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We’re all ashamed to admit it, but most of us occasionally “Google” ourselves to see what comes up. A New Zealand fantasy author comes up for me. A new website created by Frank Feinstein lets you do the same with North Korean official propaganda. KCNA Watch is a website that indexes every KCNA (Korea Central News Agency) article [...]
Over the past few months, North Korean state media has produced increasingly provocative anti-US propaganda videos with images including New York in flames, Jihadists burning flags, and now rockets blowing up the US Capitol building. In the video above, just before the 3:00 mark, rocket sights are trained on the White House followed by images of missiles [...]
It’s no fun being a press secretary. Just ask White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell. You have to put up with incessant questioning about Dennis Rodman. Then there’s that bit about Pirate Bay, a torrent based file sharing website that often runs afoul of international copyright laws. You’ve probably never heard [...]
Our earlier post on the North Korean Superbowl rocket attack ad proved so popular that we decided to once again consult renowned media analyst Dr. Daniel Marcus (he’s a “doctor” kind of like Jerry Buss was a “doctor”) for his views on Uriminzokkiri’s latest offering. As Dr. Marcus observes, “the images come from a variety [...]
Luke Herman at NKNews.org published an incredible story earlier this year highlighting several flash style video games produced by North Korea’s Uriminzokkiri web site. Check out his story for greater detail, but the general idea is that North Korea has produced a number of highly violent and often racist video games targeting the nation’s many enemies [...]
Sometimes propaganda and art blend together in a way that leaves the viewer unable to separate the two forces or discern which is which. Such is the case with the annual Arirang Games in North Korea, the epic gymnastics and synchronized art display that involves as many as 100,000 active participants. This year’s Arirang Games [...]
In some interviews after the missile test last month, I mentioned in passing that North Korea had featured its missiles on postage stamps. The reporters were invariably surprised. Our man in Seoul, Jaesung Ryu, has rounded up images of several of these stamps as shown below. 1998 stamp Apart from the sheer curiousity aspect, the [...]
Thanks to Adam Cathcart, we were alerted to a story in Rodong Shinmun about new posters being unveiled in North Korea. The posters encourage the army and people to implement the historic tasks set forth in Marshal Kim Jong Un’s New Year’s Speech. As we predicted, the satellite launch is being used as the overarching [...]
North Korea is always treated as sui generis, and there are good reasons for doing so; it has proved an outlier even among the surviving Communist regimes. But we are always interested in comparative perspectives that might shed light on what is and is not unique. Anne Applebaum has written a new history of early [...]
We have been struck by a handful of recent stories that suggest the regime’s trepidation about the country’s growing porousness to outside information. Earlier in the month, Kim Jong Un visited the Ministry of State Security. According to the KCNA, he “underscored the need to intensify the struggle to decisively foil the ideological and cultural [...]
