After all this I am not really bothered by juche gang posts, whether ironic or not, like damn. South Korea was just indefinitely worse than North Korea, it was like a fucking totalitarian state. It wasn’t until the 80s that the economic situation reversed. I mean I don’t think anyone should support the current regime but when you learn that more bombs were dropped on North Korea per capita than anywhere else in the world, ever, it becomes understandable why they’re seen as a backwards country with no development. The country was literally flattened by US bombing campaigns. And then you learn that Kim il sung gave rights to women while Rhee was murdering suspected communists by the thousands. The US was committing atrocities like No Gun Ri and yet in the common image America and South Korea are the good guys. I mean, fuck, I don’t think I can support the direction that Kim Jong un has taken North Korea in, but after learning this it solidifies my anti American views, there is officially no war after WW2 that America was justified in. I can’t believe that anti Korean War sentiment isn’t as high as anti Vietnam war, more people need to know about this
I don’t think I can support the direction that Kim Jong un has taken North Korea in
Which part? The isolation is imposed by the world, not them. Likewise with the poverty.
The nukes are a nice shield from future bombings, and once China and Russia get an alternative to SWIFT set up for global transactions, we can expect to see the DPRK open up more.
The hereditary thing isn’t great long term, but it gets way too much shit for it. Cuba’s still got the Castro family as the head of state, and you almost never hear leftists go on about that.
Then we need to consider the alternatives. If it were to unilaterally reunite with the South, under the South’s rule, you’d see the same sort of horrendous economic collapse that the GDR suffered. Probably worse, given the greater wealth disparities.
Juche gang’s a fun meme, but in reality, the DPRK’s just our generation’s Cuba, with all the atrocity porn that comes with it.
The modern reaction against north korea is largely in response to how the country reacted after the fall of the USSR.
Before the 80s, north korea was better than south Korea in virtually every way, people were actually moving from the south to the north in meaningful numbers. But the decline in aid from the USSR resulted in them doubling down on their need to be self sufficient rather than opening themselves up even in the way Cuba has to tourism.
The fall of the USSR resulted in so much deprivation in terms of the economy since they were isolated. It resulted in people starving and that resulted in further crackdowns and propaganda by the state to ensure the communist party maintained power. This part is what did a lot of damage and helped push the narrative that NK was a monarchy when they do in fact have real elections and what not for all sorts of things.
The way I view it is that the Kims are very bad, but when you literally flatten a country it's your fault that they get behind an authoritarian. And what can a Swedish dem soc do when 20% of the population gets fucking murdered?
We had 2 buildings knocked over and we're half fascist now. So we really can't fucking talk.
I agree with most of that, but ‘the Kims are very bad‘ feels like a truism absorbed through a lifetime of stories of generals being fed to Piranhas. What makes them ‘very bad’?
For anyone who sees this, here's a good article on North Korea that's pretty recent: North Korea, Without the Hacks. I do wonder if anything has changed due to covid though, but it's probably too soon to tell.
A large amount of the mainstream information surrounding the camps comes from defectors like Kim Young-il who ran away when he was 19 and wrote a best selling book about the camps, which he later admitted to largely lying about since there were such large incentives for such a story in the west. There are other instances of defectors and dissidents admitting to making up things and lying.
Prison conditions in countries tend to decline in proportion to wealth, so that's not really a surprise. I've also read (from a liberal source) how their prisoners aren't culturally penalized after being released from their sentence. You go live in the jungle for several years with your family, some guards are garbage and others are helpful but they msotlynstay out of your way, and then you go back to life. In the case that I read about, the prisoner was able to bribe his way back to Pyongyang and join upper-tier social circles after just a few years. Nothing is especially "good" about it, but there isn't much you could say that's particularly bad.
It’s not necessarily the family part that’s the most distressing, it just seems to me since the Korean War NK went from a revolutionary communist state with surprising liberties to a much more authoritarian state now. I mean obviously it’s expected, but it could be toned down a bit for sure, like so much media censoring really isn’t that necessary. Looking at vietnam which was in a pretty similar situation economic recovery did happen by opening up a little and not completely shutting out the world, and now to this day their covid recovery and such was phenomenal, proving that they have pretty excellent social systems in place.
Whether you should support Kim Jong Un...
You should consider the fact the SOUTH koreans have an 80% approval rating of him
https://time.com/5262898/kim-jong-un-approval-rating/
North Korea quite literally never did anything wrong except try to build socialism whilst US setup a puppet state with Japanese collaborators in the south and killed 20% of Koreans living in the north of Korea
Were the US to never exist the Korean Communists would have taken South Korea in a weekend post ww2
Dprks current predicament is completely manufactured by the USA
Caveat on that poll though is that it was heavily influenced by the meeting between Kim and Moon. Like it jumped 68 points in a month.
I had a look at older polls and he had over 50% in 2013 under Obama
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/10276670/Kim-Jong-uns-approval-rating-higher-than-Barack-Obamas.html
That's also not a general poll, but a poll of north korean escapees. And it's not that they approve of him, they were asked if they thought the majority of North Koreans did.
