Introduction For the last 40 years, the media and the academics of the West have been telling us that North Korea has all the sins and none of the virtues in the world, whereas the U.S. has all the virtues and no sins in the world. That is, North Korea is a bad boy while the…
The psychology of forgetting and why memory fails is a tantalising topic in the life of individuals or nations. Cognitive psychology spawned many theories about it. The main theory, the motivated forgetting theory, is the most charming as it is easy to relate to it: people forget things in the pitiless flow of life because…
The three-day state visit on July 25-27 by Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu, accompanied by a military delegation, to Pyongyang is the first-ever such high-level visit from Moscow in the post-Soviet era. Shoigu’s meeting with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday altogether elevates what would have passed as a friendly gesture by…
The author of the previous issue of this digest writes that the usual pattern of escalation surrounding the USA and South Korean military exercises has given way to news events since the beginning of June. On June 15, 2023, in response to a large-scale South Korean and USA live-fire exercise just 25 kilometers south of…
In the second half of June 2023, a wave of claims hit the world media that North Korea was allegedly experiencing a famine comparable to the Arduous March of the 1990s. A BBC article supposedly based on covert interviews with anonymous sources straight from North Korea (DPRK) and a documentary film based on the same…
In this latest in his series of digests on the increasingly tense situation on the Korean peninsula the author presents an overview of the situation up to mid-June 2023. On April 15, in response to Pyongyang’s test of its new solid-fuel ICBM, the Hwaseong-18, the US and South Korea conducted joint air force exercises involving…
