sources
on the dprk
- right to housing and retirement, multi-party peoples democracy: constitution of the dprk
- power checks and balances: infographic: why the us is a dictatorship and the dprk isnt.
- welfare economy: prolewiki article about the dprk, section on economy (that whole article is generally really great and debunks a lot of western propaganda)
- democratic since inception: kim byong sik. “modern korea: the socialist north, revolutionary perspectives in the south, and unification.” 1970.
on the rok
- poverty, slums: prolewiki-article on the term “hell josoen”
- political prisoners: western source confirming the existence of the national security law, stephen gowans (2018). patriots, traitors and empires: the story of koreas struggle for freedom: ‘the political partition of korea’ (pp. 115–116) , and the prolewiki-article on the rok, sections “national security law” and “unconverted long-term prisoners”
- widespread corruption: a lot of reporting can be found on this topic, even in western media. lets just take the government-sanctioned prostitution and sex trafficking as an example, though there is other equally horrific stuff, including the usage of disabled people as agricultural slaves.
- worlds second highest suicide rate: katrin park (2021-10-5). “south korea is no country for young people” doreign policy.
- tyrannical history: prolewiki-article on the rok, section “history” warning: very bleak read
debunking of anticipated liberal comments
norf korea no food
malnutrition was in fact a thing during the 1990s, though the portrayals of this time period, the so called “arduous march” in westen media are usually exaggerated. mostly omitted by american-allied media is the fact that those difficulties were caused by the inhumane and terrorist western sanctions and embargo against the dprk, as well as the cia-backed illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the ussr. nowadays problems regarding food security have pretty much ceased to exist in the country.
hermit kingdom
first of all, the term itself is nothing but racist, orientalist nonsense, but whatever… the dprk is in no way a kingdom, its democratic model of governance, while obviously imperfect and worthy of (constructive) criticism, is explained in the constitution and infographic linked above.
furthermore, the county is neither “reclusive”, nor internationally isolated. the dprk enjoys very friendly relations with fellow aes china, cuba, laos and vietnam, as well as anti-imperialist nations like iran, russia and palestine. the reason you dont hear much from inside the country is due to western press not wanting to report the truth.
no lights, no electricity
the famous “no lights”-photo is a photoshopped fake initially circulated by a southern far-right tabloid. here is an actual image of east asia, including the korean peninsula:
haircut police
unlike south korea, the dprk never had such policies. here is a very entertaining video debunking that myth.
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"many people too poor to afford housing’ homelessness is lower in SK than in the US by a HUGE amount. So that is blatant lie number 2.
Homelessness in the US is pretty high. A country having lower homelessness than the US is an extremely low bar. Compare with the DPRK, which has near-zero homelessness.
to be honest it’s quite disrespectful to the many south Koreans who struggled against the dictatorship for you to minimize their accomplishment like that
lmao what concern troll bullshit is this? The dictatorship is still easily, easily within living memory, it doesn’t insult the people who struggled against it to acknowledge that obvious fact.
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you keep acting like the 1988 upheaval made the south a nearly perfect utopia and pretend like any criticism of the south is now unwarranted and only done by bad-faith actors.
you didnt source any of your claims btw and still expect to be hailed as the harbinger of truth, while pretty much all of your argumentation has been a mix of shifting the goalposts, concern trolling and outright falsifications of what others are saying. fucking tsargrad tv has more intellectual honesty than you.
:PIGPOOPBALLS:
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OP is obv using that line to make it sound like SK is still basically a dictatorship. It’s a distortion of the facts at best, outright lie at worst.
It’s a colonial dictatorship of the bourgeoisieOP is explicitly saying that it isn’t something anymore and you’re saying that he’s using that to say it still is
first ever activity on this account
immediately assumes bad faith and uses language right out of chosun ilbo
completely unsourced
yeah thats not suspicious at all…
first of all, ive visited seoul in 2007 and saw the misery of gulyongma-eul with my own two eyes. ive seen that the bagkaseu halmeoni are in fact a real thing. and ive noticed the inescapable presence of western evangelical churches and other similar monuments of neocolonialism. even in more “economically fortunate” areas of the city most people did not seem happy. and i mean, ive been desensitized to a lot of shit due to my own countries utter economic collapse in the 1990s, but what i saw there was an incredibly sick and disgusting society that lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity.
you also for some reason decided to point out that the colonial masters you bootlick have an even higher rate of homelessness than your “country”. but how is this of any relevance to the discussion? congratulations, the denizens of the system your society is trying to imitate are having it even worse. but this doesnt make your problems magically go away.
you then proceed to claim that the suicide rate in the rok has been falling recently. this is a lie: according to the world health organization and the korean national statistical office, the number of suicides in south korea since your supposed democratization in 1988 (a great “democracy” that allows for people like bag-geun-hye or yunseog-yeol to be president and for jaebeols to control domestic policy) is as follows:
- 1988: 4,879
- 1990s: The average annual number of suicides was around 6,000-7,000.
- 2000s: The average annual number of suicides increased to around 10,000-12,000.
