Monday, May 22, 2006
"1st North Korean Defectors Arrive in L.A."
Thank God!
LA Times
...Rice is a luxury in North Korea...eaten only on one's birthday and New Year's.
--
In Norh Korea, women can't even ride bicycles and must wear skirts. The refugees laughed...recalling how girls wore pants under their skirts, hiking up the pant legs so they wouldn't show as they walked by police.
***Other issues affecting women in NK:
-Trafficking between NK and China - Refugees International
-Women citizens of North and South Korea meet in March 2006 to discuss reunification
-forced abortions for NK prisoners - NY Times
-Commentary on shopping in SKorea from a NK defector - Radio Free Asia
***note the above child's depiction of cannibalism in North Korea from a TimesAsia article
...Hypocrisy? Wide gulf between classes in a supposedly Marxist country - Voice of America
***video "Children of the Secret State"
LA Times (cont)
Guardian 2004 article about NK's gulag at Haengyong (near Chinese border):
**the DPRK
**Lodestar, the newsletter of the Korean Friendship Association
NPR interview with the President of the KFA. Aw, how cute. Americans who empathize with the poor, misunderstood regime!
Stupid girl at right, soaking up the propaganda posters. Although I suppose I would have to go have a look too, if I lived near the sorry excuse for an art gallery that agreed to host such a function.
Video entitled "F**kin' USA." Produced by North Koreans. I don't understand the statement: "If the US is so great, why can't we say what we want?" I think it means "...what we want [about our hatred of the US without international backlash]" As if NK's system is only failing b/c of the Bush administration. or as if the US's threats are the prime cause of their suffering, or the reason they can't say what they want without retribution.
BBC article: Kim Jong-il's kidnapping of a South Korean director and his wife for forced propaganda production.
An anonymous BBC collection of travel pictures. The photographer cutsey-fies the fact that the ice skating kids made their own skates for lack of money, but does not mention that these children appear to be healthy, even chubby, so they are better off than a large portion of their peers. Photo person also downplays the oppression that brings the orderly appearance and communitarian feel that they praise.
One might gather from the last picture of a captured US ship (1968) and the caption that the United States is more at fault for the economic situation of North Korea than are the instrinsic evils of socialism/collectivism and the Leader piece of poo's obsession with himself.
A KoreaTimes article by Tim Judah, who travelled to NK recently and did not sidestep the fact that the children he visited seemed at least four years younger than the reality. He seems to be much more interested in improving the harsh reality faced daily by the North Korean people than in the glorification of a system that could produce order (via repression) or in criticizing the US without once mentioning the DPRK's policies.
LA Times
Chan Mi Shin, 20, spoke of foraging for grasses, the only food her family could find, to make broth and of being so hungry during the famine that killed millions that she started hallucinating that an accordion's keys were cookies and candies.--
Speaking through an interpreter, she and the three other women — Na Omi, Young Nah "Deborah" Choi and Ha Nah — explained how each had been sold as brides or prostitutes to already married Chinese men who paid the equivalent of a few hundred dollars for them. Shin was sold into marriage three times within a year of turning 16.
Choi, 24, who stands about 5 feet 7, is taller than the others, perhaps because her father, a Communist Party official, had a higher standard of living than most North Koreans. But after Choi's father was sent to prison for five years, the family was ostracized and Choi was banished from school.
...Rice is a luxury in North Korea...eaten only on one's birthday and New Year's.
--
In Norh Korea, women can't even ride bicycles and must wear skirts. The refugees laughed...recalling how girls wore pants under their skirts, hiking up the pant legs so they wouldn't show as they walked by police.
***Other issues affecting women in NK:
-Trafficking between NK and China - Refugees International
-Women citizens of North and South Korea meet in March 2006 to discuss reunification
-forced abortions for NK prisoners - NY Times
-Commentary on shopping in SKorea from a NK defector - Radio Free Asia
***note the above child's depiction of cannibalism in North Korea from a TimesAsia article
...Hypocrisy? Wide gulf between classes in a supposedly Marxist country - Voice of America
***video "Children of the Secret State"
LA Times (cont)
The size of the houses where [the freed North Korean citizen-prisoners] stayed in a suburb of Washington, D.C. — a neighborhood much like Los Angeles' Hancock Park — astonished them too, a huge contrast to the single rooms of most North Korean families. The homes are "like a palace or a castle," said his sister, Chan Mi.Right on! If only more Americans saw this with his fresh eyes that conspicuous consumption is not a smart way to revel in the access to freedom, we could be helping the third world. Boisterous consumption culture will only serve to associate capitalism with greed instead of with ultimate free choice and the precious ability to help fellow men acquire the freedom, prosperity, and basics human rights that they cannot now acquire for themselves.
Refugee Johan Shin (who is unrelated to the other Shins) described it differently.
"Wasteful," he said.
Guardian 2004 article about NK's gulag at Haengyong (near Chinese border):
...harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.Official websites of:
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes.
--
'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' [the former chief of management at Camp 22] said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'
--
His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'
**the DPRK
**Lodestar, the newsletter of the Korean Friendship Association
NPR interview with the President of the KFA. Aw, how cute. Americans who empathize with the poor, misunderstood regime!
Stupid girl at right, soaking up the propaganda posters. Although I suppose I would have to go have a look too, if I lived near the sorry excuse for an art gallery that agreed to host such a function.
Video entitled "F**kin' USA." Produced by North Koreans. I don't understand the statement: "If the US is so great, why can't we say what we want?" I think it means "...what we want [about our hatred of the US without international backlash]" As if NK's system is only failing b/c of the Bush administration. or as if the US's threats are the prime cause of their suffering, or the reason they can't say what they want without retribution.
BBC article: Kim Jong-il's kidnapping of a South Korean director and his wife for forced propaganda production.
An anonymous BBC collection of travel pictures. The photographer cutsey-fies the fact that the ice skating kids made their own skates for lack of money, but does not mention that these children appear to be healthy, even chubby, so they are better off than a large portion of their peers. Photo person also downplays the oppression that brings the orderly appearance and communitarian feel that they praise.One might gather from the last picture of a captured US ship (1968) and the caption that the United States is more at fault for the economic situation of North Korea than are the instrinsic evils of socialism/collectivism and the Leader piece of poo's obsession with himself.
A KoreaTimes article by Tim Judah, who travelled to NK recently and did not sidestep the fact that the children he visited seemed at least four years younger than the reality. He seems to be much more interested in improving the harsh reality faced daily by the North Korean people than in the glorification of a system that could produce order (via repression) or in criticizing the US without once mentioning the DPRK's policies.
