My co-worker believes the DPRK is a uniquely evil and incompetent state that is in a constant state of famine. They are the most failed and corrupt state.
I told him that DPRK has been incredibly fucked over historically and has been punished on every front for the crime of existing.
Does anyone have any good info I can arm myself with? Or help at articulating something that might get through. He's very much a 'facts and logic' type of lib.
:kim-salute:
getting Americans to not hate the dprk is a lost cause. these people are idiots
Death to America
I've gotten several to "North Korea is bad but we shouldn't continue destroying and sanctioning them" and sometimes I think that might be enough.
Anyone who wasn’t already questioning the narrative on the DPRK by 22 is a lost cause.
I agree with the general thrust of your comment, but I think it's more that someone needs to have basically already become a communist to understand how propagandized the west is wrt the DPRK. Just because someone hasn't reached the end of the pipeline doesn't mean they'll never get there.
What has dprk done to earn such sanctions? Bomb? Is israel sanctioned? Treating
their own people(allegedly) badly? How come pinochet chile wasn’t sanctioned (or saudi arabia)? If they are sanctioned unfairly, imagine what such sanctions would do to other small nation (take something (re:food availability in 90s, crop failures happen randomly, and are compensated by world size, if you can trade)crop failures happen randomly
and sometimes with maybe a little help from uncle Sam, allegedly
Saudi arabia requires some finagling around “own people” with dogshit working conditions of asian workers, who are not technically citizens, but liberals don’t require much convincing around that point, unless they also hate immigrants in usa
If you could get them to listen to Blowback that'd be an amazing feat, but i'm not sure you're gonna really change their mind without really getting them understand the DPRK is a country that has been under seige since its very existence and we have been running a propaganda campaign against them for pretty much ever. If they're reasonably young you can try Boyboy's We Went to North Korea to Get a Haircut (on youtube) to introduce them to recognizing some of the propaganda maybe?
Don't bother. For all the stats in the world, it is still difficult to fully comprehend what goes on in the DPRK without having experienced it.
Every statistic you bring up will be countered by some absolutely batshit insane propaganda about how they eat cement for breakfast and dogs for dinner.
Your best bet is to just get them to agree that if America was bombed to absolute shite in the same way that NK was (find some stats about just how thorough the carpet bombing was - they're not too hard to find), that America would also be isolationist and focused on nuclear deterrence.
Essentially, material conditions created by the US' thirst for blood have precipitated whatever edition of North Korea they believe in.
This right here. North Korea does actually suck but look how fucked up our country got from 3 buildings blowing up! And we blew up literally every structure in the country and killed 1 in 5 people. They're gonna consolidate around a strongman like literally anyone would.
And we still have them under siege and we openly want to slaughter them again. Our foreign policy is to kill them if we can. John Bolton literally said, publicly, on camera, that Kim better not dare to get rid of his nukes or else the US would make sure he is sexually assaulted to death. I'm not even kidding. You heard that right, he wasn't demanding disarmament, he was demanding that North Korea continue threatening SK and Japan with nuclear weapons.
Just that the quality of life is still low, although not like what you hear in the western press, and it's obviously still due to international embargo. There are also things like collective punishment and very harsh prison conditions. And they have to spend a huge amount of resources on their military due to the external threat.
Blowback season 3 is now fully out, and is practically meant for stuff like this.
facts and info
believing DPRK is evil meets a deep psychological need for your coworker
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Tell him he totally has it right and the DPRK is literally run by evil necromancers, but that for fun he should check out this video that fell out of this portal to an alternate reality where the stuff he thinks about them couldn't possibly be true
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/31/im-the-only-australian-living-in-north-korea-let-me-tell-you-about-it Show him this. I had a really hard time believing some of what visitors to NK said until I saw this article.
holy shit those commenters are frothing racists
spoiler
erikus JudasPeckerwood 31 Mar 2019 9.41 39
"And for my favourite excerpt:
"I began my master’s in contemporary North Korean literature in April 2018."
Contemporary North Korean literature? What is that? I imagine it to be something akin to contemporary Christian Rock but with the references to Jesus replaced by odes to the Kim family. "Oh, Dear Leader, you are my salvation.", "Praise the Dear Leader! Praise Him!""
Can't even imagine North Koreans as full people with internal lives and creative impulses, they're all just soulless automatons repeating slogans that their leaders tell them (hey wait a minute is this projection again)
Unless he genuinely wants to change his mind about the world, I seriously doubt you're going to be able to convince someone to change their mind about a country 8,000 miles away from their home that they've never been to if they already have such a strong opinion about said country
North korea is such a poisoned topic. It's much easier to talk about NK's history than what the country is like today, so just focus on that and be honest that there's not much info about NK today because it's so isolated and that western sources are untrustworthy.
I've just started calling people dumb everytime someone comes to me with an insane article about the DPRK. I don't even mention the whole cottage industry of grifters and liars, just that there are no people from DPRK on the internet, so if you post something untrue, there is no one to call you out on it. It has been a medium success, in that people have stopped coming to me with that type of bullshit, but I also don't really think I've seriously moved people away from the propaganda.
Just like why? They are so divorced from reality that they think millions of people just prented to have a society for no reason? That half the country are slaves worked to death and despite that there is no food? Nah, just laugh at them and call them goofuses for believing TV.
Or, how come SK has to pay 1mil to get people to leave?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_North_Korea
Wikipedia has an entire article about how and why media coverage of North Korea is so inaccurate.
I'm just gonna copy and paste a :reddit-logo: comment I made (that got downvoted to shit on a nominally "socialist" sub lol)
A lot to unpack there but let's just go for this
hosting some of the worst living conditions in the world
Would love you to expand on this. Compare them to other similarly developed countries:
In malnutrition rate they have a rate of 1.65 compared to an average of 14.55 for other low income countries. They're actually right with upper middle income countries when it comes to that.
Their infant death rate is 11.6 which ranks among more wealthy caribbean and central american countries, well ahead of countries with similar GDP per capita.
Life expectancy is 72.89 years, not amazing but hanging around some of the higher african and caribbean countries.
The idea of North Korea as if it is in some sort of constant state of famine comes almost entirely from the "Arduous March" in the mid 1990s. There was a large famine where 500 to 600k died which was caused by a confluence of loss of aid from the USSR, floods destroying crops, and admittedly mismanagement on the part of the DPRK. Since then they have experienced periods of food shortages, but there is nothing that points to the idea that they have prolonged malnutrition like some other countries.
