I’d honestly feel better to hear someone calling us dog eating chingchong than this tankie shit. At least they’re open about being racist and there’s some truth to it.
I’d honestly feel better to hear someone calling us dog eating chingchong than this tankie shit. At least they’re open about being racist and there’s some truth to it.
I’m usually on this community’s side, but SK was literally created to be a capitalist utopia to fight against communism when the initial goal of defeating communism (NK and china) was no longer an option. If tankie triad users managed to avoid pejoratives and aggrandizing North fucking Korea for 5 seconds, they might have been able to make a point that others could physically tolerate listening to.
North Koreas emergence was much the same, except as just a bulwark against capitalism/the west. South Koreas institutions and policy can absolutely be criticised, but it is full of real people now who have their own lives. The notion that its devoid of modern culture and media, just a US surrogate is quite a repulsive one.
Same with Taiwan.
Capitalism and Leninism are equally bad. There’s no argument the ML can make that south Korea would have been better under the rule of the north. Objectively, despite the problems south Korea has. And there are many. They’ve done much better for their people. You can whine that the west has kept the North down with embargoes and sanctions. But you only have to look to china. For all their flaws to find a group that despite brutalizing and oppressing their people has done much better for them. Simply because the north is held thrall to a nepo state of cultish personality.
I think Korea would have been better off deciding its own future.
There was a moment in history where a communist North Korea could have really succeeded but due to both internal and external factors it obviously didn’t.
I do think that those of us in the West sometimes downplay how much damage the Korea war did though.
Something like 70-80% of their cities were flattened. It’s hard to recover from that while the us is constantly interfering. This is not a defense of the regime but just kinda sad what has happened to the North Korean people. It’s miserable.
South Korea and it’s oligarchy fucking sucks too. It just looks prettier and has more food.
Would that be before or after Kim Il Sung decided to be a totalitarian despot?
Depends on when you put the demarcation point for that, but the North had a higher quality of life than the South for quite some time. South Korea was under its own dictator for much of the post-war period. Its economy didn’t really get going until the 1980s. It was mostly agrarian until then.
The only time when the North had better quality of life than the South was when they were being massively subsidized by the USSR. When the Soviet economy collapsed and the foreign income stopped, North Korea collapsed too. It was never a functional economy on its own merits.
The only reason western Europe shaped up so well in the post-war era was because the United States massively subsidized it. So what?
Pretty much. I did start out by calling SK a capitalist utopia. The western Germany strategy is pretty good.
I mean for sure, but saying a country that has been colonised before is still literally part of the colonising nation kind of denies it and its people their agency. That’s the problematic bit. But yeah, if they tried to be respectful for a second, the influence the US has had on SK would still be an interesting topic to discuss.
The ironic part is that China colonized the Korean first people on a bunch of separate occasions over the centuries. Some of the most racist things I have ever heard anyone say was Chinese people talking about how all Korean Culture is just dumbed down Chinese culture. Literally super racist “look how cute the savages are trying to imitate us” shit that would get you a massive fucking side eye anywhere in the western world, except it’s an extremely mainstream trope in China.
If the Korean peninsula is a colonial state, then it is North Korea which has the older imperialist influence.
The only similarity between this two country as of now is capitalism-run state, the whole culture is entirely different. Kinda silly to agree with tankie just because of the history.