Mini-thread for rare books I've scanned from the "Letters From South Korea" series

Written in the '70s and '80s under the pen name TK, these were smuggled out of S.Korea and published in the magazine Sekai in Japan. The DPRK republished much of the series in English editions.🧵 These seem to have been a big deal at the time, and they strike me as very compelling and underappreciated historical sources. So I'm hoping to digitize as many of them as I can, and posted four so far.

My main scanned book thread:

https://twitter.com/zandapheri/status/1622307859529711618

@bubzz_trash @Parama_Coreafan I think harmonious families mean happy and loving families like these & isn't a euphemism

some data:
The Korean Family Health Association, a DPRK org which oversees issues of sexual/reproductive health, has had sexual orientation nondiscrimination in its bylaws for several years

https://twitter.com/zandapheri/status/1434240481802825730

@bubzz_trash @Parama_Coreafan DPRK-affiliated Chongryon schools for Koreans in Japan teach kids to respect people of all orientations+gender identities. the two links below are official reports on this from Chongryon's human rights org; one is a copy of an article from the DPRK newspaper in Japan, 조선신보

https://twitter.com/zandapheri/status/1622392783360360449

🇰🇵조선중앙년감📦📚🧵

Since 1949, the DPRK's Central News Agency has published the annual Korean Central Yearbook. Each contains hundreds of pages of domestic+foreign data: new/amended legal docs; leaders' writings; docs on DPRK diplomacy and inter-Korean relations; statements by social organizations and political parties; economic statistics; chronologies of major national+world events of the past year; geographic, historical, demographic, and sociopolitical info on foreign countries; data on international organizations; etc.

I posted PDFs of 16 issues:

Ongoing metathread of rare books I've scanned (and some I've recovered from web archives of now-unavailable sites, found in poorly indexed digital collections and converted to more accessible PDFs, etc), mostly on the Korean War, US atrocities, Cold War history, and the DPRK.🧵💖 조선에서의 미국침략자들의 만행에 관한 문헌집 (Documents on the Atrocities of the US Invaders in Korea). 조선로동당출판사 (Workers' Party of Korea Publishing House), Pyongyang, 1954. 514 pages
yadi.sk/i/0rhVi8H4GZ66…

https://twitter.com/zandapheri/status/1561582243373539330

A few people have asked me about the English versions of these documents, so I'll post the ones I know of in here. (Many were submitted as UN documents which means some are also available in French, Russian, and/or Chinese, which I'll also link just for good measure.)🧵

https://twitter.com/zandapheri/status/1561582243373539330

The full PDF in Korean, first of all: yadi.sk/i/OapgtoSa7SMO…

Trying to decide whether to share the most cursed documents I have. These are extremely rare and comprise 1500+ pages of data from Japan's WWII-era lethal biowarfare experiments on humans, translated by the US for its own BW program after it hired the key figures. Should I do it I'm only hesitating in case it might be of any current use for actually developing biological weapons, but in this case, although very hard to find, they've been declassified for decades, so anyone seriously looking for this info for that purpose probably already has them, right?

a fair amount has been written about the Black Panthers' admiration for the DPRK, but many sources ignore or downplay the fact that the feeling was mutual. here's some BPP-related DPRK news clippings I've collected, plus English transcripts from the CIA when available🧵 one section of the DPRK's annual Central Yearbook (조선중앙년감) gives geographic, economic, and political summaries of foreign countries, including major political parties. from 1969-1976, the Panthers were listed with (sometimes before) the Dems, Republicans, CPUSA, etc. [1/2]

I recently scanned & will share this VERY rare book, a 514-page collection of documents on US Korean War atrocities- many available in English, but I hope making them available in the language of the country concerned will be a useful addition to the historical record. details:🧵 1. 미제국주의 침략자들과 그 주구 리승만 도당이 조선 인민에 대하여 감행한 만행 (Atrocities carried out by the US imperialist aggressors and the Syngman Rhee clique against the Korean people) - 5 investigation reports by the United Democratic Fatherland Front