Update: Here’s a link to a somewhat more concise review I did for Goodreads. 

One of the most common critiques of contemporary American society, and Western culture more broadly, is its purported enthrallment to the opiate of celebrity. The notion that ordinary Americans are so dumbfounded by popular entertainment that they can’t understand linear, logical thought, let alone come up with workable solutions to complex problems which require such understanding, is not new. The late Neil Postman wrote an entire book exploring the damage wrought by modern communication techniques-namely, television and advertising-to the process of information-gathering, and by extension, rational argument and inquiry. However, even Henry David Thoreau-who lived before radio had attenuated the attention spans of humans weaned on the printed word-lamented the prospect of instantaneous communication.

Even so, you can’t properly understand the term celebrity until you’ve looked at a totalitarian state which is dominated not so much by an ideological impulse or dogma as by a cult of personality. That’s why the book written by celebrity ghostwriter Michael Malice-seen above in his dashing North Korean suit-about the late despot Kim Jong-il serves as an invaluable resource.  Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il-gives a western audience the rare opportunity to peer into the mind of someone who stood at the apex of a regime in which there was only one family and one person who was to be celebrated-upon pain of imprisonment, torture, and death. 

The unique nature of the North Korean state lies not so much in its depraved sadism-although it’s difficult to argue that it doesn’t equal or exceed even the most barbarous governments on the planet in this regard-but in the fact that it has managed to extirpate any public expression of individuality. Not only has the Kim dynasty suppressed any and all political dissent for the better part of seven decades, it has succeeded in effacing the personality of 24 million Koreans. In the tropical gulag that is Cuba you will find exuberantly defiant bloggers standing up to the Castro brothers tyranny. In the despotic theocracy that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, you will find courageous resistance to the Khomenist regime and first-hand accounts of what it’s like to be incarcerated in the notorious Evin Prison.

You won’t find internal dissidents in the DPRK, because to all intents and purposes, they do not exist. To dissent is to sign your own death warrant-not only for yourself, but for three generations of your family. You won’t hear the conditions inside of kwan-li-so described, because-with a few exceptions-no one leaves these concentration camps alive, and the only way outsiders are able to view them is through satellite photographs.

The brilliance of Dear Reader is its ability to convey these horrific truths in a way which compels the reader to look at North Korea in all its unvarnished brutality. At first glance, the concept of writing a book about an ongoing holocaust which relies upon humor to any extent is controversial, if not revolting. One of the reasons that a film like Goodbye Lenin can be enjoyed by ordinary people is because they recognize that it satirizes ugly crimes perpetrated by a regime which is safely immured in the past, and which will in all likelihood never be resurrected. The atrocities being committed in the DPRK, on the other hand, show no sign of abating.

The truth is that this book is suffused with humor, but not the type of humor that most people associate with Kim Jong-il or Kim Jong-un. It’s not designed to focus on the trivial manifestations of their well-cultivated international image of eccentricity, e.g. the goodwill tour by washed-up  NBA power forward/media spectacle Dennis Rodman. It’s used as a means of illustrating a lethally serious point. Namely, that this ruling clique has successfully employed an architecture of myth-based upon fear, ignorance, anger, and the desire for vengeance-in order to not only immiserate the Koreans under their rule materially, but to also impoverish their spirit and their souls.

One of the ways the author makes this viscerally disturbing narrative digestible is by contextualizing the Kim dynasty. People today can’t comprehend how a state created out of the spoils of World War II, a vestige of the Cold War conflict between the United States and USSR, became a singularly isolated and defiant  national socialist, i.e. fascist, regime predicated upon the worship of a single individual and intense, multigenerational racialism.

He does this in a number of ways, most interestingly perhaps by humanizing his subject, i.e. one of the most loathsome dictators of the past half-century. As off-putting as this might seem to the uninitiated, it’s a surprisingly effective means of explaining how and why the North Korean state exists, in spite of an increasingly porous web of information control. Taking traditional biographical tropes about family life and adolescent angst and transposing them into a story about Southeast Asia’s most iconic despot is an unconventional technique, but ultimately a successful one. A particularly affecting anecdote involves a young Kim Jong-il guarding the study of his father, Kim il-Sung, as he sleeps. Oddly moving, it serves as a metaphor for his guardianship of his dad’s legacy, even at the cost of the enforced starvation of over a million of his countrymen.

