Park Sang-Hak, a North Korean defectors. Credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images
It was a cloudy July night with a full moon, shortly before midnight, when we arrived at our destination near the Han river estuary. Park Sang-hak, baseball cap clamped on his head and clad all in black, worked with his brother and their two wives to pile up on the ground bulging plastic bags filled with leaflets, booklets, sweets, soap operas, satirical films and cash. Then he called for our van lights to be turned on and focused on the team as they silently filled balloons about 12 metres long with hydrogen, then let them loose to sail over the nearby North Korean border.
There were ten balloons in total, constructed from agricultural tubes of polythene. Each one carried three bags, filled with about 5,000 leaflets providing information intended to penetrate the lies of the North Korean propaganda machine. They soared into the sky surprisingly fast, soon disappearing from sight, one trailing a satirical cartoon of the ‘supreme leader’ Kim Jong-Un. “Obviously, we have no idea how many get in,” Park admitted, before adding that he was confident enough that some of them would make it across the border and into the arms of citizens in the world’s most bunkered state.
Park is a remarkable and resolute man. Once he was a rising young bureaucrat from a well-connected family, a fervent believer in the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea for more than seven decades. Today he is public enemy number one in the North, having fled to the South and dedicated his life to defeating the brutal regime that brainwashed him along with 25 million other citizens. He has survived assassination attempts, death threats and even missile responses to these nocturnal launches of clandestine materials. In recent days, he has been denounced again as ‘human scum’.
Yet he is also detested by South Korean authorities who see this diminutive dissident as a danger to their stability. They have launched legal actions and legislative efforts to thwart his activism. And now he is at the centre of rising tensions in the region.
First Kim Jong-Un’s government raged that sending over such seditious information “dared to hurt the dignity of our supreme leadership” and was “provocation graver than gun and artillery fire”. Then came dark warnings of drastic action, the breaking of communication links with Seoul and now destruction of a joint liaison office near the border town of Kaesong.
This explosive move, coming hours after warnings of military action in response to the South “stoking a confrontational atmosphere”, has sent waves of concern around the fragile region again. Russia called for restraint; the United States reiterated its support for Seoul. Meanwhile, the South Korean government — which had staked significant political capital on its latest bid to seduce Pyongyang’s dynastic dictatorship — said the demolition wrecked fading hopes of a peace settlement on the peninsula.
As ever with North Korea, it is hard to determine precisely what is going on. Kim Yo-jong, the increasingly-visible younger sister of Pyongyang’s leader, blamed Moon for putting “his neck into the noose of pro-US flunkyism”. Clearly ‘sunshine policies’ — to pursue peace and an arms control deal with Pyongyang — led by Donald Trump and South Korean president Moon Jae-in have come to an entirely predictable halt.
Analysts believe it may just be another manufactured crisis to extract some cash and concessions. As one said, there is a weary cycle in which the north pretends it wants peace while it pockets aid and sorts out internal issues before returning to belligerence.
Certainly it seems the action has blown up the Panmunjom declaration, signed by the two Korean leaders two years ago, in which they agreed to cease ‘hostile acts.’ South Korea has warned it will not accept any more hostile activity. It shows also the failure of the talks on Pyongyang’s missile programmes after that high-profile summit last year between Trump and Kim. And it is always worth remembering two key points when watching events here: first, that the Korean War — used by three generations of the Kim family to justify their paranoid stand against the world — has technically not ended after the 1953 armistice. And second, that five of the world’s biggest armies hover around this divided peninsula dangling beneath China.
Yet the North’s fury also indicates the success of the activities pursued by Park and other dissident groups as they send in contraband to corrode the hermit kingdom from within by undermining belief in the bloodstained Kim dictatorship. I have heard from several dissidents about how they would watch foreign soap operas and films secretly to see the clothes, the cars and the food that strongly challenged their own government’s claims about life being so much better under their thumb. I also met a woman jailed for eight years for watching foreign films, and a party cadre — a member of the state censorship team — who defected after being caught sharing seized books and films with his friends.
Indeed Park himself is proof of the success of such a strategy. When we first met four years ago he told me how his eyes were partially opened to the outside world after a leaflet fell from the sky as he walked around a square in the port of Wonsan. “All the flyers fell at once,” he told me. “There were about 800 people and just five security people so I grabbed one and put it in my pocket. My friend was too scared but we read it together. The most important information was that it said people in North Korea had escaped to China.”
Park defected at the start of this century with help of his father. Three years later he became determined to bring down the regime, after learning that his fiancée had been hideously beaten for two months and two uncles had been murdered in retaliation for his escape. “I had to do something,” he told me. “I was mad that these innocent people had been tortured and killed.”
