how nice but...
pics or it didn't happen!
Hackers compromised North Korean media profiles on Saturday to mock the country's heir apparent, Kim Jong Un, on his birthday. North Korea's YouTube channel was commandeered to post satirical footage depicting a caricature of Kim Jong Un at the wheel of a luxury sports car and out of control, mowing down women and children at …
Whats the point of having a twitter account and youtube feed for a nation whos populace cant view it?
So messing with those streams means that the only people who are going to see it in NK are the top brass, so in effect its kind of tweaking the nose of those brass for trying to send out bad propoganda.
Or as i suspect is more likely the case, the low level lackeys in charge of those accounts will not report that the accounts where ever compromised to their bosses in order to avoid being on the receiving end of a 10 gun salute to the head...
"Antagonise the neighbour with the weapons and the itchy trigger finger?"
If you and the neighbour on the other side have a zillion tanks and a whole bunch of nukes ready to blast him (further) into the Stone Age, then why the hell not.
Too many ppl forget that North Korea isn't Iran or Cuba. No-one there believes in The Cause. The Kims are absolute dictators, intent on a cushy life at the expense of the starving populace. None of the starving populace, including their entire military, are going to take a bullet for the Kims. Compare numbers of tanks all you like, but you can bet your bottom dollar they won't fight if it comes to it.
Whilst the West backs down every time North Korea starts stamping its feet, the Kims are going to keep doing it, bcos it works. And the generals will let them, bcos as generals they're getting a better life than the peasants. If the Kims show signs of actually believing they can do a damn thing about South Korea, you can bet that they'd be disposed of in pretty damn short measure.
The best thing to do with the Norks is absolute isolation. Not the half-assed version at the moment, where the ordinary folk get nothing but the top brass get to swan around the world on private jets. No - absolute isolation, with permanent monitoring of airspace etc, and a 100% guarantee that anything crossing the border gets shot on sight without warning. Give it five years, and the Kims would be strung upside down from lamp-posts.
That's a pretty big leap to make. The Norks have been raised since birth to believe that conditions in the rest of the world are even worse and only the Dear Leader is keeping the forces of evil at bay. It's not that they're gullible, or even brainwashed, they've literally never been allowed to see anything else. Would they fight? Absolutely they would. The Warsaw Pact never did because the Soviets couldn't keep Western media products out, so the ordinary people got a hint of the truth about the West. The Norks need a few years of Baywatch and Friends to soften them up...
> The Norks have been raised since birth to believe that conditions in
> the rest of the world are even worse
Which belief is only reinforced by what appears to be periodic aggression from the South and other Western powers.
All Kim $current actually needs to do is to rattle the sabre occasionally and watch the US respond. That's enough to cement his hold over the North Koreans for a while longer. And every single time, they oblige.
The best way to get change in NK would be firm and appropriate use of the term "ODFO" whenever the presiding Kim wants to look downtrodden...
Vic.
It was on the official YouTube channel, which I happened upon a link to through a major newspaper site article. When I saw it I thought "either that newspaper has linked to the wrong profile or the North Korean government have a totally unappreciated sense of humour". By the end the he got run-over and died I thought "no, this can't be genuine."
Not only did they pwn his internets - they totally messed with his gifts too :)
Grauniad 27/12/2010:
"A train packed with birthday gifts for the North Korean leader in waiting, Kim Jong-un, derailed in a possible act of sabotage this month, a radio station in Seoul which broadcasts across the border, has reported."