This highlights another aspect of North Korea’s unique regime, which is later revealed explicitly by Kim himself, when he admits that his advisors are not chosen because of any technical competence or foresight they may display, but because of their intense loyalty to Kim il-Sung, i.e. Kim Jong-il, thought. The consequent economic, social, and environmental disasters that resulted from this leadership method are, naturally, a necessary evil for preserving the sanctity of the true Korean state in the eyes of the Dear Leader.

Malice makes the sclerotic nature of this system comprehensible, which might come as a surprise to many of us who have been repeatedly told that there is no rhyme or reason to the actions taken by the DPRK’s leadership. In fact, there was a brutal internal logic and rationality to the actions of Kim Jong il, from extolling a juche philosophy that seemingly prized autarky-even while living parasitically off the extorted handouts from hostile neighbors and the United States-to an incomplete series of garish monuments exalting the only family to have ruled North Korea since its creation.

Therefore, the Agreed Framework between the United States and the DPRK was not a shameful capitulation, but a necessary expedient to preserve the Juche ideal, while also debasing both a former and current President of the United States. True to the promise on Dear Reader’s book jacket, this part is 100 percent “true,” as a perusal of Bill Clinton’s letter to Kim Jong-il at the time demonstrates. The bellicose rhetoric emanating from North Korea is not the rantings of a paranoid lunatic, but Songun diplomacy, which, regardless of its dubious morality, was extraordinarily efficacious. Kim’s explanation of an humanitarian aid package accepted five years later illustrates why:

After much grandstanding and hyperbole, the American and Korean negotiators reached a compromise. The Americans claimed that they were neither rewarding me nor condoning my violent rhetoric. That is absolutely true. They didn’t “reward” me or “condone” my rhetoric. On the other hand, they did financially compensate me because of my aggression. 

Accepting charity from the Yank devils was not a repudiation of the principles undergirding his very regime, but a brilliant strategic maneuver. And it wasn’t charity but reparations for the harm inflicted upon the DPRK for decades by the American imperialists.

This didn’t contradict the Juche principle of self-reliance one bit. I didn’t look at the package as aid so much as the repayment of a debt. The US imperialists had been threatening Korea for decades. It was entirely their fault that I’d had to expend such enormous sums on the military. 

Even actions that seem completely inscrutable to outside observers, e.g. the North Korean government’s evident pride in being lavished with praise by equally dysfunctional nation-states like the West African, Marxist backwater Burkina Faso or the South Asian dumpster fire that is Pakistan, become explicable once you understand them from the perspective of the man pulling the strings. As absurd as having Mali as one of your strategic partners might seem to us, it serves the interests of the Kim regime. Just like its arsenal of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, the International Friendship Museum is intended for domestic consumption, not for our benefit.

If there’s one thing to take away from Dear Reader, it’s that there is a calculated reason for every decision made at the upper echelons of power within North Korea. As Kim Jong-il avers himself, he was “no buffoon,” and his actions-however clownish they may have seemed to foreigners-had deadly consequences which were methodically plotted out beforehand. This is a book worth reading, if only because it illuminates the dark corners of a society whose people have suffered for too long in the shadows of their loving parents.

To live in New York is to be surrounded by people suffering from various pathologies, many of whom you encounter on a daily basis if-like most of us-you use public transportation. Living here also means being surrounded by Marxists of varying hues, including Maoists, Trotskyites, and-as the photograph above illustrates, supporters of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Most of the time, international supporters of the only communist hereditary dictatorship fly under the radar. Outside of the faltering consortium of ethnic Koreans living in Japan-whose own stability has been imperiled for obvious reasons-there are not many people willing to support a regime which has killed enough of its subjects to rank comfortably between Pol Pot and Mengistu Haile Mariam in the annals of historical, third world despotism.