I met him first through the US-based Human Rights Foundation, which has funded such subversive activities for several years, sending in more than 50 million hours of reading material. Alex Gladstein, the group’s chief strategy officer, said:
“Pyongyang shows with its actions that it fears Mr Park’s leaflets, which carry the truth and information about the outside world. His efforts are peaceful, creative and effective. They should be met with support by the Moon administration, not indifference — and certainly not punitive action. Sadly it appears they are firmly against human rights advocacy.”
Park’s most recent batch of balloons containing half a million leaflets was fired off at the end of last month, amid suspicions the pandemic has hurt North Korea’s fragile economy and rumours the obese Kim Jong-un has been struggling with illness. Other activists use drones to fly in memory sticks loaded with Bibles, books and films; or pay border guards and smugglers to take in banned data and electronic equipment. The risks are big: Kim tightened controls with threats of execution for people aiding illegal crossings and substantial rewards for soldiers who stop them.
President Moon has promised a crackdown on such efforts and tried to sue Park and his brother, to the anger of the conservative opposition party. Yet many of his countrymen look down at dissidents and show little interest in the suffering of North Koreans trapped in the bubble of the world’s most barbaric state. The balloon launches also infuriate people living near the border when they fall short and spew rubbish over homes in the area — although satellite trackers found some flew almost 500 miles to Vladivostok in Russia.
Yet Park remains set on his path. “South Korea is gagging us, who are its citizens, while kowtowing to the evil regime in the North,” he said. “The more they suppress us, the more leaflets we will send.”
Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express.
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SubscribeWhilst “The Limits to Growth” raised some valid points, were the scientists of that time not also coming out with reports that the world would be plunged into a new ice age by the year 2000.
It is pretty chilly outside this morning, but it is hardly an ice age.
We are now living in a world where a minority of people are questioning everything. They cynically wonder whether scientists say whatever the person providing the funding wants them to say.
For years scientists (funded by tobacco companies) came out with research that said cigarettes didn’t damage health.
In recent years scientists (funded by vaccine investors and pharmaceutical companies) have come out with catastrophic predictions that make vaccines for all ages essential.
The same could be set of many sectors who have used ‘the science’ to say what they needed to be said.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could go back to a world where scientists were not in the pocket of their paymasters and so could work independently.
This would help us to uncover some amazing truths, and not just ‘truths’ that met the commervial objectives of their funders.
Yes but they aren’t all the same scientists. Did we not just read the same article? The attempts to repudiate the findings failed. Some of these have already started…
Proof or repudiation are both absolutely irrelevent when you live in a post-truth world, where funding and connections with those who have power and control decide what ‘the truth’ will be. Those who question ‘The Truth’ or offer an alternative to ‘The Truth’ will not be heard or will be cancelled/discredited/defunded. That sounds dystopian and it is, but it is the truth.
The author served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. How ancient was the order of druids in America? I remember Asterix went there in the Great Crossing but Getafix stayed in Gaul, so it can’t have been founded then.
More modelling that nobody can prove is correct. Just because two people used the model to get the same result does not prove the model is correct. Show me any prediction that has been correct. The climate models cannot even predict the weather next week. All the pandemic predictions were completely wrong.
So, in your world, we simply guess? Do you do that in your everyday life, or make some assumptions about savings etc about the future?
If you watched something outside your confirmation bubble – I’d suggest Mallen Baker’s “Dangerously Reasonable” YouTube videos – you might find some detailed information that climate models are actually pretty good. As of course are short-term weather forecasts (climate isn’t weather). But you don’t even need models, look at the Arctic summer sea ice retreat, which is quite dramatic. We’ve known CO2 is a greenhouse gas for 150 years; this isn’t some weird science coming from nowhere. We are emitting huge amounts of it that have been stored in deposits for hundreds of millions of years within a geological blink of an eye.
None of this necessarily means the current Net Zero policies are right, but climate denial is becoming a bit of an embarrassment, and I think will go the same way as those people who denied any link between tobacco and lung cancer.
“Catastrophe is imminent!”
30 years later:
“Catastrophe is imminent!”
30 years later:
“Catastrophe is imminent!”
See the pattern here?
Yes, you missed the bit about World3 not predicting collapse: every time.
Guess you missed the last paragraph?
What an excellent essay.
It makes the point, cogently, that the question of the contribution of manmade activities to the Earth’s warming is only tangentially related to the wider debate. You don’t need to believe in anthropogenic climate change to be worried about our relationship to this planet’s resources.
I have been arguing for most of my adult life that human overpopulation is the key driver in all this: if we can keep the number to below a billion, other problems simply disappear.
While policy solutions to accelerate population moderation are at first glance unpalatable, once you take into account the alternatives, they emerge as the most humane, indeed the only humane, choice set.
I suspect that in 20 years, this view will have become mainstream. But not before a lot of needless suffering.
“human overpopulation is the key driver” … lead by example ! Promise to follow
‘Nessun problema’ as the Pope might say.
