Two convicts tied to a post for public execution (Convicts confirmed as 1.17 Factory laborers Choi Jae-gon and Park Myong-kil. Convicted for assisting in a defection)/The Daily NK)
UPDATE II: Adamu has more stuff on the video here.
UPDATE: Adamu over at Mutant Frog has put his Japanese language skills to good use and found a LINK TO THE VIDEO.
Rumors that video footage of a public execution in North Korea made it out of the country have proved true. Japan NTV ran a 90 minute video of two sets of executions that took place in the Sino-Korean border town of Hoeryong early this month. The Daily NK (Korean) has a number of screen captures from the video.
I have yet to find a link to the actual footage. Anyone who can link to the video in my comments section will become my new best friend.
The Chosun Ilbo also ran a background piece on public executions in North Korea, for those of you interested in the history of the practice.
On a related note, the NYT’s James Brookes looked at how electronics are breaking down North Korea’s isolation. Good piece, and worth a read. A snippet:
Sphere: Related ContentHalfway through a video from North Korea, the camera pans on a propaganda portrait of Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, magnificent in his general’s dress uniform with gold epaulets. Scribbled in black ink across his smooth face is a demand for “freedom and democracy.”
If genuine, the graffiti speaks of political opponents willing to risk execution to get their message out. If staged, the video means that a North Korean hustler was willing to deface a picture of the “Dear Leader” to earn a quick profit by selling it to a South Korean human rights group.
Either way, the 35-minute video is the latest evidence that new ways of thinking are stealing into North Korea, perhaps corroding the steely controls on ideology and information that have kept the Kim family in power for almost 60 years.
29 Comments
One day 20 years from now, I expect to read in some history books about CIA funding for projects to smuggle in significant quantities of media material into North Korea. “Significant quantities” doesn’t have to be much in a nation so systematic in trying to keep out info on the world for so many decades. I’ve mentioned before here and on my blog a PBS special on the fall of communism in Moscow and how a businessman who said he was a true believer came back from London when business activity began to open up in the 1980s, and he showed his family video of life in the UK. The PBS show played some of that video, and it was simply him walking through the aisles video taping fresh vegtables and 12 different kinds of potatochips and such. He said his mother started crying and couldn’t stop, because they understood how they had been lied to. Another factor the guy didn’t mention is that they understood they had also suffered while believing the lie.
North Korea has been even better with its fiction. If I were head of the CIA East Asian section, I’d put a lot of money into handheld DVD players, disc copiers, and a shit load of discs. I’d funnel them into NK in as many different ways as I could imagine.
It is the best hope I can think of for the NK people even though it could come with a heavy price tag if NK lashes out as it falls…….But it will take a recognition by the North Koreans that faces the fact nobody else is going to help them solve the root of their problem. They’d rather avoid the potential costs to them and watch them suffer.
I think the video would be on this site if and when it’s made available online. I tried a simple search for ??? but the only video that came up was a clip of Foreign Minsiter Ban Ki Mun bitching about Tokto.
Dear usinkorea,
It’s correct that if North Korean collapse should be hastened, the best way to do so is through promoting information exchanges. But I am not sure if the CIA is doing this, at least on significant scale, even if it is so much better than all these “diplomatic pressures” which go nowhere.
I think that one of the reasons why North Korean regime has survived is that there is some tacit understanding that its collapse is not desirable. In the US the picture is a bit more complicated, but none of other countries involved really wants a democratic revolution develop in Pyongyang. Too much trouble, you know. Therefore, North Korea - unlike the former USSR - was never subjected to a concerted propaganda campaign. And such campaigns make wonders. Right now I am writing a “mini-series” of articles (in Korean) for Daily NK where I try to analyze what worked and what did not in the Soviet case. But I do not expect that this Cold War experience of highly successful propaganda operation will be ever applied to North Korea. Can you imagine a South Korean government (including a GNP government) which will spend money and resources on bringing the NK collapse closer? I cannot. And CIA alone, with all due respect, will be unable to operate through China on large scale.
