Opinion - The Korea Times

Shooting it out in America

By Donald Kirk   WICKENBURG, Ariz. ― Statues, plaques and memorials remind visitors of the violence that once prevailed in this pleasant town of about 6,000 people 65 miles northwest of Phoenix. Here was the Wild West, where gun-toting cowboys fought with the original inhabitants of the land, the American Indians, or Native Americans who had arrived millennia before them. Here too, miners for gold and copper struck it rich in a desert of vast flatlands and rocky outcroppings. Opposite my hotel is a freshly painted wooden structure with balconies and a front porch that I’m told historically was a brothel, now more or less a tourist attraction.You understand, talking to people here, why the prevailing view is that everyone is entitled to carry a gun for both self-defense and hunting. Driving down a nearby road, I saw a deer scampering out of my way and barely missed a large jackrabbit hopping ahead of me. The real danger, to a lot of people here, comes from all those outsiders, illegal immigrants from south of the border or newcomers from the Middle East. As for the Nat

Jun 16, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

North Korea's unreality game

By Donald KirkNorth Korea, that is the people who run the place, likes nothing better than endorsements from foreign visitors. The list of foreigners paying obeisance to the Kim regime, Kim Jong-un and his father and grandfather before him, is quite long.The operator of a website in Los Angeles that’s known for its anti-U.S., pro-NK line has visited Pyongyang more than 60 times. He’s never been known to say a bad word about the North Korean regime or a good word about the United States, where he’s lived for decades.A history professor from the University of Georgia has also been there more than 60 times. He specializes in rationalizations and justifications for whatever the regime does.Two winners of the Nobel Peace Prize emerged spewing nothing but praise after visiting North Korea as part of the Women Walk for Peace last year. Neither they nor others on the trek, including the famed feminist Gloria Steinem, had an unkind word to say about the North.A former member of the European Parliament from Britain is a regular visitor, one of a cast of ex-diplomats, official

Jun 9, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Agreeing to disagree on NK

By Donald Kirk JEJU ― Ask an expert analyst how to deal with North Korea, and the responses range from getting tough to massaging gently. Nobody has the real answer ― though some people like to talk with absolute certainty ― and there’s no proof that anything’s going to work.The differences were sharply etched during last week’s Jeju Peace Forum at which former Korean foreign ministers sparred on the issue and soothsayers from the U.S., China and elsewhere exchanged quite different views. Nobody seemed to disagree more than Song Min-soon, foreign minister under the late President Roh Moo-hyun, and Yu-Myung-hwan, foreign minister during the first half of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency.Listening to Song talking about dealing with the North, you might get the impression, if only we just met, that all would be okay. His favorite word was “engage” ― engage in dialog, “engage, change and manage crisis.”Toward that end Song came up with “the inside-out” theory of change in the North. By “engaging” we could expose

Jun 2, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Sense and nonsense with NK

By Donald Kirk Donald Trump may be running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential sweepstakes if the polls are at all credible, but there’s one constituency in which he appears to be well ahead. That’s within the ruling circles in Pyongyang.He’s winning popularity there for two reasons. The first is that he has said, sure, he’d be glad to talk with Kim Jong-un, and the second is that he has said U.S. troops are no longer needed in South Korea and Japan. Isn’t that more or less what Pyongyang wants to hear?Don’t be fooled by the casual remark of a certain North Korean ambassador, back from the Workers’ Party Congress in Pyongyang, that he doubts the newly “elected” party chairman wants to meet the Trumpster. The ambassador carefully qualified the remark by saying he did not have first-hand knowledge but was only speculating that Trump was talking for political effect in the American presidential campaigns.While the media was reporting that comment as if it were a formal rejection of a request by Trump, a p

May 26, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Remembering Gwangju in song

By Donald Kirk          GWANGJU ― The ghosts of the uprising of May 18, 1980, hover over this old but new city in a restive spirit that shows the disunity, the factional splits and the regional hatreds that persist in undermining the ability of South Korea to stand effectively against challenges from North Korea.In fact, North Korea has to be the main beneficiary of the debates about a song that Korean conservatives see as a reflection of the North’s influence over the 36th anniversary this week of the uprising in which at least 165 people were killed and 75 went missing. The song, “March for the Beloved,” would appear to be honoring the victims, but right-wingers say “the beloved” is really the late “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung of North Korea. The proof, they say, is that the song was used in a North Korean film 25 years ago about the uprising.Some conservatives still say that North Korea was behind the revolt that challenged the government for about ten days as students took over the city from their headquarters

May 19, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Challenging China on stage