Educate women at least to early teens + give these women easy access to contraception and your total fertility rate will drop off the edge of a cliff.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200908170532.htm
Some initial spadework required – enough basic food security to allow female children to be released from the daily grind to go to school and enough hope in a society that educated girls = better life expectancy (to look after Mum and Dad) and the expectation that these girls will be economically benefited by the education (a bit of a no brainer IMHO)
“Leading by example …” Well, a very small anecdote. Of the 20 + close friends of my two 30 something daughters, only 3 have produced children so far. The educated West leading the way – the first in the contraction train ?
Yes, education definitely a key part of the solution. But so is the establishment of workable pension systems. After all, many have large families as a sort of retirement insurance policy.
We can also do a lot with the tax systems.
But that’s the problem. Demographic collapse. Not overpopulation. Particularly in the west. The idea is that immigration fixes that but immigration has its own problems.
The prospect of demographic collapse is a great problem. In Europe and Japan in particular. Not to mention China where it seems, after the reversal of the drastic one-child policy, young adults are reluctant to have more than one child.
The educated West leading the way to self-extinction, in fact.
Well we may have depopulation soon enough with war.
If that doesn’t happen, not only is your analysis for 20 years in the future incorrect, it is depopulation or demographic decline that people will be worried about in 20 years. Many are already.
Let’s hope such a war doesn’t happen.
I can’t understand how people can be worried about depopulation, when there have never been more humans on the earth than now.
As for demographic decline, this is a problem that can be fixed with a small amount of policy planning – adjustments to retirement age, automation and some attention to intergenerational fairness will be enough to manage these effects.
Soylent Green policy planning?
No, but perhaps not for the reasons you assume. Old people are sinewy and not very tasty. Babies are tender and much more delicious.
There are more people on earth for now but populations have peaked in most industrial countries. Only sub Saharan Africa has significant growth rates. Everywhere else populations and the rate of increase are slowing or reversing.
In fact all western countries are going to start declining in actual population pretty soon and the demographic decline will be exponential and not obviously fixable. There’s no solution to always having more people retired vs the working population and generational population decline. Economic growth will be low to non existent. Taxes will be extremely high. For ever. Italy will see its population half by 2100. Then presumably half again or more by 2180. Eventually the country won’t exist.
(Funny enough the west only talks about demographic decline in other countries like China)
In 20 years that will be the worry.
So the prediction of decline will be fulfilled anyway?
“There’s no solution to always having more people retired vs the working population and generational population decline.”
There is. Automation and associated productivity increases will allow for sustainable population decreases.
And while it’s true natural population growth has plateaued in developed countries, the predicted path still sees a global peak around 2050 – at near 11 billion. This is too many, especially when you consider that the developing nations want what we already high – high protein diets, well built homes, gadgets, cars…
–
We have never lived on a majority senior planet. I suspect it is going to be extremely unpleasant.
Good luck convincing Africa and India, the west and Japan have already started.
We’ll need more than luck, Kat. We’ll need consensus and dialogue. We’ll need to arrive at some kind of democratic pluralistic understanding of what must happen.
The implicit assumption in the Limits to Growth arguments is that we won’t use technological advances to prevent catastrophes. Please remember that the reason we started drilling in the ground for oil is that we were limited in the number of whales we could harvest for lamp oil. A technology improvement expanded the resources available for lighting.
Anthropomorphic global warming ain’t science. Science has to be verifiable by independent researchers. When Mann and friends said they “lost” their raw data, and refused to show it, their scientific case vanished. Anthropomorphic global warming became strictly politics.
As the world is discovering right now, renewable energy is not ready for prime time. We need fossil fuels to run modern economies. If free countries refuse to produce fossil fuels themselves, they have to buy them from maniacs like Putin, empowering him to invade Ukraine. Isn’t it preferable to allow fracking in your own country?
I’ve always thought that the theory of anthropogenic climate change was the ultimate example of hubris.
A sample of predictions of the year or range of years during which “Peak Oil” would occur in the U.S/world and production would begin its inexorable decline to zero:
1922
1960
1970
1985 to 2000
1965 to 1971
In 2009 the UK Energy Research Centre noted:[36]
“Few analysts now adhere to a symmetrical bell-shaped production curve. This is correct, as there is no natural physical reason why the production of a resource should follow such a curve and little empirical evidence that it does.”
and..
In 2012 the great George Monbiot conceded:
“We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all.”
So that’s the end of that.
I think the concern was energy return on energy investment, or something like that, right?
So Peak Oil was the point at which it would generally be unprofitable to extract new energy because the costs of extracting it (namely, the energy-use costs) would exceed the profit.
IIRC from reading a lot of that until about 2015, some of the theorists felt they’d gotten the “profit” wrong from extraction, because even though there are higher environmental and economic costs to extracting, a lot of that was subsidized by corporate welfare and other systemic thingies that I don’t understand.
