Some interesting quotes from Kim Jong-un in Mike Pompeo’s new book:
North Korea and its leader Kim Jong-un are not bothered at all by the U.S. military presence in South Korea, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued in a memoir published Tuesday.
They rather consider U.S. troops in South Korea as a protection against Chinese dominance, according to Pompeo.
Pompeo said the North Korean leader had raised the issue of U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises during their first meeting in Pyongyang.
“I insinuated that he was a little hypocritical to get worked up about them, given how his planes and rockets could within minutes, or perhaps seconds, lay waste to the city of Seoul, South Korea, a city of ten million people and only a few dozen kilometers from the demilitarized zone (DMZ),” he wrote. (…..)
Pompeo said he had also told Kim that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had “consistently told the United States that American forces leaving South Korea would make Chairman Kim happy.”
“At this, Kim laughed and pounded on the table in sheer joy, exclaiming that the Chinese were liars,” wrote Pompeo.
“He (Kim) said that he needed the Americans in South Korea to protect him from the CCP, and that the CCP needs the Americans out so they can treat the peninsula like Tibet and Xinjiang,” he added.
Pompeo also offered to U.S. policymakers: “expanding U.S. missile and ground capabilities on the Korean Peninsula won’t bother the North Koreans at all.”
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but Kim also told Pompeo that he was willing to denuclearize which I have never believed. So saying that he doesn’t mind the US military presence in the ROK just may just be something Kim may have thought Pompeo wanted to hear.
Yes this would have been an unconventional way to begin an introduction:
Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote in his new memoir that his secret meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in 2018 began with a “joke about assassination.”
“This small, sweating, evil man tried to break the ice with all the charm you would expect from a mass murderer. ‘Mr. Director,’ he opened, ‘I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me,’” Pompeo’s memoir, which Fox News obtained a copy of, reads.
“My team and I had prepared for this moment, but ‘a joke about assassination’ was not on the list of ‘things he may say when he greets you.’ But I was, after all, director of the CIA, so maybe his bon mot made sense,” he added.
Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” is set to be released on Jan. 24 amid speculation that the former Trump Cabinet secretary could announce a 2024 presidential run. Pompeo said last month that he will announce his 2024 plans this spring.
In the first chapter, obtained by Fox News, Pompeo writes his meeting with Kim was a “complete secret” and his goal was to “correct the failed efforts of the past that had not eliminated North Korea’s nuclear weapons of mass destruction.” After the North Korean leader opened with an assassination joke, Pompeo said he responded in kind.
“I decided to lean in with a little humor of my own: ‘Mr. Chairman, I’m still trying kill you.’ In the picture taken seconds after that exchange, Kim is still smiling. He seemed confident that I was kidding,” Pompeo said in the memoir.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
This seems like one of these incidents where Trump says something outlandish to be funny or elicit a reaction and the media runs with it like he is seriously going to do it:
Behind closed doors in 2017, President Donald Trump discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and suggested he could blame a U.S. strike against the communist regime on another country, according to a new section of a book that details key events of his administration.
Trump’s alleged comments, reported for the first time in a new afterword to a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, came as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un escalated, alarming then-White House chief of staff John Kelly.
NBC News
You can read more at the link.
Here is a new book I will need to check out:
Sung-Yoon Lee, the Kim Koo-Korea Foundation professor in Korean Studies and assistant professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University near Boston, said that Kim Yo-jong has been more visible and empowered to speak on behalf of her brother since 2020.
Korea Times
“She is Kim Jong-un’s most trusted aide, adviser, deputy, spokesperson, attack dog and confidante,” he said in a recent email interview with The Korea Times. “In their body language when they are in close proximity, I see genuine mutual trust and affection. She is not a mere ‘secretary.'”
He said now is the time for the world to pay greater attention to the ambitious younger Kim because of her growing influence in her country.
Her multiple crucial roles in the North ― as the deputy director of the Workers’ Party’s Publicity and Information Department, alternate member of the Politburo and member of the State Affairs Commission, among others ― have convinced Lee to believe that Kim Yo-jong could lead the country in case her brother is incapacitated for any reason.
If this happens, he said, Kim Yo-jong will succeed her brother to become the supreme leader of the impoverished state because she is the only adult who is part of the Mount Paektu bloodline, which refers to the three-generation lineage of North Korea’s leadership, descending from founder Kim Il-sung. “There is no doubt that Yo-jong is leadership material,” said Lee.
