not joking, i know someone who visited the dprk and one of the places where they make those posters. then the visitor politely asked and was allowed to take some of them home. the friggin hand painted originals!
my biggest (maybe) delusion is I could go to North Korea and be fine on account of I treat people like humans
You'd be totally fine. Plenty of people do it and have done it with no issues. Boy Boy made a great video out of their trip to the DPRK. There's nothing dangerous about going there at all
This is what westerners can’t comprehend. When they were allowed to travel to the DPRK they would gawk and stare and ask questions like “do they shoot you if you don’t pray to Kim Il Sung ten times a day?”. North Koreans aren’t brainwashed bumpkins. They are arguably more emotionally healthy and inarguably more well versed in the world around them than Americans. You get treated like that by some random gringo from Omaha, yeah you’re probably gonna be a little rude to them. That’s better than what those American tourists deserve.
Ya I literally don't get the no autopsy thing. Did the Trunp administration really push this?
“No autopsy” is literally a murder mystery trope that immediately means there was a cover-up
It's pretty shocking that they also tried to fly him straight back to the US instead of to a hospital in South Korea for treatment. Maybe things would've turned out differently if they'd done that?
otto warmbier, was caught trying to steal a poster at his hotel in the dprk and died after being repatriated following serious health complications during his incarceration
He died after his conviction. American coroners found no evidence that he was killed or tortured. The settler probably never worked a real day in his life.
The DPRK is quite literally at war with the US, which is actively trying to turn it into another Libya. The state can chill out and become Belgium when they don't have bi-annual war games planning an invasion against their country.
I mean this with no disrespect, but if you come from the West, your police serve capital. There's don't. I get that you're used your police serving the real estate industry and trying to fill quotas for drug crimes, and this is what you see every day.
If a cracker from the Hitler country was fucking around and not following the standards by which a guest in the country is expected to do then it's his fault. I get that to him from his perspective it would've seemed like such a nothingburger, and that we as members of the imperial core may sympathise with him at first, but he broke into a military section of the extravagant hotel he was staying at in order to steal this poster. It's sad that he passed during due to unrelated complications, but if he wanted to not be arrested he shouldn't have broken into the military wing of a country his homeland has been nothing but hitlerite towards.
And I mean unrelated, his medical complications were not due to his treatment (perhaps stress, to be fair) and the medical treatment I've read had been some of the best available to the DPRK despite embargo due to the ultimately political nature of his situation. Don't cry too hard though, US Congress has authorized that his parents are entitled to roughly 500 million dollars worth of the DPRK's economy if it ever "liberalizes".
The relevant question isn't "did he break the law", but "did NK mistreat him, or neglect him in custody, causing his illness"? I haven't seen any evidence they caused his illness through mistreatment, and it'd be pretty much impossible to prove so long after the fact if they did, unless said mistreatment involved broken bones or something. But what is much more believable is him being assaulted, perhaps strangled, by other prisoners upon incarceration, which would explain the "lack of oxygen to the brain" that the coroners report mentioned.
The DPRK authorities have some responsibility, if they are going to imprison him, to make sure that doesn't happen, IMO. It would fall under neglect. I mean either way he's no martyr, I certainly don't condemn the DPRK for it, but I think it's fair to say they could have handled it better. If this were one case out of dozens, or hundreds, of americans getting arrested in the DPRK, and one guy happens to get sick and go into a coma in custody, I'd be happy to accept it was coincidence or just stress, but it's not a common occurrence for an american to go to prison there, and americans are (rightly) hated there, so it's sorta hard to accept a healthy US college student just abruptly went into a vegetative coma with no acute cause besides stress when there are so many other possibilities that seem much more likely and simple.
Didn't the parents agree not to do an autopsy on him? I may be misremembering
You are correct, so the medical information gathered on him was from when he was still alive plus superficial examinations (turns out he had a scar on his foot and his teeth were crooked)
idk https://www.forensicscijournal.com/articles/jfsr-aid1012.php
Otto Warmbier’s family asked Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, a neuroradiologist and the elected coroner, not to perform a complete autopsy, but rather merely to conduct an external inspection of the body [3,16-18]. The family did not offer a reason for their objection [19,20].
Thank you for the source, comrade
I was at work and didn't quite read that far, thanks for finding the relevant bit
A guy from a country that's bombed and killed 20% of their civilians, used biological weapons against them, and regularly sabotages them, stole something to bring it back to his fraternity. It's literally on video. I don't think he deserved 15 years of hard labour, but I don't blame the Koreans for suspecting that it wasn't yet another US military project. The US would happily turn the DPRK into Syria. As Stephen Gowans has said, the country is constantly on high alert from all the random bomber missions and aircraft fleets that Amerika threatens with the explicit intent of destabilising and draining the DPRK.
