“He rejects all questions about extrajudicial killings or humanitarian atrocities as propaganda: “The media is often reporting that we execute people, which is not true,” he claims.”
Interesting article. I often wonder about the mindset of people who deny the obvious facts. Does he really believe it or is he just cynical?
Neither, IMO. From observing him over the years, he knows what's good for him, and he knows how to get a good vibe going with others at the same time. The vibe can make anything true or false and is not known for being concerned with moral true/false questions, which get into subjective (qualitative) ethics. (You can argue that those same ethics prevent reasonably helpful business from being done in many cases, as distasteful as it sounds.)
I'd add that he has a good nose for opportunity and a higher than average threshold for risk. This is your typical "fixer" type.
It’s probably like being an ambassador from a country with lots of controversy around human rights and so on and they get interviewed when something big hits the news. It’s not like they don’t know what happens but it’s in their and their countries’ interest to see things differently.
Probably this. No atrocities committed by any government were done because the government viewed itself as 'evil' so it must do evil things, the perpetrators always view their crimes as justified for some form of greater good. If one believes a single lie is just a single stepping stone on the path to some grand utopia, or if that lie would prevent some chaos (social disorder, rebellion, etc), some will have no problems telling that lie as many times as they need to.
An ambassador is a citizen of their country and is subject to getting recalled and being sent to reform-through-labor camp to forage corn kernels from frozen pig shit if they don't toe the line.
This guy, on the hand, has voluntarily chosen to be an apologist and enabler for one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet.
On the other hand, should the stars align so that anyone cares, Eritrea is open to foreign intervention.
Libya cancelled its nuclear program in the early 21st century and welcomed UN inspections. Then an international alliance force removed Gaddafi from power and he was killed.
I am sure would-be-dictators all over the world are taking note - if you have nukes, you don't face invasion.
Although he was a bad guy, doublecrossing him was a terrible choice and we’re feeling the consequences of that hubris.
That said what keeps the west from invading NKorea aren’t the nukes. It’s the katyusha and other conventional armament that would rain down on Seoul a few Kms across the border.
No question. The thought process though would be similar. His client isn’t going to take it lightly if he spills the beans—probably wouldn’t get a dose of Pu, but the guy running the place had his brother offed in a foreign airport.
The 2nd largest company on the Fortune 500 has its executives doing major business with a government that dismembers Washington Post employees in foreign embassies. In fact, US defense contractors were profiting off their slaughter of Yemenis until recently. The attempts to look abroad and decide to find someone to find fault with is risible.
The web site this comes from is named for someone who said about Israeld killing of hundreds of children in Gaza bombings "Israel cannot have a proportional response" against the Palestinians.
>I often wonder about the mindset of people who deny the obvious facts. Does he really believe it or is he just cynical?
This just made me think of Baghdad Bob so I looked him up and apparently he is still alive and allegedly living in the UAE. It would be interesting to hear what he thinks now of all the obvious lies he told almost two decades ago.
Funny you mention Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf considering it's been proven in hindsight that Iraq didn't have WMDs, in addition to the devastation that the invasion did to his country. ISIS wouldn't exist if your lot believed in his "obvious lies".
The guy is clearly lying considering that even the US does extra-judicial killings both inside (citizen-citizen) and outside the country (Drone strikes, CIA assassinations), regular executions of people (death penalty, even for treason).
Most Americans don’t bat an eye that they pay taxes to fund this. As long as it’s in our interest we turn a blind eye. As long as it’s someone else we look down on them.
Not a DPRK apologist. But I wouldn't really say "obvious" with respect to anything coming out of there... Just two weeks ago rumors ran rampant that the leader was dead... We just have no clue.
I have no doubt that there's rampant human rights abuse in NK but where have you seen photos of their abuse? I'd imagine they'd be very careful about that.
There are satellite pictures of the camps and I remember seeing cell phone picture of the inside. That together with the very consistent descriptions of people who have escaped from there should be enough.
There have been pictures, even cellphone video of things like public executions. Here's one recent report but people have been escaping the place and bringing evidence of abuse out for years.
