It IS. It’s just more subtle than barbed wire, striped uniforms, etc.
It is a totalitarian single-party state, with all of the brutality required to maintain that condition. It is not a place in which any open political dissent is tolerated.
It is not, in that respect, hugely different from many other countries in the world. Including many which are near and dear friends of America.
When the USA partitioned Korea, it did not install a liberal democracy in the south. It created a fascist kleptocracy, based around the previous Japanese collaborationist government, which proceeded to slaughter the South Korean left with great enthusiasm.
Then, the war. Which was notable for the heavy use of propaganda by all sides. Then a succession of US puppets and right-wing military dictatorships in the south, all of whom kept the propaganda efforts going.
South Korea didn’t get close to real democracy until the mid 1990’s, and it wasn’t until very recently that they got a government (Moon Jae-In’s DPK) that wasn’t extremely right wing.
I’m sure that you’ve likely heard horrendous stories from defectors. So have I. Some of them are true, some of them are not. Until recently, the ROK generously compensated defectors for testimony against the North, and the South Korean and American right continues to do so.
That situation is now changing, however.
Yes, North Korea sucks. It is an authoritarian hereditary dictatorship, with all of the brutality that implies. There are prisons, there are political prisoners, there are secret police, there is brutality and oppression.
But the cinematic Orwellian hellstate of the US media portrayal is not an accurate reflection of reality, and that distorted image was deliberately created as a justification for war.
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Realize now that the first impression of a sitting American president to North Koreans is a guy that is, regardless of what you think of him, at best an extreme caricature of the excesses of western culture in every way imaginable.
I am thinking that unfortunately all of the previous North Korean propaganda that characterized Americans in a certain way is now kind of proven to them by meeting this guy.
Trump is the very caricature of the asshole American businessman, who wants grand and golden everything around him. He’s a pompous arrogant ass and I’m sure that comes through in body language and otherwise no matter what he might say in these videos.
It makes me sad.
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Man, if Obama had sat down with a dictator (legitimizing their illegitimate rule), saluted their general (!) and basically gave away many of our bargaining chips for more vague promises, the right wing in America would be rioting in the streets and stealing tanks from the armories and so on.
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What about Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun?
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Yeah, you have a point there; careless writing on my part. I’m more familiar with the military history side of things than the detail of modern ROK politics.
Kim and Roh were leftist within the frame of ROK politics, but I’m not sure how that translates to global standards. For most of its history, the ROK government considered anyone who wasn’t fanatically committed to war with the DPRK to be a dangerous pinko subversive, which has a rather distorting effect on the Overton Window.
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By skipping over the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, you appear to be ignoring the Sunshine Policy period of engagement with the North,
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Yeah, I skipped some detail there. The transition to democracy and the peace process with the North has been a gradual thing over recent decades, and is not solely due to Moon.
As I was writing the initial post, I considered revising the sentence about Moon to add more nuance, but then decided that it was accurate enough for the main message I was trying to convey (i.e. “20th century ROK governments were mostly far-right and undemocratic, and are not an unbiased source of information about the DPRK”). That was probably a misjudgment on my part.
It’s difficult to classify the ideology of ROK political parties at a glance (for example: was Kim’s cutting of corporate subsidies in the 1990’s a left-wing or right-wing act?). Overt socialism has been heavily suppressed, leaving the official opposition to centrist liberals, and the party names tend to be rather uninformative. It’s rather similar to the USA in those respects, for somewhat similar reasons.
But, as I said: I’m not closely familiar with ROK internal politics.
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I don’t mean this sarcastically-
I am starting to become convinced that there is a specific gene expression responsible for the intrinsic recognition of the philosophical concept of hypocrisy, and that a majority of people who end up defining themselves as conservative have achieved a mutation of it that does not fully allow it to activate.
Otherwise there is no other way to explain this because there’s so much hypocrisy that goes on, they should be drowning in it
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Thanks for the tweets from a DC corporate media water carrier struggling to put the video in the worst possible light for the North Koreans. I feel so enlightened by the de facto Trump propaganda.
Does anyone credibly think foreign prosperity was hitherto unknown to the North Koreans? Or that they’d have any issue with legit denuclearization? Unlike the US, the North Koreans have no history of substantive military aggression for nearly seventy years. So why would the people care if they give up their nukes if circumstances warrant?
Meanwhile, Donald always punches down, he’s a punk bully and no better than that.
He did a solid for Kim for no good reason – self-aggrandizement is not a good reason. But doing so, he did a huge disservice for the North Korean people.
If Fifield cared about the North Koreans – as opposed to giving any support to a historically and not proven unfit and unqualified POTUS – it doesn’t show. Note that that “if” is rhetorical. Of course, she’s part of a legion of what used to be called media whores, journalists who consistently make their audience more ignorant, more poorly informed for being exposed to their work.
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Does anybody besides me think the North Korean military hats look like a baseball cap with an upside-down salad bowl stuck on top?
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Gotta love automatic translation.
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