North Koreans riding on the back of a pickup truck carry props to be used during upcoming anniversary celebrations, Thursday, October 8, 2015, in Pyongyang, North Korea.
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North Korea will celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party on Saturday with a massive military parade expected to show off its military might and feature concerts, performances and exhibitions.
Uniformed bands were practicing, children were drilling, many as young as five, marching in step to the drummers ahead. It will be the most important event since April 2012, when the country celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Kim Illinois Sung.
The preparations for the Workers’ Party of Korea anniversary appear to have begun as early as May, when satellite images captured approximately 45 tents assembled at a former Pyongyang airbase, according to an analysis posted on website 38 North.
While Kim Jong Un is seen as unfavorable toward China, there is no doubt he is seeking China’s cooperation in his desperate bid for foreign currency spoils.
In the frenzy leading up to the event, the capital has been plastered with posters and banners extolling the party’s achievements. Kim Jong-Un and his dictatorship still use barbaric methods against political opponents and dissidents.
However, as the in-flight magazine of the state airline Koryo Air points out, “these days the song “we can’t get along without him” is much in vogue”.
Lankov listed a plethora of reasons – the big cost, the social upheaval, the North Korean leadership’s reluctance to surrender power – that explained why neither side genuinely wanted reunification, even if both still publicly espoused the idea.
Curiously in this paradise of equality, our plane – a Russian-built Tupelov – had Business Class seats.
Every North Korean child learns from school the official history of the party.
These same lawmakers, members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, pushed outgoing Speaker John Boehner to announce his resignation just two weeks ago by threatening a floor vote on his speakership. Full weaponization of all nuclear materials the country has produced would therefore produce ten to sixteen actual weapons, he concluded. Albright also expressed concerns that more weapons could be produced if North Korea decides to use its light-water reactor facilities to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
There was no garbage in the streets, but neither was there any dissent. However, no state can remain in power via these means indefinitely, especially after a period of 70 years and now into the third generation of a dynasty, as the fate of countless authoritarian governments leaders over the past century can testify.
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A policeman directs traffic in Pyongyang, Thursday. In April he also said the North is believed to be capable of miniaturizing nuclear warheads to put on its new KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile and fire it at the USA mainland. The emergence of semiprivate businesses such as taxi companies in recent years has provided the state with fresh sources of income, said Go Myung-hyun, an expert on North Korea at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a Seoul-based think tank.
