Felix Abt's Blog, page 3

NORTH KOREA — BANNED BY HOSTILE FOREIGN POWERS TO USE...

NORTH KOREA

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BANNED BY HOSTILE FOREIGN POWERS TO USE HI-TECH IN FOOD PROCESSING

Media call North Korea either a “technological backwater” or a country that “violates sanctions” when it does acquire modern technology such as robots from the ABB Group whose chief representative I used to be in the DPRK.

Photo

INTERVIEW WITH A CAPITALIST: LIFE, VENTURES AND ADVENTURES IN THE HERMIT KINGDOM

“Setting up multiple businesses, North Korea’s first business
school and the first foreign chamber...

DID ANYBODYread my book while smoking North Korean cigarettes?

DID ANYBODY

read my book while smoking North Korean cigarettes? 

QUALITY MEDICINE — ABORTED BY INHUMANE SANCTIONSBy chance I...

QUALITY MEDICINE — ABORTED BY INHUMANE SANCTIONS

By chance I came across this old picture (© gettyimages / Bloomberg) for the first time. It represents my 3-legged concept for a quality pharmacy chain I developed with my North Korean staff. I tried to realize it in the first 4 PyongSu pharmacies which I set up when I lived in Pyongyang:

1. Quality pharmaceuticals (made by PyongSu JV Co. Ltd., other DPRK pharma companies, and imported ones) ☑ 

2. affordable prices ☑ 

3. competent staff giving competent advice ☑

But North Korea sanctions dealt a blow to it and Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign destroyed foreign investment in North Korea. His “sanctions” also prevented North Korean pharmaceutical companies from achieving or maintaining the international industry standard called GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) as defined by the WHO.

Decadent Capitalist: Tales from the Hermit Kingdom

With his long career working for multi-national corporations in some of the most dangerous parts of...

SANCTIONS AND THE TARGETING OF A POPULATION: THE CONTINUATION OF THE KOREAN WAR BY OTHER MEANS AND ITS IMPACT ON ORDINARY NORTH KOREANS

By Felix Abt, author and entrepreneur(Published in January 2018 by Imperial Military Watch, a...

NORTH KOREA BEHIND THE VEIL, by Felix AbtThis new book is a...

NORTH KOREA BEHIND THE VEIL, by Felix Abt

This new book is a collection of an insider’s short stories, articles and images providing a unique insight and a different perspective on the so-called Hermit Kingdom.

And this is what motivated the author, who lived and worked for seven years in North Korea, to publish it:

“North Korea has been portrayed for decades as a monolithic gulag network filled with slaves and a hellhole by the mass media. The socio-economic changes North Korea has undergone over the last decade or more have been almost entirely unreported.

Indeed, by the beginning of 2017, mass starvation had long ceased, while more and better-assorted markets emerged throughout the country (and yet you’re still reading that ‘North Korea’s regime is starving its population’).

Fewer people are punished for political crimes than in the past (but you still read that three generations of a family are sent to the gulag for the slightest political crime).

The rising middle class has been transforming the rigid old political class system since marketization has enabled people from lower classes to build their own business, with some becoming rich and even more influential than many party and government officials from the privileged ‘core class,’ something prohibited two decades ago. Yet, you’re still told by the media that a North Korean’s fate is solely defined by the social ‘caste’ he belongs to and so on.

Business people around the world have had no access to any news of positive progress, while any stories of ‘normal’ development are generally considered not to be newsworthy by the media.

Alas, the strangulating economic embargo which was imposed later in 2017, a de facto collective punishment, is bound to reverse this progress, causing enormous and unnecessary suffering to the North Korean people.”

Free download here

ALL RESOURCES ARE USED FOR THE ELITES AND FORBUILDING NUKES AND...

ALL RESOURCES ARE USED FOR THE ELITES AND FOR
BUILDING NUKES AND ROCKETS

That’s
the message you get from politicians, activists and media.

In
spite of strangulating sanctions, North Korea’s leading science and
technology university, Kim Chaek university, recently developed a
cranial CT scan
(see picture), known by a variety of names as well,
including brain scan, head scan, skull scan, and sinus scan which it
sells to
domestic hospitals for the amazingly low price of an average car (which
would cost in Western
countries the price of a small fleet of cars). Dr. Kee B.
Park, an American neurosurgeon and director of the DPRK programs (aimed
at
strengthening North Korea’s health system) of the Korean American
Medical
Association told me during August 2017 in Seoul: “The images from this
CT scan I
have seen are of satisfactory quality, helping doctors detect a variety
of
diseases and conditions.”

Photo credit: Kim
Chaek University

This is one of the stories from the new book NORTH KOREA BEHIND THE VEIL. Inside stories and images you can’t find anywhere else. What the media don’t want you to see. Free download here

QUOTE FROM A MAN IN THE IVORY TOWER

“Kim Jong Un has decided to do something his father was
afraid of — he has started introducing...