Take this with a grain of salt as I’m talking from memory, but I think he’s acted as a middleman with North Korea to set up trips to the country for tourism, including for some Spanish journalists that were taken through very controlled routes. I remember the guy kept talking about how the North Koreans don’t mess around and so the people should be careful, about how great the Kim family is and about how proud he is to be so well considered by the regime.
I remember wondering if it’s all just a charade for him that allows him to have contact with North Korea (as in, him being some sort of agent), if he just found his business niche, of if he’s an idiot who drank the kool aid because he likes to feel he’s important.
As an aside, I was impressed watching those documentaries by how many North Korean officials spoke perfect Spanish without any
trace of an accent. Apparently some of them had lived and studied in Cuba for some time.
Edit: I found it, the documentary is called 'En tierra hostil', from 2015. It's currently only legally available under subscription from A3player, a streaming service from a private Spanish TV channel, but it might be viewable in other sites.
"Lately, Cao de Benós says he’s fostered agreements with European companies to use cheap, skilled labor on technology projects. “We develop a lot of apps for Android and iOS, and very cheap,” he says. “And we are very strong in animation. We export a lot for all kinds of modern cartoons.”
He cites an example, but obliquely: “Let’s say you’re making a cartoon, and you are outsourcing the work. So you go to Romania, because you know it’s very cheap.” But the Romanian company knows of an even cheaper option. Its representative flies to Pyongyang and makes a deal for the same work at half the cost—and then gets 50% of the fee without employing anyone. “This has happened,” he says. He will not name movies. Nor popular video games. North Korean labor is also behind websites and crypto, he says. The shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor are all around us."
I am particularly interested in the double outsource example he mentioned involving Romania. We know it's a shady country however, I think this happens more often and in more parts of the world. So it is entirely possible that companies that outsourced work from the US have paid for labor in North Korea without knowing about it or knowing about it and wanting to take advantage of a better project quote.
Sounds like a good investigative story for a tech journalist to pick up.
This could also be a security and privacy risk. Think of proxies of funneling data from consumers. Oh, how I hope for an app store where a tab would be present to see everyone who was involved which created the app and its web services and the github history of it. Wasn't the blockchain supposed to be the end all fix of transparency across the supply chain?
Nope, it is. I am from there and can certainly tell you that it's true. Nice job trying to cover it up though. Virgil! It is full of bullshitters, thieves, and good people who are misled by their government which plays on their hopes and fucks them up the ass while they protest their hearts away every year. Then again I could substitute any other country name and the sentence would still make sense wouldn't it? Definitely doesn't help that a lot of scams originate there.
> It is full of bullshitters, thieves, and good people who are misled by their government which plays on their hopes and fucks them up the ass while they protest their hearts away every year
I'm not entirely sure what country you're talking about here. Is it Romania? United States? Maybe United Kingdom?
Yikes, can you please edit out personal swipes from your comments to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? We're here for curious conversation. It's also best to avoid denunciatory rhetoric, not because things don't deserve denouncing, but because it degrades internet discussion quality badly.
> Nope, it is. I am from there and can certainly tell you that it's true.
You must live in one heck of a bubble, I'm a Romanian and definitely wouldn't describe it as "shady".
While you clearly have some issues with the way certain things are going inside the country, the generalizations you're making are definitely exaggerated.
People just don't know the Eastern Bloc all that well. It is shady as the OP says. It's a mentality and a way of life that the more polite-class citizens of those countries there are trying to unwind and return to some bastion of civility, but it's hard when the modern-day mafia runs the governments and does it's best to stay in power.
At least here, the corruption isn't as obvious. Over there, they wag their tail right in your face and ask you what are you going to do about it.
People emigrate from these countries to say, North America or Western Europe or UK in search of a better life.
I'm not saying that all countries are equally corrupt. I'm saying that the angry citizen's rant at the government, in broad-brush terms, is pretty much equally applicable anywhere.
I wouldn't even think of this as being shady. If you're a firm based in a country where it's politically/legally ok to work with people in North Korea, and someone (from a country where it isn't) employs you to do some work, and doesn't contractually require you to do the work yourself, and you know you can get someone else to do it for much cheaper, but still meet all the requirements... why wouldn't you do that? It's not shady at all; it's just... smart. The client is getting the product for the agreed-upon price. They're effectively paying for your ability to work with people that they can't work with.
