The name has been almost permanently ruined. Whenever people hear of it, they always think of no food, 1984, worshipping the leader, getting your entire family arrested for not doing so, all that stuff. And if you say otherwise, they just call you a propagandist who is hiding the truth. And even if Korea’s government does anything like build a water park, people say that it is just to “fool the world into believing they are good”. Like they can’t even build an entire village without people saying that they are just building it to deceive people.
At least China is taken seriously by a lot of people.
Please, we are hearing what North Korea is like from people who escaped it as though a prison. They’ve said finding a dead body discarded on the side of the road is a regular occurrence, that the propaganda there is so rampant you never even realize that your “dear leader” is fat until after you leave. When a humanitarian group went to perform cataract surgeries for the blind, they captured footage of the patients literally praying to a picture of Kim Jung Un thanking him for the surgery and promising to work harder in the salt mines.
Seriously, what is your motivation for posting this?
I lived there for several months while doing research.
The usual line in response to that is “obviously everything you saw was faked!”. I could almost understand that line of reasoning if I were a famous diplomat, but I was a no-name grad student. I seriously doubt I was of such interest to the government that they spent that much effort faking multiple towns, villages, and the entire university I was based out of for months.
I did not see “dead bodies discarded on the side of the road”. Yes, the Kim family is very well regarded considering everything they have done for the people. There’s far more hero worship of other countries’ leaders. Look at how much the British love their monarchy, people were on their knees crying at the recent funeral. The US literally carved busts of their founders INTO A MOUNTAIN. DPRK has extensive mining operations, it is a major industry, but salt is not one of their major mined resources, so you are definitely making that one up.
That’s not to say that there aren’t difficulties to life there, but much like Cuba the vast majority of economic issues that plague the people are the direct result of US-led sanctions. If the US was less dedicated to starving anyone who dared to oppose them, things would look much different.
Please, we are hearing what North Korea is like from people who escaped it as though a prison.
Defectors famously lie. EIther you make patently absurd claims about the DPRK whenever called upon, or you get ostricized/blacklisted. There’s a reason some defectors realise their mistake and try to get back home. Do you honestly think that Kim personally executed musicians, or that people push trains to work every day (instead of…walking?).
I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure building a water park is the boast you think it is.
It’s like you can’t read.
even if Korea’s government does anything like build a water park, people say that it is just to “fool the world into believing they are good”
Clearly this is meant to be an example for twisting anything DPRK does into something sinister.
So among the two best, most innocent things the DPRK did in the past ten years was building a water park?
Really astounding how well you write considering you can’t read
He might be a policeman, they always patrol in pairs because one can read and the other can write. Third one sit in the station to monitor those two suspicious intellectualists.
Parenti quote
The quote
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Dear angry libs:
The only acceptable opinion for an American to express about the DPRK is contrition for the genocide their government commited there. Anything else will be met with well-deserved mockery.
Holy shit, just realized that the liberals are already here, didn’t expect it to be this fast.
You should have defended Imperial America and its Korean client state instead. Anticommunists wouldn’t have minded if you did that.
If you said that massacring millions of Koreans and pouring gasoline down their babies’ throats was okay then it’s no big deal.
If you said ‘during the cooperativization period, mass campaigns involving huge numbers of people carried out irrigation works and forest and water conversation projects’ then you need to be deported immediately or given the death penalty, depending on whatever’s less expensive.
Can’t believe that South Korea is often portrayed as this OmG wHoLeSoMe PaRaDiSe!1!1!1! when they legit have a lower birth rate than Japan, have some of the most depressed and suicidal people on the planet, some of the longest workhours, and all this on top of historically existing to be an anticommunist dictatorship.
Meanwhile, North Korea has active worker participation in society at large yet it is portrayed as this bleak dystopia and the worst place on Earth.
Working people so hard that they are driven to suicide just to own the tankies.
…North Korea has active worker participation in society at large yet it is portrayed as…
To the bourgeois, that’s exactly a
bleak dystopia and the worst place on Earth.
It’s a wonder why the working class don’t realise why they have been taught to hate it. I suppose it’s mainly because the ‘working class’ that had been taught to hate it is mostly labour aristocrats and PMC.
