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On May 1st, 1946, a South Korean guerilla tried to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Kim was speaking at a political rally in Pyongyang when the White Shirt guerilla threw a grenade on stage. Kim's bodyguard---the young soviet officer Yakov Novichenko---caught the grenade and threw it away. Novichenko was seriously mutilated by the grenade blast, but Kim survived the incident without injury.
The recent assassination attempt against Trump reminded me of this story, and I wanted to share it with themotte for two reasons:
It's just a great story, and one that I wish were more widely known. For me, it helps shed light on why the North Koreans felt like they "needed" to start the Korean War and invade the South in 1950. (I only know about Novichenko because of my time living in North Korea, where a North Korean army officer told me to look him up.)
I feel like there should somehow be a meme connecting these two assassination attempts and the Trump/Kim summit, but I'm not enough of a meme-warrior to figure out how to do it. Maybe one of you all can pull it off?
Neat story. Never heard of it.
Tangential, but wtf? I can't believe this has been hidden in theschism for years. Have you written about your experiences in this role beyond your polite request to resume academic exchange? I assume we haven't resumed it.
You lay out some good points with the Soviets in that post, re: collapse and nukes. Academics can provide a basis for further collaboration. Do you think there are any risks associated with academic exchange with geopolitical rivals and adversaries?
There's:
I have more fun stories I'd like to share but either haven't gotten around to it or have been asked by the "state department" not to.
With major powers like China/Russia, I think there's some risk (but the way the FBI/military talk about the risk is way overblown). With a much smaller country like North Korea that is super isolated, I think there's basically no risk.
even though they have a history of cyberattacks and crypto scams? I don't know why you think there's no risk, or any benefit, in freely helping them increase their IT skills. Even if the stuff you're teaching them is purely peaceful, it frees up their state resources to work on other, more black-hat stuff.
In the balance of it, creating an technical class within North Korea that is not military in nature is important, I think. NK having its software devs being more civilian is important in the long term for creating a philowestern elite.
If this was a third-world country with limited state power that might make sense. But NK isn't like that. There is no "separate technical class" or "civilian class." If those devs are useful to the military regime, they'll just be transferred to work on whatever the rulers deem useful. Creating more "civilian" devs just frees up more resources to use for blackhat devs. And if they start to act "philowestern" from exposure to the internet, they can just be imprisoned or executed (as many people are who are caught with contraband material, like banned books or even SK dramas on DVD.
This sort of thinking has been tried. For a good long time now, most notably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Policy. The hope was that giving them free, peaceful aid would make them a more friendly nation. It didn't work, it just gave them enough resources to keep their shitty dictatorship running while they developed nukes and ICBMs. It's astonishing to me that people still think giving them "no strings attached aid" is going to magically change the mind of people who have spent decades running one of the cruelist military dictatorships on Earth.
Academic exchange is not "no strings attached aid". It is a mutual relationship where both parties benefit from the arrangement.
With all due respect to small military dictatorships, I do not believe that they bring forth Einsteins nearly often enough for an arrangement with them to be "mutually beneficial", except in the most literal sense of the word where the other party gets at least a little bit of benefit.
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