White dude checking in, lived in SK for six years, but I speak Korean and married into a Korean family. As far as I can tell, SK is full of libs. Being a commie is basically illegal there. But North Korea is way more popular than you would think, particularly in the southwest. A few years ago one of the presidential candidates (Yi Jung-hee I believe, who was polling at like 3%) got on the debate stage with Park Geun-hye (who was later impeached and imprisoned for basically taking orders from a shaman) entirely to yell at her. Apparently Yi slipped up and used some North Korean language while describing ROK—like she called it the "southern government" or something. Really really funny. Imagine an American presidential candidate referring to the United States as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the great satan in front of millions of people.
I think America retreating basically means China advancing. SK already does a shitload of business with China, but American business is also all over the fucking place in SK. (McDonald's and Starbucks are basically packed 24/7 nationwide.) But again, in my experience Koreans talk shit about the Chinese all the fucking time, even though China has a massive influence on their culture. All the different countries in East Asia fucking hate each other as far as I can tell. The only country Koreans hate more than China is Japan. Korean college students I worked with would complain about Japan constantly and, in my opinion, justifiably, especially like when the fucking Japanese prime minister visited the Yasakuni Shrine to honor all the fascist war criminals buried there. I think older folks maybe hate China more though. I remember overhearing a Korean boomer in a restaurant talking about 중국놈—choong-goog-nom, basically an impolite term for a "Chinese guy"—pretty casually with his friends. The Koreans I met also basically blame their pretty serious air pollution problems entirely on China. Again, this is my experience, I don't mean to generalize. As a white dude my experience is limited. I lived in a conservative part of the country (although to be conservative in Korea means, among many things, supporting universal health care) and might not have run into any South Korean communists. Or they just never felt comfortable enough to tell me.
The situation is complicated. Koreans (generalizing, in my experience) disdain China, support but don't really think about North Korea, despise Japan, and have a love-hate relationship with the USA. If you check out a great book called Ghost Flames, about the Korean war, you can learn about how there used to be shitloads of communists and leftists in South Korea, although sadly most were either executed during the war or fled to the North. There was another wave of repression (thousands of people imprisoned or disappeared) during the long reign of the dictator who developed the country, Park Chung-hee.
My conservative, Bernie-supporting wife tells me that the liberals are probably not going to win the next presidential election in South Korea. A conservative president will lead to more pro-American, anti-North Korean policies and probably more military confrontations in the DMZ. Things have been pretty quiet there for some time because Moon Jae-in, the liberal president (but way cooler than any liberals in the USA), has been sending money to North Korea for years (I believe). Coronavirus is also getting out of control in SK again, which fucking sucks, although of course on a per capita basis it's still nothing compared to the USA.
Do Koreans compared to Americans have a greater understanding of what left politics look like or is it much more warped? My gut says even worse due to decades of propaganda about the DPRK.
Not in my experience but having stronger unions, an excellent public health care and transportation system, and suffering under generations of imperialism goes a long way to putting people’s heads in the right place. Generally however they think communism = NK = bad.
Shit next time I'm in Korea visiting family we should hang out!
I'm crying that I don't have a new friend to drink beer with now.
Bruh we can hike a mountain and eat pajeon and chug rice wine at the top someday.
She’s conservative in Korea but a democratic socialist in the USA. The overton window is a bit more to the left in SK in some ways. She supports universal health care and housing and unionizing and trans people and anti-racism and anti-imperialism and doesn’t give a fuck about Biden or the Democrats but doesn’t want to call herself a socialist. I got in a little trouble with her mom the other day for using the Korean word for “comrade” in reference to my wife.
Isn’t the current prime minister currently softening SK’s stance toward China and he favors a peaceful reunification with NK. It seems SK will eventually be more open with China out of pragmatic reasons.
if the US ever reduces the flow of money and weapons into Israel, they will set off a dirty bomb in Jerusalem and one inside the US, blaming Tehran and Hamas for both. then they will nuke Tehran, make a global call for evangelical Christians to come defend the Holy Land in the End Times, where they will train and arm them to fight a holy war of terror against any non Israeli-aligned factions back in the US, and then return them to US soil so that the final days of US empire are the darkest in history.
