A curious & compelling short book by South Korean journalist & writer Su-jin Chun. It could easily have been double-speak drivel about how North Korean women are the ultimate divas or outriders of modern feminism, but it is actually a mixed-bag on the isolated regime’s complex politics, sometimes yielding troves of esoteric details on the inner-workings & origins of Pyongyang’s ruling elite & the Kim saga.

Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman (Paul Erasmus):

“In 1981, the bloodthirsty madness was was an exercise costing about R1 million a day. Even ‘psych ops’ – the propaganda effort at the time – could not offset the exigencies of that. The reality is that the three decades ago, the regime spent a million bucks a day on promoting death and torture to prop up an Afrikaner elite, although at the time we didn’t see it like that at all.”

“And so, six years after the toppling of the dictator, a few hundred thousand Iraqis killed, a brutal insurgency, trillions of dollars wasted and five thousand dead US soldiers, the country was being rebuilt on the same model of a concentration of unaccountable power, shadowy intelligence services and corruption.”

“The lessons learned from unanticipated accidents at three different nuclear power plants should reassure us of what? That future unanticipated problems with other nuclear power plants won’t be serious? That engineers have acquired clearer foresight and the potentially catastrophic risks of nuclear power generation have been eliminated? That once the utility companies see that the goal of maximizing profit has led to unacceptable levels of risk they will stop maximizing profits? That complex systems that create risk can be made safe with more complexity? That there will never be another “normal accident”, the term coined for failure that can be understood in hindsight but cannot be predicted because of the complexity of the system? And don’t forget that the problem of the safety of nuclear waste storage has never been solved. We’ve made our point.”

“At some level it seemed incomprehensible that hundreds of millions of people ignored ten years of their lives that had shaped them profoundly. Some have not been allowed to discuss it. Some fear the practical repercussions of raising it. Some simply cannot bear to address it. Others hush as if it were a curse, so powerful that its very mention darkens current peace and prosperity. It is, to them all, unspeakable. And the Party and those it rules have conspired in amnesia. A decade has disappeared.”

“Behind the street theater was some of the countries wealthiest businessmen who had painstakingly been trying to build up the “counter-establishment” since the 1970s and now saw the publics unrest as an amazing opportunity to at long last mobilise popular support for their own agendas.”

“In the end, the Zionists won their state not through the force of argument but through the force of arms.”

“A 1983 holiday expedition with fellow officers to a garimpo (an informal gold mine) in Bahia led to criticism from his superiors, who claimed they were concerned by his “excessive economic and financial ambition”. –
“A military court judgement earned him a fourteen-day prison sentence. A year later, he found himself in even hotter water. In a piece published in October 1987, Veja named him [Bolsonaro} as one of the ringleaders in a plot to bomb military installations: armed action designed to lend force to his group’s trade-union style demands. The attack never took place and the military court found him not guilty. But in practice the affair meant his days in the army were numbered. In December 1988 Bolsonaro quietly transferred to the reserve and started a new career.”

“It’s a rare and extraordinary honour for any Western business leader to be afforded a private dinner inside the Beijing leadership compound – even more so that the Murdoch family should be present.”

“The most disgraceful periods in history were arrived at slowly, methodically, with an infinite number of decisions being made, every day, by real people. There is no going to sleep one night in a democracy and waking up the next morning to police roundups. There is no “tipping point,” there are many points, and at each of them we have a choice – do we continue down this path, because it has not yet affected us personally, or do we intervene?” – Will Potter