korean unification studies

6 responses so far ↓

• 1 Richardson // Oct 2, 2007 at 7:59 pm

  I would take everything you read in that newsletter with a grain of salt;

  http://www.dprkstudies.org/2006/02/06/when-academics-become-dprk-apologists/

  On, “Invisible WMD- the effect of sanctions,” also see;

  http://www.dprkstudies.org/2007/09/11/sanctions-forcing-north-korea-to-negotiating-table/

  From the newsletter;

  “…there were significant market reforms in 2002…”

  Almost all of those reforms have been discontinued and rolled back. Beal knows this.

  “On a longer perspective we can ask why the North Korean economy outperformed the South’s for decades, perhaps into the 1980s?”

  A combination of slave labor, communist bloc aid, and southern corruption. Again, Beal knows this.

  That’s about all I can stomach of that apologist’s writings. Like anything recent from Cumings, the amount of fact checking that is required to sort opinion from fact makes reading such drivel time consuming and useless.

• 2 dilworth // Oct 2, 2007 at 9:51 pm

  All views are welcome… apologists, aparatchiks, polemicists, apocalypticists, pogromists, pansori players and poets… just the usual Koreanists I guess!

• 3 Richardson // Oct 2, 2007 at 10:15 pm

  I guess I have issues with and fail to see the value of information that intentionally omits critical facts - intentionally misleading information.

• 4 visitor // Oct 4, 2007 at 5:57 pm

  By linking to the Pyongyang report, without making clear that it is pro-North Korean and anti-American, you are jeopordizing your reputation by taking sides. This periodical is really just a propaganda piece. Because the authors of this blog are German, one would think they would have a historical sensitivity towards the modern day totalitarianism and death camps that exist in NK. Unfortunately it seems they prefer to play up largely fictional “American crimes” like No Gun Ri instead of talking about the replicas of Auschwitz that exist in NK.

• 5 dilworth // Oct 4, 2007 at 6:32 pm

  Thanks for the comment visitor and thanks for the concern.

  We respect all views at Korean Unification Studies and if you want to put forward a cracking anti-North Korean, pro-American site (that we don’t already link to) then we’ll probably link to that too!

  In fact, pretty soon we’ll have up a page for you to post your own pieces for the site as a guest author - so feel free to let rip on that.

  I (Gunther) have posted nothing on NoGunRi or fictional American crimes and to my knowledge neither have Klaus and Hans. Who says the authors of this site are German?

• 6 Benji (Koreabloggen) // Oct 12, 2007 at 3:58 am

  Regarding Tim Beal; Sweden’s own pro-North Korea-organization published a four page essay on the six party talks written by him (and poorly translated into swedish by the editor) in an issue of their monthly paper. If that man loans his credibility to people like that (assuming that he knew about the publishing), then I’m not sure how much of it he has left in my eyes.

  (…not saying that every view on issues regarding North Korea isn’t interesting - heck, I’d love to read “On the Art of Cinema” if it wasn’t so badly written.)

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