Kim Jong-un is believed to have children, although no further details about them are known, but they are too young to become leaders, said Lee.
He ruled out Kim Jong-un’s brother Jong-chol from the possible successor list.
“Kim Jong-chol has stayed out of public view since Jong-un ascended to the throne in the wake of their father’s death in December 2011. Jong-chol has long been known to harbor no interest in politics, whereas Yo-jong has been known since her childhood to be ambitious and bossy,” he said. “More importantly, Yo-jong has participated very visibly in policymaking at least since February 2018 when she visited South Korea as her brother’s special envoy.”
Lee, an expert on North Korea’s leadership, is the author of the new book, “The Sister,” which unravels the rise of Kim Yo-jong. The book will be published on June 15 next year.
“I do reveal a few facts of policy relevance in my book,” he said.
You can read more at the link.
Professor Ramseyer and his views on the comfort women are back in the news:
A Harvard professor has claimed that Japan did not force Korean and other women into sexual slavery during World War II, renewing his much-denounced claims that the victims were actually prostitutes.
J. Mark Ramseyer of the Harvard Law School made the claim in the preface to a recently published book on the victims, saying Japan’s military did not need to forcibly mobilize what he characterized as prostitutes and had little room to do so.
Authored by Tetsuo Arima, a social science professor at Waseda University, the book was published on July 30 ahead of South Korea’s Aug. 15 Liberation Day that marks the country’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, long a source of historical animosity between the neighboring countries.
In the Japanese-language preface, Ramseyer also said that it was only after Seiji Yoshida, a Japanese novelist, published a book entitled “My War Crimes” in 1983 that damage claims by former sex slaves started to emerge.
The book included Yoshida’s claim that he took Korean women from the island of Jeju for sexual service.
Ramseyer then claimed that women, who worked at the military brothels to make money or due to pressure exerted by their fathers, started to claim that they were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but like I have long said, the comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters.
The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes. Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.
What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“. In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet. To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution. I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute. Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty. This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.
It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls that were underage. There is no need to create a false narrative of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
The Korea Times has a review of a new book written by the former German ambassador to North Korea Thomas Schafer who spent 8 years living in Pyongyang. Here are some insights from Schafer from the book:
While Pyongyang is initially presented as home to a clash between extreme and moderate approaches, it is the former that have won the day, through their use of belligerent acts that include, but are not limited to, the sinking of the RAS Cheonan, the breaching of the Leap Day Agreement, the public execution of Jang Song-thaek, the closing and eventual destruction of parts of the Kaesong Industrial Zone and various military and border skirmishes. For Schafer, these acts are not carried out solely on the order of Kim Jong-un, but are often outside of his control and perhaps actually to send him the message: that he is imminently replaceable.
Korea Times
Schafer is also quick to discount suggestions that, following the examples of Libya and Iraq, the North’s nuclear missiles are but a defensive necessity in a world characterized by brutal and unilateral American imperialism. While they may serve that purpose, the book makes no secret of the fact that Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons have offensive intent and that their goals center on removing American troops from the Korean Peninsula (by force if necessary), as well as carrying out the oft-repeated desire for undefined international justice.
You can read more at the link, but the fact that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are also intended for offensive purposes is often forgotten about. Something else forgotten about that appears this book may not mention as well is North Korea’s acquiring of nuclear weapons to proliferate them for hard currency as we have seen before. Anyway this book seems interesting and I will likely pick up to read. It is not often that a foreigner lives 8 years in Pyongyang and writes a book about it.
I would have to think that Lt. Col. Lohmeier knew that his career was over when he decided to publish this book. Hopefully he is retirement eligible because it would suck to get chaptered before hitting 20 years of service:
A Space Force lieutenant colonel has been removed from his command after appearing on a conservative podcast criticizing the United States military. Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier joined The Steve Gruber show to discuss his new book, “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military,” which alleges that Marxist ideologies are becoming widespread within the armed forces. He expounded on those concerns in the podcast.”Since taking command as a commander about 10 months ago, I saw what I consider fundamentally incompatible and competing narratives of what America was, is and should be,” Lohmeier said. “That wasn’t just prolific in social media, or throughout the country during this past year, but it was spreading throughout the United States military. And I had recognized those narratives as being Marxist in nature.”
CNN
You can read more at the link, but Lt. Col. Lohmeier currently has the top selling book on Amazon just behind Dr. Seuss.
