Archive for the 'History' Category

Young Southerner Views on North Korea and Reunification

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

A reader in Glasgow, Scotland sends in the following questions:

What do you think the feeling is of the younger generation within South Korea to North Korea?
What do you think the general feeling amongst younger South Koreans towards reunification?

The short answer is that young South Koreans appear to regard the North Korean regime as […]

Kim Il-sung’s 96th Birthday

Monday, April 14th, 2008

What would have been Kim Il-sung’s (김일성) 96th birthday, had he not died on 8 July 1994, is today (in Korea), 15 April. The “Great Leader” was born in Mangyondae in what is now North Korea, on the day the Titanic sank.

Footage of Kim Il-sung

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Jack of DPRK Forum points to some footage of Kim Il-sung, including some vintage stuff from 1956. Note that what would be Kim Il-sung’s 96th birthday is coming up on 15 April (same day the Titanic sank).

Kim Jong-il Employing Lessons from the Sino-Soviet Dispute

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Though the mechanics are obviously different than the Sino-Soviet Dispute, the outcome is similar enough to be compared; North Korea is in the middle of the re-emerging Chinese great power and the world’s only superpower (for a detailed explanation this, see Suh Dae-sook’s book). Bush’s change from a hard-line to La-La Land policy […]

Namdaemun Suffers Arson

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Namdaemun (the Southern Great Gate), which was perhaps the most renowned historical landmark in Seoul, suffered arson.
A little bit about the perpetrator:
Chae Jong-gi, a former fortuneteller who was angry about the amount of compensation the government had paid him for the loss of his house to a development project, showed up at Namdaemun.
He wore […]

Remember the USS Pueblo, 23 January 1968

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

From the Navy Historical Center:
On 23 January 1968, while off Wonsan, North Korea, Pueblo was attacked by local forces and seized. One crewmember was killed in the assault and the other eighty-two men on board were taken prisoner. The North Koreans contended that the ship had violated their territorial waters, a claim vigorously denied […]

Resource: North Korea International Documentation Project

Friday, January 18th, 2008

I was unaware of the North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) until James Person, NKIDP Program Associate, brought it to my attention:
The North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) serves as an informational clearinghouse on North Korea for both the scholarly and policymaking communities by widely disseminating newly declassified documents on the DPRK from its […]

Jenkins Book Update: Available in English, March 2008

Friday, January 18th, 2008

The book by Charles Jenkins detailing his time as a U.S. defector in North Korea, “Kokuhaku” (To Tell the Truth, in Japanese), will be released in English, 3 March 2008 under the title, “The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea.” (h/t Sam) The 238 page book is going for […]

Must Read: Winning the Information War inside North Korea

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

The latest edition of the Military Review, a publication of the US Army’s Combined Arms Center located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has an excellent paper on, “Finding America’s Role in a Collapsed North Korean State.” (PDF) An excerpt:
American military and political thinkers today are focused on creating policies to govern stability operations, but this […]

Another Kind of Student Radical

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

About two years ago, I wrote about South Korean President-elect Lee Myung-Bak’s “student radical” days and how he came to get his chaebol job despite his prison record, on the now defunct blog The Korea Liberator (archived here).
This episode is fairly well-known in South Korea, but I reproduce much of the original post below […]