But things are happening anyway. Just had another talk about the Internet access in NK. It’s available now (from autumn 2004) to foreign companies, and their Korean employees. People (highly privileged, of course) are surfing the Net now. Largely for porn, of course, but also for Chosun Ilbo articles (yes, Marmot, yes). And this is the third story I’ve heard about this in one month. And of course the deadly combination of the used VCRs and KBS dramas. Perhaps, they will do it without CIA? There is one good thing about Stalinism: it never lasts forever!
usinkorea - I hope you are right, but I would bet the CIA is not doing that because they are so incompetent and bureaucratic-minded. You see, that plan would require passion, initiative, and a willingness to take risk - even if the CIA had people with these crucial attributes (and they don’t), I think the US Congress has outlawed them. The CIA would much rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a riskless satellite to survey the North Korean countryside than the 1 or 2 million dollars it would take to buy the mobile telephones, DVD players, VCRs, and portable TVs that would make a huge difference.
I wonder what Bruce Cumings would say about this.
(my guess: draw moral equivalence to American South lynchings in defense of his beloved Mr. Kim)
Is it just me or do others also think this is great news? My sympathies for the two men who were executed, but the very fact that a defector was able to re-enter NK (according to the story) and make a video of what appears to be REAL NK execution, tells me that NK no longer has any kind of control over the northern border. In lieu of the James Brooke’s article in NYT, I’m beginning to think that instead of sending the NK disposable radios, we should consider sending them Emergency Power Supplies so that they can pop out the offending VHS tapes everytime NK security turns off electricity. Or sending in cellphone batteries. It doesn’t cost so much to operate a Korean video rental business in the US. I would think that it wouldn’t be too difficult for the CIA to operate a VHS shop that provides more than just “Immortal Lee Sun Shin.” Hell they can sell massive amounts of completely blank VHS tapes at steep discounts. Maybe just sending in used old VHS tapes that’s in all the Salvation Army basements might be help enough–suredly, this wouldn’t cost that much to do.
All Koreans are talking about today is how outragous it is that thouse bad bad evil japanese are stealing history. So killing some north koreans gets a collective YAWN from the kim on the street.
However, listening to the koreans and their logic about takeshima, provides some good laughs.
An Australian friend, Brendan Brown, visited NK last
August and wrote an article about it for the Korea
Times. A relevant paragraph related to the above topic
I include below, and while purely anecdotal, the fact
that official postage stamps of George W. Bush being
knifed are currently for sale there says a lot about
the regime’s endorsement of “extreme”
anti-Americanism, to say the least…
–Scott Bug
“A flight back to Pyongyang and to a stamp shop. The
stamps and many propaganda paintings, murals and
mosaics showed the pride of North Korea and
their worship of the two Kims. However it also makes a
lie of their repeated claim that the DPRK endeavours
peace and friendship with all the countries of
the world. Missiles hitting the White House, American
soldiers being crushed by North Korean soldiers and
one stamp of a North Korean soldier thrusting a
knife through the neck of George W. Bush don’t exactly
re-enforce their professed claim. They do make good
photos and souveniers though.”
Brendon Brown also wrote this article:
http://www2.gol.com/users/coyn....._korea.htm
The anecdote about the unwillingness to sell lollipop by the piece trully sheds insight on how things are run in North Korea.
http://www.mutantfrog.com/2005.....execution/
Here’s a link to the video. Meet me behind the mall tomorrow at 3 to begin Best Friend Duties. Be sure to bring a can of spray paint and some toilet paper.
One of you guys over in Korea ought to make some connections and set up a grey market in those stamps, maybe on Ebay. I bet you could do quite a business selling them as souvenirs, especially the ones that show Bush, and particularly if you got some of the US anti-Bush web sites to mention them as an item of interest, along with a link.
Even pro-Bushies might buy them as an item of interest. Does anyone have an established business arrangement to buy them from NorK through legal channels? Oughta look into posters too; could be quite a novelty market for them abroad in Europe as well, unless the NorK’s intend for them strictly to be only domestic-use.
Actually I have noticed that a lot of items dealing with Korea (North and South) are being sold in Europe and the United States and bought by Korean collectors here in Korea. Recently one of the newspapers published an article about flyers (sp? - not the pilots but paper notes) being sold in a Korean auction. Actually the same items had been sold to a Korean on E-bay. It seems highly likely that the Korean buyer turned around and resold it here in Korea. The map a couple of months ago that was sold for around 10,000 US dollars because it showed Tokdo as being Korean and was published in the late 1890s is an example - that same map could have been purchased a year ago for about 60 dollars and what is really interesting about it - it is not really a map but a suppliment from a magazine (illustrated newspaper). I think the potential market is buying on e-bay and turning around and selling on the Korean on-line markets.