The reason was that he was acting like a suspicious cracker from a country that sends almost nothing but suspicious crackers there. 95% of Americans who go to the DPRK are either feds or fed associated journalists who want to smear the place. So this suspicious cracker breaks into a military section of a hotel, is told to go back to his room, does so but then sneaks back to the military wing to do something fucky with a poster.
They were really harsh on him, but acting like a spy while being the exact type of person who would be sent to the DPRK as a spy isn't nothing. The guy was an idiot.
You clearly haven't retained anything about the case. As you can even see from the picture, he was not beaten to a coma in his arrest, and later on even gave testimony (not that the testimony was particularly valuable) that was video recorded and broadcast on TV. He fell into a coma after that point. There is zero evidence that his comatose state was related to police brutality, with even his own parents, with full access to his medical records from his vegetative return on, had nothing to cite proving the coma was induced by torture except him having a scar on his foot that they didn't know about and some crooked teeth. No evidence of fractures, no bruising, no dislocations, no chipped teeth, no signs of concussion, nothing.
He most likely contracted botulism, which is more prevalent in the DPRK due to its poverty, or a similar disease while in custody. Because the DPRK had a limited ability to identify the disease and to treat it, it was not able to save him before he became vegetative.
Nowhere in this story is there room for "pigs did a guy to death". The DPRK handling of some jackass US dude flagrantly breaking their laws and trespassing in a military space was humane by all available evidence.
Would you also like to know if I would change my view if they domed him because they saw his last name and assumed he was Jewish? Imagining counterfactuals is useless when you are refusing to engage with reality.
No they detained him because he was acting sketchy as hell stealing shit and acting like a spy. Then he had a medical issue while incarcerated, went into a coma and there’s no evidence of DPRK doing anything to him.
He seems to have gotten botulism and then his parents pulled the plug on him after his vegetative body was returned
His body had no bedsores on it and no evidence of torture. They were turning him multiple times a day to prevent bed sores, just like medical professionals are supposed to
The torture accusations are completely unfounded.
Looks like he got beat up by the cops after he caused a disturbance. Then died of complications. Not great. Maybe if we let the dprk have proper medical supplies that wouldn't have happened
No, but like. A hand full of scared shitless dprk cops and a corn fed good ol boy causing a ruckus? A couple elbows are easily forgivable.
Not a good take. We absolutely do need to justify whatever degree of violence we think it will take to replace capitalism -- how else are we supposed to get popular support for it? Even the "we shall not make excuses for the terror" quote immediately excuses the terror by pointing out how it's a response to the violence of "the royal terrorists." The "there were two reigns of terror" quote does the same. Justifying violence also clarifies which types of violence are necessary and which are excessive, which is another key part of building and keeping popular support (see Mao separating the PLA from the warlords by mandating that they pay for supplies from peasants rather than just stealing them, see the Red Army's punishment of sexual violence during WWII).
And that's in a revolutionary context. In a post-revoutionary AES state there's even more rationale to justify whatever violence we think is necessary to maintain that state, as the threats it faces are less imminent and it has more resources and time.
The American coroner who did the autopsy identified no evidence that he was physically harmed by anyone in any way. Why exactly do you think the American coroner would lie to protect North Korean prison guards from Americans' disapproval?
Also in addition to what others have said, this wasn’t just a poster in some random hotel. It was a poster from a specific floor in that hotel that was used for official military purposes, has restricted access, and he was told explicitly NOT to go there.
Also very funny:
That time the Singaporeans sentenced a cracker to 6 lashes of a cane for vandalism. Bill Clinton personally intervened and pleaded for leniency so the kind Singaporeans reduced his sentence - from 6 lashes to 4.
Also the Aussies pitching a fit every time one of their crackers gets a death sentence for bringing drugs into Bali.
This is just vibes and not a real analysis from me, but the death sentence for drugs thing really bums me out. Ya I know we're settlers, but the guys doing trafficking are usually poorish and in a bad spot in life. I haven't thought this out, so don't @ me if I'm 100% wrong.
Isn't this just the "I was poor so I had no choice to join the military and kill even poorer brown people" sentiment?
Why does someone who choses to externalize their suffering on even less fortunate people deserving of any sympathy at all? Indonesia is a poor developing country with insufficient addiction support resources. Trafficking drugs and supporting organized crime in countries like that is absolutely going to get people killed.
