- New Zealand is an odd place to find a North Korean prison. (HT to reader)
- MUST READ: Over at Sino-NK, Professor Andrei Lankov has penned a wonderful post on why the history of North Korea’s founding busts a lot of the myths held by both left and right. To sum up, regardless of what the South Korean left would life to believe, the Soviets micromanaged affairs in the North on a scale that far exceeded American control in the South, and that the many reforms undertaken in the North were, in fact, undertaken by the Soviets, not the Koreans themselves. Regardless of what the right would like to believe, however, the regime the Soviets put in place in the North had a great deal of popular support.
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The writer completely exaggerates how hard is to get to that “prison”. Here is the hill. http://goo.gl/maps/0c9l3
The Wikipedia entry on the film has a few more photos.
That Lankov piece is excellent – guy knows how to research and write. Good stuff.
Lankov’s piece is good.
It ought to be added, though, that it is not just South Korean moon-bats who want to overlook the extent of Soviet influence in the North and the degree to which that influence and the following continuation by the DPRK of soviet methods of governance constitute the – attention Liz! – sort of Foucauldian “governmentality” that Foucault himself and his epigone all consider such a a general and singularly sinister feature of modernity. The sentimental left of the international academic mainstream also tend to ignore this aspect of the NORK polity while bemoaning and belaboring its impact in the ROK. See, e.g, Henry Em’s otherwise interesting and valuable review of Takashi Fujitani’s “Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II” and Jan Uchida’s “Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945″:
http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/e-journal/articles/em.pdf
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