BobHarris.com - Good News on North Korea and Another Gratuitous Plug

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Good News on North Korea and Another Gratuitous Plug

Tag it now -

Wednesday, 03 October 2007

Hey, some actual good news in international politics.

"Nuclear Deal Reached With North Korea," says an actual NY Times headline today:

Under an agreement reached in February, North Korea has shut down its Yongbyon facility, but the reactor still has to be fully disabled. According to Xinhua, the agreement today foresees the disablement of the five-megawatt experimental reactor, the reprocessing plant and the nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility in Yongbyon by December 31, 2007.

The progress in the disarmament talks came as the leaders of North and South Korea began the second day of a separate three-day summit meeting in Pyongyang, only the second such meeting between the states since the Korean Peninsula was divided in 1945.

As I've mentioned, you may not have heard about the deal when it happened, because it came the same day as Anna Nicole Smith's death. And we all know what the media considers truly important.

Not to be too much I-told-you-so, but here's a bit of the North Korea chapter in my new book Who Hates Whom, just released last week (and Juche, btw, is the ruling party's philosophy of absolute national self-reliance, particularly insane in a small, poor country with limited resources):

In the past, Kim Jong-Il has been willing to trade nuclear stoppages for aid, and in early 2007, that's precisely the deal on the table...

A generation of Koreans has reached midlife with no memory of the Korean War; their kids don't even remember the Cold War. With families split across the border, both sides realize that war would be ruinous, and -- perhaps most important -- conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai would like to market to the one-third of the country north of the border.

Unification is already happening -- gradually. North and South have competed as one "Korea" in several international events, TV ads in the South now feature stars from both countries, and the 2008 unified Korean Olympic team plans to travel together to Beijing on a rail line through North Korea, an unprecedented opening. Baby steps. Patience...

Bottom line: the son groomed by Kim Jong-Il as his replacement fell out of favor in 2001... for sneaking off to Disneyland.

Juche, my ass.

North Korea is even freakier than I'd realized. Did you know they have their own calendar, placing the beginning of time at Kim Il-Sung's birth? In Pyongyang, it's not 2007; it's 96. And the anthem to Great Leader opens with imagery of blood-soaked hillsides. Ewww.

My favorite tidbit in this chapter: Kim Jong-Il once kidnapped a prominent South Korean actress and her film director husband, hoping to kick-start the North Korean movie industry. The result: a monster movie in which a lizard-shaped rice ball turns into a giant beast that eats iron. He brings peace to a village but then eats the heroine and dies. The end.

I have got to put that in the Netflix queue.

And if that sounds like a fun read, I hope you'll grab a copy of Who Hates Whom.