By Donald Kirk We keep hearing about all the influence the Chinese have over North Korea. If only they’d exert their power, maybe cut off or slow down the flow of oil that’s the lifeblood of the country, then the North Koreans would start talking seriously about giving up their nukes. At least that’s the theory. Now what about China’s real influence over South Korean policy? We don’t hear too much from South Korea about China’s claim to the entire South China Sea or the construction of air strips on islands held by China in the Spratlys. And we certainly don’t hear a thing about the pressure the Chinese keep exerting on Japan to give up the Senkakus, aka Diaoyu, in the East China Sea. All that’s on the broad level of international relations among powers jostling against one another as they assert their sway in the western Pacific. Now how about getting down to the micro level? What kind of influence does China have over the South Korean government, over freedom of thought in South Korea and over the right of free expressi

May 12, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

North Korea's deepening isolation

By Donald KirkKim Jong-un celebrates his “coronation”in Pyongyang today while forgetting about one unpleasant reality that deepens North Korea’s isolation in an already hostile world. He presides over North Korea`s biggest-ever party, the Seventh Workers` Party Congress, while Iran, his longtime partner in nuclear crime, vastly improves its ties with South Korea ― so much so that we have to believe Iran won’t be cooperating quite so much with North Korea as it has been for years on nukes and missiles.While South Koreans, and everyone else, worry about North Korea`s nuclear and missile tests, President Park Geun-hye has returned from Iran with a phalanx of ministers, chaebol chieftains and other businesspeople.　They`ve spent much of the week in Tehran striking deals that should definitely convince Iran`s top leaders that further collaboration with their North Korean friends is really not a good idea.That figures considering Iran’s potential as both a growing market for South Korean exports and a major source of the oil needed to fuel the South`s massive i

May 5, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Focusing on North Korea

By Donald Kirk Russian documentary filmmaker Vitaly Mansky has managed to bamboozle his North Korean hosts in a confidence game that’s one of the greater journalistic coups ever scored against the regime.Mansky, having given the North Koreans the clear impression that he wanted to collaborate fully with them, totally deceived them in his portrayal of a little girl as she was groomed for her role in minutely scripted rehearsals for the anniversary two years ago of the late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il’s birth. Far from churning out propaganda similar to a British team’s production in 2004 of the documentary “A State of Mind” on a pair of girl gymnasts, Mansky’s “Under the Sun” focuses on an eight-year-old as she’s ordered around by her handlers.So doing, he presents images that are shocking and amusing, wrenching and sardonic, in a 146-minute record of the girl, Zin Mi, mimicking the lines fed her over a family dinner, at a rehearsal for a dance, at her induction into the “Young Pioneers,” at a speech that

Apr 28, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

By 'invitation' only

By Donald KirkNorth Koreans some years ago had an unusual way of acquiring professional expertise when it came to teaching people foreign languages. Rather than advertise for teachers, they kidnapped native speakers. Most of them were Japanese, but they also captured likely candidates from Europe and the Middle East.Robert Boynton, a professor of magazine journalism, more or less explains what the North Koreans were doing in his book, “The Invitation-Only Zone: The Extraordinary Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project,” but important questions go unanswered. Absolutely the most compelling is how many more kidnap victims remain in North Korea. Most Japanese are convinced the North Koreans are holding hundreds whom teams of agents for the regime have grabbed off beaches, picked up in parks or inveigled into meetings under false pretenses.Why would a country resort to kidnapping? That’s one of the many mysteries about North Korea, about the isolation and delusions of leaders who got the idea the best way to find the talent they needed was to drag people from wha

Apr 21, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Advice from deceased leaders

By Donald KirkCredit someone in North Korea with a sense of historical irony. Who would have thought anyone up there would have dreamed of writing an imaginary letter from Abraham Lincoln to President Obama berating him for endorsing harsh UN sanctions and failing to halt the U.S. nuclear weapons program?We’re so used to seeing North Korean propaganda heaping terrible insults on Obama (a “monkey”) and President Park Geun-hye (a “witch” and worse) that this kind of satire comes almost as a relief. Nobody is going to get too mad at the North Korean propaganda machine for resorting to such a device after some of the terrible stuff we’ve heard lately. “Honest Abe,” in the letter to Obama, said not a word about North Korea wreaking vengeance on the U.S. in the form of nuclear attacks on Washington and New York. Would it be too optimistic to infer that North Korea is softening its line?In fact, the letter, written in Korean for a North Korean audience in the magazine “North Korea Today,” also reveals a couple of other surprises. F

Apr 14, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Read more

Shooting it out in America

North Korea's unreality game

Agreeing to disagree on NK

Sense and nonsense with NK

Remembering Gwangju in song

Challenging China on stage

North Korea's deepening isolation

Focusing on North Korea

By 'invitation' only

Advice from deceased leaders

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