I don't really agree with the death penalty either, but I really struggle to play my tiny violin when the fucking whitey colonists act like they can't be held responsible for the very widely known consequences of their bullshit.
Isn't this just the "I was poor so I had no choice to join the military and kill even poorer brown people" sentiment?
if they were in the CIA trafficking to fund counterrevolutionaries, maybe. normal traffickers are not an imperial attack, it's standard consequences from inequality. the laws that allow your schadenfreud wrt aussie traffickers kill way more people from the poor country
Individual punishments for systemic problems are not based. I don't really care who is getting punished, I want things fixed.
If some poor sod carrying like 1 one millionth of the world's heroin is executed in Indonesia or just rots in some hell gaol back home I'm outraged. They aren't responsible for this hell world we live in where people choose oblivion over engagement, they aren't even important to the machinery of the drug trade, they're just some idiot.
There are actual things worth getting mad about in this world and low level drug dealers don't fucking matter. They're a symptom, not a cause.
That time the Singaporeans sentenced a cracker to 6 lashes of a cane for vandalism.
Singapore is part of the imperial core, a capitalist country with limited freedom of speech and assembly. It isn't based to beat a teenager until the point of bleeding for doing his part against car culture, even if the teenager in question was an asshole. This is just like cuckservatives gleefully getting precum in their adult diapers when teenagers in america get shot by the police or small business owners for theft, even if you can argue that such *examples are not comparable since the thefts were out of necessity while Michael Faye was being a little shit. Its just not right for capitalist "civil society" to physically punish the youth.
Also the Aussies pitching a fit every time one of their crackers gets a death sentence for bringing drugs into Bali.
Indonesia is also a capitalist country which, with Australia's help mind you, performed an invasion and genocide of neighboring East Timor to destroy their socialist government. Even if the Australian "people" who go there to "party" deserve slow painful deaths, such retribution should be meted out by the people, not the fascist government.
Waaaahhhhhhh white people can't face consequences for their actions unless a government of the exact form I like is dishing out those consequences.
Maybe crackers should have thought about that before killing, raping, looting, and enslaving their way across the entire globe for the last half millennium.
It is always self defense to beat a cracker.
Maybe crackers should have thought about that before killing, raping, looting, and enslaving their way across the entire globe for the last half millennium.
but
Singapore is part of the imperial core, a capitalist country with limited freedom of speech and assembly.
Indonesia is also a capitalist country which, with Australia's help mind you, performed an invasion and genocide of neighboring East Timor to destroy their socialist government.
These countries are part of the same world order established by the killing, raping, looting, and enslaving you mentioned, which in fact, they continue to help perpetuate because they inherited colonial patterns of political economy, subservient to the global elite of white nationalist colonialism.
We shouldn't celebrate their cruel form of "justice" because it is antithetical to the preservation and enabling of human flourishing. They are corrupt, fascist monsters to be destroyed.
Waaaahhhhhhh white people can't face consequences for their actions unless a government of the exact form I like is dishing out those consequences.
"PEOPLE NEED TO BE BEATEN AND KILLED FOR PETTY CRIME OTHERWISE THE IRREDEEMABLE HUMAN SOUL WILL FALL TO EVIL!!!!"
Right wing christian brainworms. When it comes to meting out violence, how can you trust governments with the most cruel ideology to be fair and just?
Recognizing that anglo disgust at other countries retributive notions of justice only extends to white anglos and ridiculing it is not the same thing as celebrating that system of justice.
Recognizing that anglo disgust at other countries retributive notions of justice only extends to white anglos and ridiculing it
Thats not the context I got, OP's post is ridiculing some white libshit for fucking around and finding out in DPRK (based), not about asymmetry of disgust based on whiteness.
To this, the other anon responded that its "funny" how some kid got beaten by Singapore and Australians get killed in Bali for drugs, to the dismay of their respective governments. Singapore isn't doing "self defense" when they cane teenagers for doing dumb shit.
I agree though, they only get disgusted when its a white citizen and/or when the country is their geopolitical enemy. Saudi Arabia beheads people for being gay and none of the western elite give a shit. I apologize if this is what anon meant originally, its just that I hate the Singaporean, Malaysian, and Indonesian governments to hell and back for their bullshit.
If the US police beat the shit out of some proud boys or neo Nazis, I can approve of that specific incident without approving of either the US or their cops in general.
Bad systems and bad laws can still sometimes do good things.
Beating whitey is always a good thing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Tuong_Nguyen
Does it suddenly become not ok if its a non-white Australian
Wtf are you on about?
"Actually the war on drugs and state violence is good actually if its used against white people"
I do wonder if they’ve managed to avoid the white worship that plagues their neighbors