People keep proposing some dramatic scenarios here but I think the real answer is a lot more boring. Unlike the USSR, China doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck what the guiding ideology of the nations they ally with are, if you’re willing to buy their shit they’ll do business with you. Out of pure self preservation I think most politicians in US allied states would start shifting to more pro-China rhetoric as American power wanes. Internally in most of those nations not a ton would change.
Japan would easily transition to a multipolar or China centric world. The Cold War was the best time ever for Japan because they knew how to play the US. Calling Japan a puppet state is totally off, I think.
Israel, very hard to predict. I really don't know.
SK, being smooshed between NK, PRC, and a less-US aligned Japan will adjust to fit its neighbors and develop real relationships with its other half, though I doubt there will be full reunification because it would require more compromise than either side would want. Some kind of loose Korean federation is plausible.
mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max mad max
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mad max
:zizek-ok:
The Japanese far-right would be the dog that caught the car if the U.S. had to abandon its bases there. I imagine they'd bluster a lot about rebuilding their military and nixing the post-war treaty, but China is at a point now where any economic or military challenge from Japan would be laughed down. The country would probably just transition to being a Chinese satelite, which might be good for Left anti-austerity movements there.
Although given how even the Japanese communist party doesn't like the CPC, maybe not.
If anything, with the US out of the way, I'd see Japan attempting to make the ROK into a satellite state, except miserably failing due to increased pressure to compete economically with China. If America declines, then I'm guessing Japan would do a speed run of the last 30 years of American history, starting with austerity and ending with a PM somehow even weirder than Taro Aso.
Why is Taro Aso weird? I feel like Japan trying to make the ROK into a satellite would be a disaster because Koreans aren't fans of Japan.
He's comparable to George W Bush in a lot of ways. He's awful at public speaking and notorious for pronouncing words wrong, even really simple ones. He comes from an extremely wealthy family that maintained friendships with a lot of prominent politicians. He has a talent for saying the weirdest, wrongest, most racist or sexist things possible but then try to play it off by saying like he was tired or they're mistakes anyone could make. Like once a few years back he said no one noticed when Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany. One of his more famous statements is "hurry up and die" in regards to Japan's elderly population.
For some reason he's also the Japanese government's anime ambassador?
Oh boy, where to start. Imagine an extremely chipper Joe Biden who loves anime and is also technically royalty.
Oh Taro Aso. Last PM had to step down because his asshole was bleeding, so the LDP just replaced him with an actual bleeding asshole.
Edit: nvm, I mixed up Aso with Suga for some reason. I stand by the bit though.
Although given how even the Japanese communist party doesn’t like the CPC, maybe not.
Honestly they need to get unrecognized as a communist party internationally and replace their spot with the Japan Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist)
Japan Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist)
This ceased to exist in 1999. Its successor is supposedly the Workers' Communist Party In Japan.
All I can find is this where it says it split like 3 times
The only conclusion I have come to thus far is that Japan's so fucking reactionary their communists are our corporate libs.
Their Wikipedia article:
https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/労働者共産党
Their official webpage: http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/i/ga3129/
(If you don’t speak Japanese, DeepL handles the language better than Google Translate.)
Of Japanese revolutionary parties, Chukakuha is probably more well known and has a greater online presence (including a YouTube channel).
Japanese communist party are just the same thing that UK Labour or the US Democrats are, controlled opposition for the conservative party. They would absolutely kowtow to economic influence from China.
Can easily imagine that Israel is going to stay on the course it's been on, taking more and more land and continuing to murder Palestinians.
If the stream of money is cut, I imagine them stop expanding at least, eradicating anything brown left "inside" and becoming a nuke-armed hermit.
A superpower in decline can still project a lot of military power. Just look at Russia, and what they've been able to do in Ukraine and Syria and everywhere in between.
Israel might turn to more crowdfunding, but 5 billion or so is not that big of a fraction of the US government's budget.
Korean unification is pretty likely if the US isn't there to prop up the south. even if it was done in a hong kong two-systems way it'd still be super great.
Japan and South Korea will probably get closer to China. Hard to say what happens with Israel.
