I don’t have any story behind the guy in the picture below. We were at the cemetery for North Korea’s martyrs on the anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, which was like being at Arlington on July 4th. As you can see behind him, columns and columns of soldiers paid respect from before we arrived until after we left. As for him, I couldn’t tell if he held authority or[…] Keep reading →

Non-North Koreans had a field day with the videos of people crying they saw after Kim Jong-Il’s death last year. People saw it as over-the-top and probably forced at the pain of punishment. I wrote on that crying before. On this trip, on April 15 — the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth — we got to visit the newly unveiled colossal statue of Kim Jong-Il next to his[…] Keep reading →

A detour brought us to something few non-North Koreans, and probably few North Koreans, get to see — the other side of the tracks in Pyongang. April 15 was the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, something like July 4, 1776 in the United States. Amid the hubbub, they detoured our bus from whatever our route was supposed to be to a driving along some dilapidated[…] Keep reading →

My book on North Korean strategy concludes that North Korea’s government is stable because everyone who could influence it is motivated to maintain its stability and that those who would benefit from changing it have no influence. I tried to look for holes in my theory. I thought of a few. South Korea continues to become increasingly prosperous. Combined with a more porous border, more information reaches North Korean people,[…] Keep reading →

We toured a museum of the subway system there. Here are the brief notes I took: Room after room of staged photo after staged photo of Kim Il Sung smiling, giving no information on engineering or planning or contribution from anyone but him… where he sat, when he visited, but no details on what he said. Nothing about what we would call the project. That museum was just like most[…] Keep reading →

Who would expect beautiful beaches in North Korea? Visiting that far north in April, we didn’t find warm sunny beaches, but the Earth is beautiful and it’s hard to hide that. Some of the beachfront hotels looks nice, almost Mediterranean, from afar. Up close you saw the hotels couldn’t have been seriously maintained in decades. One hotel had zero hot water. We had to heat water by dropping a heating[…] Keep reading →

It’s hard not to think little or disparagingly of “leaders” who ruled and gained position not through merit but by accident of birth or through having little confidence (I read Russia installed Kim Il Sung over others more competent). Through no malevolence, you wish they could have known or even experienced some of the suffering they contributed to, even if they didn’t intentionally create it, let alone if they intentionally[…] Keep reading →