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
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.