Crafty Commies

The Cold War had it right – those Communists sure are sneaky and not to be trusted, least of all with being original. While doing some completely unrelated research, I stumbled across some acts of true evil that must be revealed.

First published in the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Fairclough reveals that North Korea has been flooding the U.S. market with counterfeit cigarettes. While this is a relatively old story (the original article being published in 2006), Center for a New American Security (CNAS)’s newest report highlights the Korean counterfeit cigarettes case study as an instance in which sanctions were an effective means of coercive diplomacy. As CNAS’s January 2011 report described, “private industry estimates that North Korea’s gross revenue from counterfeit cigarettes alone amounts to between 550 – 700 million dollars per year, making the DPRK the number two counterfeit cigarette producer in the world (after China)” (Asher et. al. 34). North Korea produced several different brands of counterfeit cigarettes, including Marlboros, to such a high quality that products seized in Miami “even included forged pamphlets urging smokers to visit a Web site to find information about the health dangers of cigarettes and the admonition, ‘Don't Litter’ on the side of the box. Some also have copies of state tax stamps.”North Korea isn’t the only Red country to be ripping off original American products and trying to pass them off to the rest of the world. On January 23, 2011, China released a video of an air force drill that was remarkably similar to a scene in Top Gun. That film is awful enough, the world doesn’t need someone else trying to bring it back. The final scene of the film was spliced into the drill footage and aired on state television, CCTV. Although the film was taken down shortly afterwards, the Wall Street Journal ran the footage from Top Gun and the Chinese air force drill side by side. Note to China: If you’re going to try to make your military look all cool and powerful, don’t use a movie made 25 years ago to try to make your point and hope no one will notice. If you are going to steal film footage and splice it into military videos, at least choose a good movie.