a synchronized hive, existing only for the purpose of being slaves, but slavery for its own sake (unlike the more modern, purpose-driven slavery).

Tim Johnson, who writes for the China Rises blog at McClatchy, is blogging while on a visit to North Korea . It promises to be a surreal experience, and valuable as a peek behind the concrete curtain. For example, the airline infrastructure is something out of a 50's novel: On landing in Pyongyang, I was amazed at the vehicle that brought the stairs to the plane. You can see it in the photo. Obviously, it was some contraption made in the Soviet era as well, and passed on to the fraternal North Koreans. It looks like a stretch El Camino mixed with some sort of old Cadillac. Anyway, it was those touches that made me think I had entered into some other-worldly theme park that ought to have a huge admission price. He also notes that DPRK is environmentally pristine, which is unsurprising given that North Korea is utterly dark from space . Johnson wonders if maybe DPRK will become the "Bhutan of East Asia." This strikes me as wildly optimistic.

my feeling is that the nuke tested by NK was a fake, or at best a dud. Thats not wishful thinking; I am getting it from here and here . Keep in mind that NK's entire strategy has been to rattle the cage and scream. Then the various powers that be give it a bribe to shut up for a time. They need to continually up the ante to maintain this strategy - so the suggestion that they have a weapon is more important and valuable to them than the actual weapon (sort of teh inverse of the Israeli position of actually being in possession but never acknowledging it officially). NK is a pile of independent mini fiefdoms run by local power apparatchiks. As James Fallows writes in a must-read piece , NK is likely following the standard Seven Stages of Collapse: Phase One: resource depletion; Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion; Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, a...

A PROGRAMME of covert action against nuclear and missile traffic to North Korea and Iran is to be intensified after last week’s missile tests by the North Korean regime. Intelligence agencies, navies and air forces from at least 13 nations are quietly co-operating in a “secret war” against Pyongyang and Tehran. more excerpts on the flip.   It has so far involved interceptions of North Korean ships at sea, US agents prowling the waterfronts in Taiwan, multinational naval and air surveillance missions out of Singapore, investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of Macau and a fleet of planes and ships eavesdropping on the “hermit kingdom” in the waters north of Japan. [...] “Diplomacy alone has not worked, military action is not on the table and so you’ll see a persistent increase in this kind of pressure,” said a senior western official. In a telling example of the programme’s success, two Bush administration officials indicated last year th...

From Reuters , TOKYO (Reuters) - A North Korean missile launched on Wednesday was aimed at an area of the ocean close to Hawaii, a Japanese newspaper reported on Friday. Experts estimated the Taepodong-2 ballistic missile to have a range of up to 6,000 km, putting Alaska within its reach. Wednesday's launch apparently failed shortly after take-off and the missile landed in the sea between the Korean peninsula and Japan, a few hundred kilometres from the launch pad. But data from U.S. and Japanese Aegis radar-equipped destroyers and surveillance aircraft on the missile's angle of take-off and altitude indicated that it was heading for waters near Hawaii, the Sankei Shimbun reported, citing multiple sources in the United States and Japan. More information will be posted as it becomes available, but at least at this early stage it appears that the technological failure of the Taepo Dong-2 missile may have averted war. A successful attempt by North Korea to fire a missile at Hawaii...

If there is a central ideology animating the illusion of a functional society that is North Korea, it is juche (??). Loosely translated as self-reliance, juche comprises the following principles: The people must have independence (Chajusong) in thought and politics, economic self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in defense. Policy must reflect the will and aspirations of the masses and employ them fully in revolution and construction. Methods of revolution and construction must be suitable to the situation of the country. The most important work of revolution and construction is molding people ideologically as communists and mobilizing them to constructive action. Any objective assessment of North Korean society will quickly conclude that on each of these principles, the actual implementation of juche in North Korea is as hollow and meaningless as the concrete shell of the Ryugyong Hotel . What better symbol of a failed regime? What is particularly tragic however is how the facade of ju...

From Reuters , WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea's test-firing of missiles was an act of a "paper tiger" that has miscalculated the world's response and may result in sanctions, the senior Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on Wednesday. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware said he was more concerned about Pyongyang's taking conventional provocative acts that could escalate tensions in north Asia, than about it's ability to hit U.S. territory with a missile. Asked on CBS' "The Early Show" whether Washington should have destroyed the missiles before launch, Biden said, "I would rather have seen it do exactly what it did, demonstrate to the whole world that it is in fact a paper tiger. "It does not have the capacity to do any short-term damage to the United States of America or Japan," said Biden, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2008. Before I get too far into the actual North Korea business, it...