October, 2004 Soundings
"In 1990, the reported value of [North Korean] imports was nearly $3 billion (in current U.S. dollars). Eight years later, the reported level had dropped below $1.2 billion—a catastrophic fall of over 60 percent. After 1998, however, North Korea's imports rebounded markedly. By 2001, the reported level exceeded $2 billion—and it appears to have risen through 2003."
How was North Korea able to pull this off? "It may be perplexing and counterintuitive to see the United States . . . . described as a major backer of the North Korean state. Yet this is now in fact the case. . . . In the 1996-2002 period, Washington awarded Pyongyang just over $1 billion in food aid, concessional fuel oil, and medical supplies. . . . We can never know what would have happened if the United States and her allies in Asia and Europe had refrained from underwriting the survival of the North Korean state in the late 1990s and the early years of the present decade. . . . What we know—or think we know—is that the DPRK was failing economically in the mid-1990s. But in the late 1990s and early years of the current decade the prospect of 'economic collapse' was diminished materially by an upsurge in provisions of goods from abroad—goods that were financed in considerable measure by new flows of Western foreign aid.
"What thus seems beyond dispute is that the upsurge of Western aid for the DPRK under 'Sunshine' and 'engagement' policy played a role—possibly an instrumental role—in reducing the risk of economic collapse and increasing the odds of survival for the North Korean state." "The Persistence of North Korea," Nicholas Eberstadt, Policy Review, October and November 2004.
"[Stanley] Crouch places himself in the ranks of black conservatives, like John McWhorter, who denounce the cancer of barbarism growing in black popular culture. He is vocally disgusted by hip-hop music's 'neo-Sambo … mugging or scowling' with 'gold teeth, drop-down pants, and tasteless jewelry.' He bravely chastises producers and 'artists' who peddle the same 'bullying, hedonistic buffoons' D. W. Griffith portrayed in Birth of a Nation. The spark and originality of Crouch's criticism—what will make it impossible to ignore him—is that he takes the customary disgust of conservative critics and goes it one better. He derides the purveyors of crudity because they are, after all, guilty, but he sees the real danger in a wider cultural trend, one more to do with 'authenticity anxiety' than race. That trend is the belief, slipped into circulation by the liberal intellectual elite, that what is most 'real' is what is most base, most closely allied to the loutish ways of the lower orders." "Authenticity Blues," Stefan Beck, The New Criterion, November 2004.