The event which occasioned these paeans to The Great Leader was the opening night of Red Dawn, a 1984 action-adventure thriller involving a Soviet invasion of the mainland United States that-much to the chagrin of the director of the original film-is being remade into a would-be blockbuster where the main antagonists are North Korean shock troops. Being a state-barely-where an economy  doesn’t exist and ICBMs are too poorly designed to reach the shores of the United States appears to have its advantages, at least from the perspective of a Hollywood film producer.

However, those going out of their way to avoid controversy usually have it thrust upon them, whether it be in the form of racially insensitive tweets, or a counter-protest staged by a bedraggled band of true believers led by an SDS spokesman who resembles a more unkempt version of Eric Stoltz, ca. The Butterfly Effect.

You thought SDS had disappeared with the departure of the last Americans from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam? Alas, it’s still extant, as is the Workers World, which peddles old ideas from the new left slightly repackaged-emphasis on slightly-for the Internet Age. The bilingual edition of the latter no doubt aimed to appeal to emigres from that vast swathe of Latin America which is infatuated with socialism, notwithstanding its rather obvious shortcomings.

Whether the proclivity of newcomers to favor government management of the economy will translate into increased support for The Great, Dear, Omniscient Leader is a matter for future generations to decide, but the spirited crowd of approximately half a dozen devoted communists seemed to be solidly in the corner of Kim Jong-Un and opposed to the shameless political dwarfs behind the cinematic reincarnation of this motion picture.

One of the scheduled speakers was the man wearing the jaunty keffiyeh seen above, who hails from the workers’ paradise that is post-Batista Cuba. Apparently, Raul Castro’s tropical paradise is, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, another victim of malicious, patently false Western propaganda. You might be asking yourself why, if that’s the case, he is in New York City right now instead of Havana. Oh, you vile, imperialist cur.

There was also an unofficial spokesperson from Occupy Wall Street whose purpose I wasn’t able to readily discern, although perhaps it was intended to add ballast to a movement that has seen better days. Most recently, when the Soviet Union existed as more than a whimsical advertising campaign from Hershey’s.

In fact, one of the points emphasized by our Alexi Lalas look-alike was that North Korea had a thriving economy during the untainted, benevolent reign of the Soviet Empire. Aside from the fact that this is wholly inaccurate, this assertion is 100 percent true. Still, you wonder why a regime that prides itself on its rigid autarky would rely upon its two largest neighbors in order to survive.

One of my hopes for the anti-Red Dawn/pro-deranged, overtly racist, vaguely Confucian Communist junta demonstration was that its small number of participants would be dwarfed by a slightly larger group of trolls, a la Communists for Kerry or Bureaucrash during its heyday.

Alas, no such hilarity ensued. I did get the chance to capture an amusing confrontation between comrade Maupin and a friend of mine who was also there to record this historic event. I don’t recall what was said verbatim, but I’m sure it involved a denunciation of capitalist lickspittles and/or running dogs of imperialism. For those of you who are interested in watching this tete-a-tete for yourselves, you can view it in its entirety on Youtube, which I’m certain would have been created by North Korean engineers if their nation hadn’t been bombarded by Western disinformation campaigns.

Sarcasm aside, one of the most disturbing aspects of this rally was a brief speech delivered by an envoy from the America-Democratic Republic of Korea Friendship Committee, who parroted the same lies you find published regularly by North Korea’s official news service.

Like the useful idiots who traveled back from Moscow with nothing but praise for Joseph Stalin-even as he was in the process of liquidating class enemies within the Soviet state-this loathsome creature returned from Pyongyang in order to stand upon a soapbox-quite literally-and laud the achievements of  a state which is synonymous with indifference to human life and the ruthless suppression of anyone who dares to exercise his natural rights.