So I really, really, really hope that these models are “wrong.”
But what JMG/Club of Rome got right–gets right–for a human population with technology developing exponentially and resource use per capita growing exponentially, is that the risks of proceeding at this rate outweigh the benefits, based on those two principles.
Hard to argue with that, but where I always come back to, after reading JMG, is building community, building personal and family health, building overall resilience, and grounding that in a humble faith in something greater than myself. I’ve learned I can do that w/o reading depressing prognostications every day. What I WISH is that we’d see a growing trend–and we might–of building off-line community resilience, which makes right-wing Christians happy and libertarians happy and progressive folks who buy this science happy. Because what else can we do anyway? Building local community resilience (the Transition Towns movement), or the homeschooling pods arising now, or the parent groups and FAIR chapters who are speaking up against neoliberal identity politics and global corporatism, are all addressing the same harms and building the same strength. What else can we do?
So, the predictions that weren’t made have stood the test of time? There won’t be a crisis (just a decline) but the crisis can’t be avoided? A tad confused perhaps?. And, by the way, AGW may well prove to be one of the “fake certainties of our age”
Unherd publishes an article by an authority (in the USA) on the occult, astrology, Freemasonry and Hermentic Occult Spirituality (HOS). An article containing facts and predictions that can be heard any given June 20th at the bar of the Rover’s Return, Stonehenge. What next? David Icke on sunspots or Diane Abbott on perpetual motion?
In NYC while they constantly fret about global warming policy, there is trash and litter everywhere, leaching into the soil and killing us far faster. Here is your metaphor. Abstractions are always more fun.
It is not infinite growth, but infinite division. Doing more with less. A unending library built from grains of sand, powered by the sun.
The planet isn’t finite because people imagine new things all the time.
Agree. Human collective stupidity and ingenuity make it mixed. Out in Singapore. Imperfect? Of course but 5.5m people in small area making it work very well most of the time. They don’t have much use for pessimism.
But they don’t produce all of the goods they consume.
Which is key isn’t it?
Singapore is amazing.
“He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.”
Is that the sound of a barrel being scrapped I can hear
He’s got a big following from a lot of intellectuals and PhD’s, but your quick dismissal is noted.
If you never read his 2007 essay, “The Theology of Compost,” it’s your loss.
It’s like the fundamentalist atheists type who mock Thomas Merton or the Dali Llama–their sad loss. The scope of “life” is much richer than playing adversarial textual games with the symbols generated through alphabetic literacy.
God bless. May you one day perceive the sacral nature of compost, before you join it.
So has Josh Rogan
From Thomas Sowell’s ‘The Vision of the Anointed’ (1995) chapter 4:
‘Like most prophecies of doom, the Club of Rome report had an agenda and a vision – the vision of an anointed elite urgently needed to control the otherwise fatal defects of lesser human beings. Long after the Club of Rome report has become just a footnote to the long history of overheated rhetoric and academic hubris, the pattern of its arguments, including its promiscuous display of the symbols of “science” – aptly characterized by Gunnar Myrdal as “quasi-learnedness” – will remain as a classic pattern of orchestrated hysteria in service to the vision of the anointed.’
The car and speed analogy, as I so love telling the ex plod who run the speed awareness courses, is entirely fallacious- it is an empirical fact of physics that were any potentially colliding bodies travelling at greater OR lesser speed, collision would be impossible
You can feel the decline here in the USA…
America is sinking. You yanks better put on your life jackets.
The “Limits of Growth” posits exponential population growth. This is not occurring.
Look at these 2 graphs: Historical population , Current UN projections
Exponential growth is the rule for an agrarian societies. It appears industrial societies exhibit different patterns. As more of the world has industrialized, the more significant those trends are for global population growth. Best estimates are that we will peak this century between 11B-12B people and will decline thereafter.
This article makes a big deal about global warming risks, but it’s worth remembering that when The Limits of Growth was published, the Club of Rome was actually worried about global cooling. That prediction didn’t hold up too well.
The challenge of the future isn’t resource scarcity. It’s people scarcity.
The *specific* predicted consequences of climate change that the author quotes – decline in population and industrial capacity – are surely happening, but not because of anthropogenic climate change. Materialism and breakdown of the family bond has largely led to a dropoff in Western baby production, and meddling by Covid&Climate-alarmed politicians has resulted in a crippling of our industry.
We can only hope that enough people wake up to the real problems besetting the West, before the Druids et al drag us into oblivion.
I suppose Unherd has to prove regularly that it’s a broad church, doesn’t it?
Printing nonsense occasionally therefore must be part of the deal.
Malthusian ideas appeal to a certain type of conservative though, as you can see here.
It doesn’t get much more conservative than druidism.
Well I was talking about the commentators. The overpopulation myth is strong here.