The Red Scare was probably one of the most successful propaganda campaigns to ever take foot in America while also being so deeply flawed. There was like a dozen related court cases about it and how "unconstitutional" some of it was, with the holes clearly visible to people who believed in that 2 century old piece of paper as if it were the scripture wrote by god themselves-- and none of that actually mattered. They still were able to convince the majority of the population that if there was communism building up somewhere in the world, no matter how small, it was a direct threat to the people of the US. The body count the US has on its hands over it is almost never spoken about, still to this day, with all the knowledge we have of how horrible those campaigns were, it's still viewed as a mostly righteous fight.
Just look at what the US did to Laos. Of course it should have never of happened. But there is still around 80 million unexploded bombs in Laos, right now, that the US dropped and have they done ANYTHING tangible to rectify this? No, and people are still being maimed or killed from those unexploded ordinance. But does this get added the, "Deaths from Capitalism," right next to all the other tragedies this world has had? lol
I'd say the Civil War and WWII were the only justified actions of the US military.
The Union was justified in their nominal goal of crushing the Confederacy, but all they managed was ensuring the Confederate States remained loyal to the Union. The blood of three hundred thousand Union troops was spilled only for the southern planter aristocracy to have all of their land returned - in several occasions by forcefully reposessing it from freed slaves. A largely unmitigated insurgent campaign continued for a decade after the surrender at Appomattox, in which dozens of brutal pogroms were waged against the freed slaves. Roving gangs of ex-confederate militiamen and Ku Klux Klanners would kill freed slaves by the hundreds without facing any consequences.
By the end of Reconstruction, African Americans had been more or less confined to a life of serfdom, while several ex-confederate generals and officials sat in Congress. The few who managed to establish independent enclaves like those in Tulsa were eventually dealt with as well.
There are few fuck-ups in history which rival the gross mismanagement of Reconstruction.
And yet America still managed to commit unconscionable atrocities in WW2, and in the Civil War managed to fuck up actually liberating slaves in the US. We've fucked up our only good wars.
Yeah, the only 'good' parts of the Civil War are the parts where some Confederate slaver ponce got blasted off his horse by a minie ball fired by some immigrant Union rifleman. The rest was mostly dudes shitting themselves to death between battles.
Other highlights: Union clapping themselves on the back letting Black people fight...towards the end of the war, in their own segregated unit...that ended up being one of the most decorated.
Participating in WW2 on the NOT NAZI SIDE is like a giving a star to a 5yo for managing to spell her name... The Japan nukes should not be downplayed, it is a consensus it wasn't even what caused them to surrender but rather it was just another factor secondary to the imminent USSR invasion. Nobody knows how many nukes the US would have dropped otherwise.
Nevertheless 1940s average American's hate for Nazis because of the war is infinitely more based than anything we've ever seen before or since.
I'd agree with that. Also note everything the US tried to do instead before those wars.
The US will do the right thing when all other options have been exhausted.
Very true. Maybe one could argue about the revolutionary war although America wasn’t as much of a formalized state and it was more of a militia.
And they also wanted to preserve slavery and expand the colonies to displace more of the indigenous people. Pretty sure only one person that signed the declaration wasn't a slaveowner.
There is an argument that there is a legitimate vision of freedom from the british empire in the revolution, but it's a freedom steeped in settler colonial categories, built in further exploitation and extermination of indigenous Americans, and creation of a new republic elite of which only the most radical figures of the period like William Manning and later Thomas Skidmore really opposed.
Very true. Apologies as I’m canadian and we don’t study the revolutionary war, only the war of 1812.
Yeah, we did some cool shit during the war. Ever heard of the siege of Detroit? Canadian forces under Isaac brock and indigenous forces under Tecumseh set up fortifications around Detroit. Then they marched around the fort in the day, switching coats inside out to appear like there were way more troops than there were. At night indigenous forces did war whoops to scare the Americans who were terrified of native Americans. Brock sent a letter to the general inside the fort saying if the fort was taken he wouldn’t be able to stop the native Americans from slaughtering them all. Of course it was completely a bluff. In the day as soon as the cannons started firing America surrendered. I always laugh about that because it’s fucking hilarious that Americans shit themselves at the prospect of having to fight native Americans, and surprisingly this story really happened. Of course our treatment of indigenous people following the war and up to today is still horrific, but for a brief period in 1812 the British, Canadians and native Americans teamed up and whooped America’s ass several times.
My great-grandfather very likely helped kill communists in Seoul during the Korean war. I only learned about this last year as we finally met that side of the family, but I'm still horrified. End the fucking Korean War. let the Koreas make their own destiny.
Do you have any recommended articles, books, places to start on the topic? Thanks.
I tend to like Revionist historian’s views on any topic pertaining to the Cold War. The term “revionist” has been soured because of holocaust deniers who are masquerading under the guise of revisionists, but in essence it’s just historians challenging popular conceptions of historical events. For most events of the Cold War the orthodox view has been that fundamentally America enforces freedom. Revisionists challenge that idea and bring up a lot of really excellent points, suggesting things like America was more responsible for the Cold War due to such articles as the Truman doctrine and Kennan’s long telegram. So I’d look into revisionist history on whatever period you want to learn about. One excellent historian is William A Williams, his books on American diplomacy do not shy away from criticizing American foreign policy and his students founded socialist clubs at his university.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Appleman_Williams