There is rich irony in exploiting a country that rejects global capitalism while believing that "the shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor" is socialist at all.
>The shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor are all around us
what a weird smear. who in their right mind really believes DPRK is the realization of any kind of socialism? i guess the nazis were socialists too then.
>The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization,[9] which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism.
I'm at -1 downvotes on the above comment. There should be some kind of system that reverses this kind of denialism on the bastion of intellectualism we call hn.
I'm a bit surprised that companies are even doing business with North Korea considering how unreliable they have been in the past.
In the 70s, when they at least seemed to be on par with South Korea in terms of development [1], they imported mining equipment and 1,000 cars from Sweden but never fully paid for them [2].
I guess the risk is worth it for some companies/individuals if they're only spending a few thousand dollars to potentially save many more.
> “Let’s say you’re making a cartoon, and you are outsourcing the work. So you go to Romania, because you know it’s very cheap.” But the Romanian company knows of an even cheaper option. Its representative flies to Pyongyang and makes a deal for the same work at half the cost—and then gets 50% of the fee without employing anyone. “This has happened,” he says. He will not name movies. Nor popular video games. North Korean labor is also behind websites and crypto, he says. The shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor are all around us.
The Onion was right all along [3].
And I know this is a pretty stereotypical nitpick, but I wish they (both the author and Cao de Benós) would be more specific and refer to DPRK's ideology as Juche [4], instead of just calling it socialism. Ignoring nuances in political ideologies just makes them more difficult to discuss.
For more about this guy I highly recommend watching the documentary Friends of Kim in which he plays a starring role. You can even find it on YouTube. TL;DR he and a bunch of "friends of the DPRK" went to NK to participate in a parade and shout "Yankee Go Home" but then he started acting suspicious and turned on other members of the group.
Which proves ancient statement "Greed and cowardliness rule the world". I'm sure, there are people even in Western democracies, who perfectly aware where their outsource projects comes from. Not to say about China and Russia - they use slave labor of North Koreans for decades. Slaves from North Korea built stadiums for World Cup 2018 [0] in Russia. Everyone there knew about it (I'm Russian as well), there was plenty of evidence. Did anyone boycott the games?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 93.0 ms ] threadInteresting article. I often wonder about the mindset of people who deny the obvious facts. Does he really believe it or is he just cynical?
Neither, IMO. From observing him over the years, he knows what's good for him, and he knows how to get a good vibe going with others at the same time. The vibe can make anything true or false and is not known for being concerned with moral true/false questions, which get into subjective (qualitative) ethics. (You can argue that those same ethics prevent reasonably helpful business from being done in many cases, as distasteful as it sounds.)
I'd add that he has a good nose for opportunity and a higher than average threshold for risk. This is your typical "fixer" type.
This guy, on the hand, has voluntarily chosen to be an apologist and enabler for one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet.
Does North Korea have any competition for this title? I thought they were number one on that list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Eritrea
Libya cancelled its nuclear program in the early 21st century and welcomed UN inspections. Then an international alliance force removed Gaddafi from power and he was killed.
I am sure would-be-dictators all over the world are taking note - if you have nukes, you don't face invasion.
That said what keeps the west from invading NKorea aren’t the nukes. It’s the katyusha and other conventional armament that would rain down on Seoul a few Kms across the border.
This just made me think of Baghdad Bob so I looked him up and apparently he is still alive and allegedly living in the UAE. It would be interesting to hear what he thinks now of all the obvious lies he told almost two decades ago.
“If only I was in America, then with my talents I would have had an awesome career in law, politics, or business.”
Most Americans don’t bat an eye that they pay taxes to fund this. As long as it’s in our interest we turn a blind eye. As long as it’s someone else we look down on them.
Not a DPRK apologist. But I wouldn't really say "obvious" with respect to anything coming out of there... Just two weeks ago rumors ran rampant that the leader was dead... We just have no clue.
There have been pictures, even cellphone video of things like public executions. Here's one recent report but people have been escaping the place and bringing evidence of abuse out for years.
https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-north-korea-public-execu...
