I have long been a supporter of flooding North Korea with as much outside information as possible to challenge the propaganda the regime indoctrinates its people with. However, the number of defections though up this year are still too small to say the regime is crumbling:
A North Korean soldier defected to South Korea, Tuesday, by walking across the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) on the heavily fortified inter-Korean border. The defection occurred about two weeks after a North Korean resident crossed the maritime border in the Han River estuary on the west coast.
In recent years, North Korea’s elite, including high-level diplomats stationed abroad, have also defected to the South. The latest defector, Ri Il-gyu, fled from Cuba to South Korea in November of last year.
North Korea watchers and defectors residing in South Korea say these defections might indicate increasing economic hardship in the North and a growing desire for freedom among its residents, driven by access to information about the outside world. (…..)
Kim Seung-chul, president of North Korea Reform Radio who defected from the North in 1993, said President Yoon Suk Yeol’s policy of embracing defectors has stirred up complex feelings in the minds of North Koreans.
“South Korea celebrated its first North Korean Defectors’ Day on July 14, and President Yoon’s outreach to 26 million North Korean citizens in his speech is affecting the minds of North Koreans. The loudspeaker campaign and anti-Pyongyang leaflets have also been effective in bringing about change,” Kim said.
Socio-economic factors, such as economic hardship and political oppression, continue to drive North Koreans to flee their country. In the first half of the year, the number of North Korean defectors arriving in South Korea reached 105, a slight increase from 99 in the previous year.
You can read more at the link, but there has never been a coordinated and sustained effort to flood North Korea with outside information. This is probably the lowest cost way to pressure the Kim regime. Just their reactions to the propaganda balloon launches by the defector group Fighters for a Free North Korea demonstrates that what they are doing is having an impact within North Korea.
Can you imagine this person in a room trying to negotiate nuclear disarnament with North Korea?:
A nuclear policy expert appointed to the Department of Energy under the Biden administration in February 2024 previously co-authored an article entitled “queering nuclear weapons” which argued “queer theory” should be used to inform American nuclear policy.
Sneha Nair works as a special assistant at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency responsible for maintaining the safety and security of America’s extensive arsenal of nuclear weapons. (…..)
Nair co-authored a piece titled Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament which was published in June 2023 by the influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine which focuses on the threats to humanity from emerging technologies. (…..)
They said: “The queer lens prioritizes the rights and well-being of people over the abstract idea of national security, and it challenges the mainstream understanding of nuclear weapons—questioning whether they truly deter nuclear war, stabilize geopolitics, and reduce the likelihood of conventional war. (…….)
The authors spoke positively about nuclear disarmament writing: “Queer theory helps us not only see the bad of a world with nuclear weapons, but also imagine the good of a world without them.
“It envisions using the resources freed up by nuclear disarmament to build structures that tangibly increase people’s safety and well-being through health care, social housing, etc.”
Newsweek via a reader tip
You can read more at the link if you can stomach it. Basically Nair wants the U.S. to denuclearize to advance the left’s socialist utopia cause. I would like to know what Nair’s position is when after the U.S. denuclearizes and is threatened with nuclear annihaliation by North Korea prior to launching an attack on South Korea. Should the U.S. just let authoritarian regimes with nuclear weapons attack and take over any country they want in order to advance the left’s socialist utopia vision?
Ultimately alll Nair’s viewpoint would do is expand nuclear proliferation. In Asia countries like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan that are threatened by authoritarian regimes would do is develop their own nuclear deterrent if the U.S. got rid of its nuclear weapons. So instead of nuclear weapons tightly controlled by one nation the U.S., they would be spread among multiple nations increasing the odds of a miscalculation and their use.
I am sure Ms. Stephens feels like she is doing something positive, but in my opinion she is just enabling the Kim regime to receive tourism dollars that ultimately goes to funding their nuclear and missile programs that threatens regional peace:
When British traveler Zoe Stephens, 30, decided to tour North Korea for the first time in 2017, she didn’t think she would be doing it for a living.
“I went to North Korea as a tourist first, pretty much the same way as everyone else. I realized it’s nothing like what the media says,” she told The Korea Herald. She said “the real North Korea” took her by surprise and charmed her.
“So I decided that I wanted to start doing tours to show everyone what the media wasn’t showing — the human side to North Korea.”
Since then she has visited North Korea more than two dozen times, staying as long as a month at a time until the pandemic shut down the borders. She eventually began working as a tour guide for a Beijing-based company Koryo Tours, which mainly offers travel programs to North Korea.
You can read more at the link, but Ms. Stephens claims she has free access to go around the country and take pictures. However, I doubt they are taking her to the labor camps and firing squads. Keep that in mind every time someone tells you how great North Korea is to visit.
Another sign that Korea’s drug problem continues to spread:
Members of a college social club comprising hundreds of members from South Korea’s 13 colleges, including the nation’s most prestigious schools like Seoul National University and Korea University, administer drugs at an amusement park. (Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office)
A 30-something graduate student at KAIST, South Korea’s top science-specialized university, was recently arrested by the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office for distributing and using drugs within a social fraternity he created in 2021 which included members from 13 other elite universities.
Three other university students were also apprehended, and two others were indicted without physical detention for breaching the Narcotics Control Act. Eight other students who took drugs but were not suspected of other offenses were granted deferred prosecution on condition they participated in a rehabilitation program.
You can read more at the link.
You might as well have a policy platform that supports trying to find the Loch Ness Monster and the Sasquach if you believe at this point North Korean denuclearization is achieveable:
The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula would remain a U.S. policy objective should Vice President Kamala Harris win the White House race in November, a former Pentagon official said Tuesday, dispelling concerns about the exclusion of the goal in the Democratic Party’s new policy platform.
Colin Kahl, former undersecretary of defense for policy, made the remarks, saying that people appear to be “overreading” the platform. He is known to have participated in a process to write the platform expected to help set the tone for Harris’ policy stances.
During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday, party delegates officially adopted the platform that did not have any mention of the goal in contrast with the 2020 document that stated a pledge to advance the “longer-term goal of denuclearization.”
“Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula remains an objective of this (Biden) administration and, I would have to imagine, a Harris-Walz administration,” Kahl told a press briefing.
You can read more at the link.
The only thing surprising about this news is that it took prosecutors four-months to figure out this was a political hit job and charges should have never been sought in the first place:
A prosecution investigation team has decided to acquit first lady Kim Keon Hee of charges related to her acceptance of a Dior handbag from a Korean American pastor in 2022, legal officials said Wednesday.
The team from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office (SCDPO), which is in charge of the first lady’s case, has recently reported the decision to Lee Chang-soo, the head of the SCDPO, and Lee plans to report it to Prosecutor General Lee One-seok soon, the officials said.
You can read more at the link.
