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Sifting through golf sands for a hint of North Korea's future
 In keeping with his orderly ascension from ranking army general to top political official to supreme leader of the last hard-line Communist country on earth, North Korea's chubby young Kim Jong-un is expected soon to take up golf, where he will challenge his father's record of scoring almost a dozen holes-in-one on his first try at the game.Afforded little else in the way of information on the internal doings of the secretive country, observers will be reduced to parsing news of the young leader's score, speculating on what it might mean should he fail to match his father's 38-under-par. Such is the fantasy scenario of North Korea's notorious -- often ludicrous -- propaganda machine, which is operating at full throttle after the death of the country's last demigod ruler. Observers question whether the regime can maintain the barrage of lies big and little it has used for so long to mislead and repress its citizens. In particular, they wonder how long it will be before the flood of information loosened by the digital revolution, which helped destabilize and wash away repressive regimes throughout the Middle East this year, finally leaks through slowly widening cracks in the Kimchi Curtain. Posted by: Pappy 2012-01-01 |
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