[W]e're entering the most dangerous phase in the region in decades. I'm really not all that hopeful. - Brian Reynolds Myers

If South Korea's dictatorships were America's running dogs, then North Korea was the Eastern bloc's house cat: intractable, convinced of its superiority, and to some observers a more independent creature, but never much good at feeding itself—even after the can openers started falling silent in 1989.

To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place.

"Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung": This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in 1960. It’s not to be taken too literally or narrowly; one gets the larger meaning. But it’s not that much larger. When dissidents and demonstrators called for freedom of speech in the past it was usually nationalist, anti-American and pro-North speech they had in mind.