Take this with a grain of salt as I’m talking from memory, but I think he’s acted as a middleman with North Korea to set up trips to the country for tourism, including for some Spanish journalists that were taken through very controlled routes. I remember the guy kept talking about how the North Koreans don’t mess around and so the people should be careful, about how great the Kim family is and about how proud he is to be so well considered by the regime.
I remember wondering if it’s all just a charade for him that allows him to have contact with North Korea (as in, him being some sort of agent), if he just found his business niche, of if he’s an idiot who drank the kool aid because he likes to feel he’s important.
As an aside, I was impressed watching those documentaries by how many North Korean officials spoke perfect Spanish without any trace of an accent. Apparently some of them had lived and studied in Cuba for some time.
Edit: I found it, the documentary is called 'En tierra hostil', from 2015. It's currently only legally available under subscription from A3player, a streaming service from a private Spanish TV channel, but it might be viewable in other sites.
He cites an example, but obliquely: “Let’s say you’re making a cartoon, and you are outsourcing the work. So you go to Romania, because you know it’s very cheap.” But the Romanian company knows of an even cheaper option. Its representative flies to Pyongyang and makes a deal for the same work at half the cost—and then gets 50% of the fee without employing anyone. “This has happened,” he says. He will not name movies. Nor popular video games. North Korean labor is also behind websites and crypto, he says. The shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor are all around us."
I am particularly interested in the double outsource example he mentioned involving Romania. We know it's a shady country however, I think this happens more often and in more parts of the world. So it is entirely possible that companies that outsourced work from the US have paid for labor in North Korea without knowing about it or knowing about it and wanting to take advantage of a better project quote. Sounds like a good investigative story for a tech journalist to pick up.
This could also be a security and privacy risk. Think of proxies of funneling data from consumers. Oh, how I hope for an app store where a tab would be present to see everyone who was involved which created the app and its web services and the github history of it. Wasn't the blockchain supposed to be the end all fix of transparency across the supply chain?
You think it is - in reality, it's not really so shady. He probably picked the name not because it's true but because it's believable.
I'm not entirely sure what country you're talking about here. Is it Romania? United States? Maybe United Kingdom?
Yikes, can you please edit out personal swipes from your comments to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? We're here for curious conversation. It's also best to avoid denunciatory rhetoric, not because things don't deserve denouncing, but because it degrades internet discussion quality badly.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
You must live in one heck of a bubble, I'm a Romanian and definitely wouldn't describe it as "shady".
While you clearly have some issues with the way certain things are going inside the country, the generalizations you're making are definitely exaggerated.
People just don't know the Eastern Bloc all that well. It is shady as the OP says. It's a mentality and a way of life that the more polite-class citizens of those countries there are trying to unwind and return to some bastion of civility, but it's hard when the modern-day mafia runs the governments and does it's best to stay in power.
At least here, the corruption isn't as obvious. Over there, they wag their tail right in your face and ask you what are you going to do about it.
People emigrate from these countries to say, North America or Western Europe or UK in search of a better life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSU1IJk70i4
what a weird smear. who in their right mind really believes DPRK is the realization of any kind of socialism? i guess the nazis were socialists too then.
>The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization,[9] which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4206218/
I guess the risk is worth it for some companies/individuals if they're only spending a few thousand dollars to potentially save many more.
> “Let’s say you’re making a cartoon, and you are outsourcing the work. So you go to Romania, because you know it’s very cheap.” But the Romanian company knows of an even cheaper option. Its representative flies to Pyongyang and makes a deal for the same work at half the cost—and then gets 50% of the fee without employing anyone. “This has happened,” he says. He will not name movies. Nor popular video games. North Korean labor is also behind websites and crypto, he says. The shadow hands of globally sanctioned socialist labor are all around us.
The Onion was right all along [3].
And I know this is a pretty stereotypical nitpick, but I wish they (both the author and Cao de Benós) would be more specific and refer to DPRK's ideology as Juche [4], instead of just calling it socialism. Ignoring nuances in political ideologies just makes them more difficult to discuss.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_North_Korea#/media/...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/04/547390622/...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C76HqPaA6kw
[0] https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/3205842/russia-2018-world-cup...