It’s sickening to think that such a creature walks among us, but like ignorance, disease, and hatred, he is a pestilence which has yet to be eradicated in a world where knowledge is at the fingertips of most of humanity. A sad yet ineluctable truth that we’ll have confront as plunge ahead into an era just as turbulent as the one which occasioned a cinematic classic of the Cold War.

Update: Breitbart coverage here.  Also, a write-up from North Korea News. Watch Adrian Hong’s speech Escape from North Korea. A much longer speech by a survivor of a North Korean concentration camp can be viewed here. Hat Tip: Todd Seavey.

As health care costs keep rising, a good part of that rise is due to insurance fraud.  According to the New York Times, 10 doctors, in 9 separate clinics, funneling money  through a total of 105 different corporations conspired to defraud private insurance programs for over $250 million.  And this plot is just the tip of the iceberg in a vast culture of fraud.

American Rattlesnake cares because most of these conspirators are immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union:

This one, like many others, was rooted in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the locus of the city’s Russian-speaking immigrant population, many of whom grew up under a Communist system that bred disdain for the rules and a willingness to cheat to get around them.

Brighton Beach has one of the highest rates of health care fraud in the nation, according to federal statistics. In fact, an analysis of data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates those two programs, shows that more health care providers in the Brighton Beach ZIP code are currently barred from the programs for malfeasance than in almost any other ZIP code in the United States. (The top spot is in southern Florida, with its high proportion of older residents.)

“This is the Russian mind-set, and this is why it’s endemic in the system,” said one law-enforcement official who has investigated organized-crime groups from the former Soviet Union. “If you’re not scamming the system, if you’re not scamming the government, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing — you’re looked upon as a patsy.”

One of the most harmful aspects of our nation’s current immigration policy is its manifold refugee resettlement programs, the disastrous consequences of which have been amply documented on this website. That’s why the speech Don Barnett, currently a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and expert on refugee resettlement in the United States, delivered to the Penn Club on Tuesday night is so crucial to understanding the scale of the problem faced by small towns and communities throughout America. A former employee of the United States Information Agency within the U.S. State Department, he spent an extensive part of his career working in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, which produced most of the refugees brought to the United States during the Cold War Era.

Today we have a much different approach to refugee resettlement that, as Barnett pointed out repeatedly during the course of his speech, is completely untethered to any concrete American foreign policy goal, and which is divorced from any traditional definition of the term itself. Even as President Obama promises to end the signature law that allowed hundreds of thousands of refuseniks and political and religious dissidents to emigrate from Russia and the former USSR, the amount of refugees being sent to America from the third world increases exponentially. As Barnett noted in his talk, and as even open borders advocates readily concede, the United States accepts more than four times as many refugees as every other industrialized nation combined. This despite the ineluctable fact that the pool of genuine refugees has rapidly diminished since the conclusion of the Cold War, a reality that becomes fungible when the very definition of the word refugee is altered in order to encompass everyone who belongs to a specific persecuted religious, ethnic, or political group or gender, even if the person being given permanent residency is currently living in his country of origin. Now even an IDP, or internally displaced person, becomes a “refugee” eligible for possible resettlement in the United States.

Barnett highlighted some of the most deleterious changes in refugee policy over the past 3-4 decades, including the Refugee Act of 1980, sponsored by former Senator Ted Kennedy and current Vice-President Joe Biden, which officially decoupled American refugee policy from American foreign policy goals. This law enshrined the nebulous United Nations definition of “refugee” into American law, allowed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to exercise discretion in referring foreigners-most from nomadic, tribal cultures that have no familiarity with Western norms or customs-to the State Department, and empowered local “voluntary” organizations whose payroll is a function of continued, unwanted refugee migratory patterns to the United States.

These voluntary agencies, or VOLAGs for short, get generous stipends from the federal government, i.e. American taxpayers, for finding purported refugees, as well as compensation for the imputed costs of help rendered to these people, despite the fact that once they arrive in the United States these refugees are abandoned by their sponsors and shunted off to local social service agencies. In fact, “hooking up” these newcomers with already overburdened taxpayer-funded welfare programs is the primary goal of many of these agencies. While only comprising one percent of their clientele, they constitute over fifty percent of their funding, which explains why these groups fought so vigorously against any curtailment in the flow of refugees into the United States following the September 11th massacres, however brief. Catholic Charities constitutes the top leech of these parasitical organizations, generating over half of its annual revenue by bilking American taxpayers, millions upon millions of it earmarked specifically to unravel the social fabric of local communities through the resettlement of  unassimilable refugees from the third world.

