23 Comments

Thanks for this. I always appreciate the people who have the time, skills, and inclination to run this kind of stuff down.

I've been watching the rollout of this North Korean BS story since its beginning, and have been pretty sure from the beginning that it was pure invention, presumably to justify some escalation the West already had teed up. I've seen that all the corporate media have been running with this story despite the fact that no one has presented any real proof.

You speculate that the possible source of this invention is Ukrainian in origin, which is uncritically accepted by the West. I think most of those accepting and propagating such stuff know full well that it is lies, but as long as they can attribute it to someone else, they are more than happy to advance it.

This methodology seems reminiscent of stuff like "Russiagate" during Trump's first term.

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I agree with your comment.

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The names aren't Korean, but pseudo-Chinese. That should have been a dead giveaway.

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Yeah, the letter W and L (in the initial position) don't even exist in Hangul, the Korean alphabet.

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Of course the story is fake. However, if it gets the desired result, fake news is just as good as the genuine article.

Sort of like how Bush administration grandees admitted that maybe Iraq wasn't teeming with WMDs after all, but only after they already had gotten the war that they so craved.

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probably because Daily Mail retracted the story and deleted it.

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Seems to have been pulled,

But it was archived by someone here:

https://archive.is/hmPR6

There was a day when the SK story appeared out of Ukraine, SK and UK all at the same time

Another story was that UK was successfully training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s (but beneath the headlines the pilots were flying properllor driven planes with a max speed of 200mph - F-16s stall at that speed. It also clarified that the most important skill they were being trained in was speaking English, so a long way short of flying a jet fighter).

Of course the real story was that SK pilots might have joined the SK F-16s that had just arrived in Romania. That would require some explaining away and distraction.

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Valuable, thank you Stephen.

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appreciated

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Thanks for the post, wait when the German mainstream media use the wrong pictures.

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It's amazing that $725-million can't buy a better fake photo. Although, they probably tried faking the photo with Google's Chatbot but it came back with people that definitely would not have been from Korea so they had to go the old-fashioned route...

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The American press magnate W. R. Hearst told his employees at the beginning of the last century “not to let the truth get in the way of an interesting story.” It’s a saying that has become fashionable again in the last few years. Of course, those who follow it cannot be called journalists. They are just propagandists and, unfortunately, there are more and more of them.

Many thanks for the clarifications you give on each topic!

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Very interesting. Led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, but thank you.

The fake photo is a still from a 2:05 video. Lord Bebo posted it on X today. https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1864315307759738934

From there I found it on a Chinese video site posted over a year and a half ago, Feb 2023. https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1t8411g7vY

Also fun... The author, a mysterious Brit named "Will Stewart" and his outlet "east2west news", is a tabloid story factory covering Russia since 1992(!), reportedly. Just after the Soviet Union dissolved, by coincidence.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/10/23/bullshitting-russia

The journalist (ahem) profile of this supposed individual, "Will Stewart", is linked to the Daily Mail article which has now been taken down.

https://muckrack.com/will-stewart/articles

I credit this whole detour to several Duran videos, one just this week, saying no one has ever produced any photo evidence of the North Koreans in Kursk myth. Ask and ye shall receive.

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good sleuthing. well done

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The story is "from Ukraine," but probably only as a cut out from the National Endowment for Democracy, itself a cut out for DIA or the CIA.

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Thanks so much for the truth! Really a good job of the investigators!

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Love how the first two propaganda soldiers were female; that’s the frosting on the propaganda cake.

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What about the other 99,998 North Koreans in Kursk? Are those fake too? Say it ain't so!

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Well, if Kursk were awah in North Koreans, why was it necessary to publish an easily debunked fake when there should have been plenty of authentic photos?

If the Ukrainian military really were a well-oiled machine striding from triumph to triumph, why so many fake victory stories? And if Russian really were behaving like more loutish versions of the Mongol Horde, why is it necessary to publish so many fake atrocity stories?

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They just want you to think that, those North Koreans are sneaky, man. Especially in large groups

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If we take into account that the "Ukrainian propaganda mouthpiece" exists with other people's money, it is possible with a high degree of probability to allow direct participation of foreign specialists in this sector of the "Ukrainian economy". If the propaganda had been entrusted to the Ukrainians themselves, the Daily Mail would have seemed like a "trustworthy source" to everyone...

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Very true that the Daily Mail is not the most reliable, but both that paper and its sister paper the Mail on Sunday publish Peter Hitchens, who has been very good on international events, particularly the Ukraine-Russia war

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A strange paper - the only western media ever to discuss the scandal of the Syrian CW report changed by management at the OPCW were the Mail (Hitchens) and an Italian paper.

The comments below articles are probably the freest of any media in the world (or were last time I checked) and reveal huge scepticism by the British public.

But yes, mostly full of nonsenses.

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