Just a thought
“And CIA alone, with all due respect, will be unable to operate through China on large scale.”
I doubt this for two reasons. 1) the church groups and other humanitarian groups have been working in China perhaps not on a scale we might consider “huge” but given the vulnerability North Korea has created by being too good at controlling thought, I would say a clearly “significant” amount is already being done by these groups. (I would also bet a good chunk of money the CIA has already been giving these groups some money somehow. It would be incredibly stupid not to help these groups in some little way even if too big a way is geopolitically risky.
2) Contemporary technology has made it so much easier. We already get some video smuggled out by people with hidden camcorders. Smuggling in handheld DVD or VCD players and copiers can’t be too hard. The hardest part would be to get the human assests to smuggle the stuff in. We already know some of the North Koreans who made it out of NK are going back in with technological resources to document the reality. I’m sure there are some gung-ho South Korean activists familiar with working in the environment in Manchuria who would do it too. And again, the CIA doesn’t have to be open about making contacts with these people. They can set up front people who make the contact and provide the funding to distance the US government from “direct” contact.
Another problem would be getting enough North Koreans to risk their lives to spread the material by making copies and providing others with the means to make copies. Kind of like a chain letter effect. To be effective more quickly, the agents or human assests you send in would need to be good at knowing who is a local spy for the government like in all totalitarian regimes which have them everywhere. The infiltrator would also need to be good at picking people who have the desire and cunning to help spread the info.
I think it could be done without a whole heck of a lot of trouble. The activity is going to be noticed and people are going to get caught. I can picture Kim Jong Il standing in front of the masses waving a confiscated DVD player and propaganda disc smuggled in and saying it is a clear sign of the devious nature of the evil US.
And he would score some points amond some in the world —- but the pressure for spreading the truth of the outside world
So who’s got the Japanese transcript of the video?
Those inclined to believe that what’s going on in NoKo is simply reflective of a “different” culture that we’re not fit to judge, or that NoKo horrors are marginal to the experience of most North Koreans will find it hard to main such a stance once they delve into the details. That in itself is a big reason, I suspect, why many choose to skim the surface instead - worrying about nukes while ignoring the demonstrable and ongoing evil that has motivated their creation. This video removes one more excuse for not knowing.
Click on my name for some more footage from the video care of Japanese TV and a nice 2-channeler who is doing the video capture work.
Mutant Frog will be going into the details of the video and presenting a time-coded translation and analysis. Stay tuned!
Correction: NO NEW FOOTAGE on the 2nd part! The second part is highlights from the footage and analysis. Sorry for any confusion!
Professor Antov, “Marmot,” Mr. Robert Neff, and Those Others Who May be Interested in My Case:
Would ALL Of YOU please go to my Bogus Trial at Seoul District Court (Room #301) at Seocho-dong, Seoul, on 23 March where I will face the possibility of going to jail for up to seven years for, I Swear to God, an undercover job I did, gratis, for the N.I.S. and the African Congress?
This request seems, I know, like a crazy or plain old f*#$ up request. Please, trust me when i assert that this is not a lie or a joke. I can only offer my Word and God as my Witness.
I, of course, recognize that this is hardly the ideal sort of forum in which one should ask for help; but, I’m at a loss for assistance, and need as many intelligent Waegooks as possible ( especially those like Professor Antov and Mr. Neff who have a good deal of public recognition in the R.O.K.) to be, at least, present in my, potentially, politically-inspired case.
For details, please e-mail enquiries to: phunt65@hotmail.com
Hi everyone.
I read the comment by Paul H. regarding if someone making a market in NK stamps/posters etc. and if anyone has established connections to buy NK produced stuff.
There are lots of people selling stamps, but my specialty is NK produced documentary videos, movies, and books. All books and most videos are in English. I also deal in NK art posters, oil paintings etc (no art is currently listed for sale as I am working on doing writeups for the 80 additional NK videos that I need to list on my e-store first). In 2.5 years of selling I’ve established a raving fan base with lots of repeat customers!
Here is my website for all who may be interested:
http://stores.ebay.com/NORTH-KOREA-IMPORTS
Thanks,
Nicholas
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