Beyond the social and economic devastation this has wrought upon small communities like Lewiston, Maine and Clarkston, Geogia, there exist secondary and tertiary effects of this incestuous relationship between the federal government and the refugee funneling agencies that rely upon it for sustenance. It has crowded out private charities that might have served a similar role-without dunning American taxpayers-as well as fostered systemic corruption in agencies operating under the auspices of the already notoriously corrupt United Nations. The Somali Bantus-probably the most recognizable recipient of State Department generosity over the past two decades-epitomize the deep structural flaws of the refugee resettlement process, from the endemic fraud-even immigration attorneys, when pressed, will concede that over eighty percent of refugees lie during their application process-to its arbitrary selection process, to the lack of proper verification procedures. The latter is a particularly pressing need, since the federal government has promised to do genetic paternity testing-a dubious proposition in a polygamous society such as Somalia-for the better part of a year yet still has not implemented any program to that effect. The corruption of the process is reflected in the allocation of  trafficking, or T visas, which are allegedly reserved for victims of human trafficking. The recipients of these visas are probably viewed by the uninitiated as victimized women and children, but in reality they are men in over 70% of the cases, most of which are labor related and have nothing to do with sexual bondage and trafficking for the purposes of forced prostitution.

The worst part of this situation is that the price tag for supporting these people is astronomical, yet consciously obscured by those who have a vested interest in perpetuating the flow of taxpayer-dependent refugees hosted by the United States. While advocates for these programs maintain that most of these individuals attain “self-sufficiency” within a year, they neglect to mention that their definition of self-sufficiency is based solely upon refugees enrolled in Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, i.e. those who receive direct cash assistance from the federal government. The fact that half of these refugees receive food stamps and are enrolled in Medicaid, that over a quarter reside in public housing-in this city there is a three year waiting list for such accommodations-that they are three times more likely to be enrolled in SSI-a permanent program-and that most do not have medical insurance, and are therefore reliant upon emergency rooms for routine medical care, is never factored into their actuarial tables. Therefore, the true cost of this country’s refugee resettlement program are never revealed to the American public, although it is widely estimated to be more than ten times the one billion dollars in direct cash assistance these refugees receive during any single year.

One very dispirited audience member, during the question and answer session at the end of Mr. Barnett’s speech, asked if there was anything positive to report amid the welter of very depressing information he had conveyed during the course of his hour-long presentation. Although Barnett conceded that the refugee problem was going to be with us for many years to come, he assured the questioner that there were positive developments to report. Here he cited the response of his own city, Nashville, Tennessee, which has rebelled against the increased costs-economically, socially, and culturally-refugee resettlement has imposed upon ordinary citizens during one of the most prolonged economic crises in American history. In the case of Nashville-and the state of Tennessee-the refugees being dumped upon American taxpayers are Kurds. The fact that  Kurds already have a prosperous, fully-functioning autonomous land in which to live-one that is almost paradisaical in nature if we’re to go by the promotional material-has not stopped the State Department from planting thousands of them in the places like Davidson County.

Yet the good people of the Volunteer State have fought back, and just this past June-with the help of the Tennessee Eagle Forum and Act for America-compelled their state legislature to enact the Tennessee Refugee Absorptive Capacity Act. Although watered down after ferocious lobbying from the usual suspects-led by Catholic Charities-it represents a distinctive achievement in the fight to reject refugee resettlement, which impacts every part of the United States. This is demonstrative proof that citizen activism, if focused, can achieve results, and serves as an incentive for anyone who might believe that this is an insoluble problem. The challenge ahead might be difficult, but it is not impossible.