N. Korea: U.S. Waging Cultural Invasion

[Khephra]

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea on Tuesday accused the United States of sending midget radios and "impure" publications into the country to destroy the isolated communist state with "rotten imperialist reactionary culture."

North Korea's totalitarian government has reportedly tightened surveillance in recent months, out of fear that some of its hunger-stricken people were receiving smuggled tiny transistor radios capable of receiving outside news. Some U.S.-based Korean groups seeking democratic change in North Korea have attempted to send small radios carried by balloons into the North.

"The U.S. imperialists are now bent on their moves to send midget radios and TV sets into (North Korea) in an effort to break up the single-hearted unity there and degenerate and disintegrate it from within," the official communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said. "Out of the same motive, the U.S. imperialists are trying to send impure publications."



http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-nkorea-cultural-invasion,0,6427620.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

[geek tragedy]

1. Wow, they just get crazier and crazier.

Kind of like a leftwing version of Free Republic.

[chenGOD]

3. Yeah no offense, but...

I could do without a lot of American "culture".

Starbucks, cookie-cutter movies, McDonalds, Britney Spears and that ilk, Wal-mart, Kenny G...

[geek tragedy]

4. Better to eat at McDonalds and Starbucks

than eating grass like they do in North Korea.

Every country has its share of shit culture. Ours just gets spread more. Mainly because people love to import American stuff, and the shitty movies and TV shows are cheaper than the good stuff.

[chenGOD]

5. People love to import American culture or...

it gets forced down the throats of people?

I was in South Korea before they had their economic crisis of 1997, and I can tell you that there were far fewer McDonalds and Starbucks before than after. Nothing to do with the IMF being a tool of the US foreign policy to force countries to open up to American companies. Now of course the Carlyle group is buying up whatever they can.

And yeah people are starving in North Korea. Several years of drought plus bad economic planning are to blame. America's economic embargo doesn't do anything to help though. Plus the cutting off of the heavy oil just before winter was such a wonderful humanitarian gesture.

[geek tragedy]

6. If there wasn't a market for this stuff,

it wouldn't sell. If people in Korea didn't eat at McDonalds, it wouldn't do business there.

Don't get me wrong--it feels a little icky to see a McDonalds in Tuscany.

[chenGOD]

7. Yeah i know...but...

If people would spend some time to educate themselves about the quality....but of course the consumerist mindset demands that they ask no questions. And gets good results...

It's sad though, seeing the first generation of kids with obesity problems.

[geek tragedy]

8. If people bothered to educate themselves about quality,

Chirac and Bush wouldn't be the two guys determining the future of the Transatlantic alliance, but rather would be serving time.

[DoveTurnedHawk]

2. Cultural and Economic Links

Are the only long-term, peaceful solution to the NK problem, IMO. There is no military solution. There just isn't. Not when Seoul is effectively held hostage by hardened NK artillery.

DTH