- 2010s: The average annual number of suicides was around 13,000-15,000.
furthermore you somehow manage to accuse me of minimizing the accomplishments of the 1988 revolution. this is an absurd fucking accusation that you invented out of thin air while somehow wanting to accuse me of being dishonest. on the contrary! it is your government that is sweeping the role of certain leftist components of the protest movement under the rug, since they dont fit into the puppet regimes worldview. and yes, 1988 is recent compared to 1947. learn how time works, liberast.
the "no-lights"-photo in question
::: has long since been proven to bee debunked, hell ive included a photographic rebuttal in my original post. stop denying reality if it doesnt suit you. power outages are also a thing in eastern europe, yet there arent equivalent photos circulating online.your assertion that nothing coming out of the dprk can be trusted, since the eeevil commies are supposedly restricting the flow of information just sounds like hilarious anti-communist cope to me. im really starting to question myself why i am even justifying myself in front of a moron like you.
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Yes I think it’s disrespectful of their accomplishments and their sacrifices to say that the society they fought and died to create is “sick”, “disgusting” and lacking “even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity.” That is a fucking lie and you know it. Those people fucking died to get health care, they fucking died to get cops to stop carrying guns and to stop shooting protestors, they fucking died to get habeas corpus rights, they fucking died to get the right to criticize their government. The created a society where homelessness is low and nearly everyone has access to food, health care, education, and fair trials. There’s a lot of work left to be done there, but to tell these blatant lies is very low of you.
They built that society out of their own blood and you are calling it disgusting. It literally disgusts me to see you say this shit, and if you said these bullshit lies about literally any other country in Asia, you’d called an anti-Asian racist and for good fucking reaso
Are you a socialist? I don’t see why you’d bother to have a HB account if not, and yet I cannot reconcile that with your statement here. If you’d let me use America as a reference point, it’s like that moronic conservative talking point that “men and women died for the flag, show some respect!” It’s a touch better, because you can point to actual rights won by the martyrs of struggle against the dictatorship and their successors (and also they weren’t colonial running dogs), but that does not mean that the society as a whole isn’t fundamentally sick, and respecting them doesn’t preclude acknowledging that because it’s not like they drafted the current structure of SK society. Like, the US is diseased and needs to be destroyed, but that’s no disrespect to people who fought for women’s suffrage or abolition or whatever. They were trying to improve the material conditions they were met with and so am I.
You’ve basically talked yourself into a deeply conservative dogma on pure indignation.
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for a person claiming to be this principled against supposed “lies” you sure do make a lot of shit up about other people. never have i claimed that the rok has achieved absolutely zero progress, this would be absurd. yet you, the supposed beacon of honesty, simply invent such statements of me.
you continue to confuse, at this point probably willfully so, the justified admiration for the 1988 revolution with respect for the decrepit south korean puppet regime. to use an analogy: every leftist will admire the heroism of the 1789 revolution in france, but that doesnt make the french dictatorship of the bourgeoisie any less horrible. leftists recognize that things are progressive or reactionary in the context of their material conditions.
you on the other hand use right-wing liberal logic at best and end up sounding like piłsudski rallying against the bolsheviks. have you even read socialist theory? are you member of a party?
and you really dont get how all this makes you sound like chosun ilbo?
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Whatever you call yourself, you have argued yourself into a position of extreme, sanctimonious conservatism if you are claiming the present Korean society does not deserve harsh criticism. Nowhere did OP say that things are just as bad as under the military dictatorship which, as you say, was one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. The thing about that being true is that you can make significant progress in the state of things and not even escape being under a military dictatorship, so I think acknowledging the current state as a deeply unwell bourgeois democracy is being borderline charitable when you look at the sordid state of Korea’s electoral politics (which might be owning communism being banned, something the communists who were persecuted and slaughtered by the dictatorship certainly didn’t fight for the preservation of).
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ahh look my new favourite anti-communist rok apologist is bringing out the classics! dont you just love the pecking order misery olympics bullshit people broing out when somebody says that things are not as good as they should be? Oh you think things are bad? Try shoveling burning coal with your bare hands, like in mordor! :maybe-later-kiddo:
Criticize all you want. But do so with facts, not with lies
I was on this thread criticizing OP before you were, you don’t need to tell me that
The only person who would say that SK “lacked even the most basic fundamentals of human dignity.” quite frankly sounds like a privledged first worlder who does not understand how bad things can really get, and what a society that lacks human dignity really looks like. A society that is disgusting and lacking in human dignity looks like S Korea in 1960, or Alabama in 1860. Not like S Korea in 2024.
I don’t understand why you’re so ready to call tone a concrete statement with a truth value. I’m sure you’d agree that America today is disgusting and lacking in human dignity if we point out practices from one of its largest companies, Amazon, essentially forcing its employees to piss in bottles and shit in bags to make quotas on time, forcing employees to work around the body of their collapsed and eventually deceased coworker, demanding that they come in even when forecasts predicted the facility would be destroyed by a tornado (and it was). There is so much in America, even when we constrain our view, that we can use to support the country being disgusting and lacking in human dignity, and I’m sure we can find different but still comparable stories in SK. For example, check out their human-trafficking fueled “defector” industry where they hold N Koreans hostage by preventing them from leaving and trapping them in a society where they struggle to find work and can even starve to death in the middle of a city if they don’t work as good little media puppets spreading lies about the North.
