Didn’t know where else to put this but North Korea has apologized for the shooting of a South Korean official

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cn...orea-south-korea-shooting-intl-hnk/index.html

 

they've both been doing a lot of apologize as of late, good for them

 

Crying Kim Jong Un says he has failed his people, in public address to them

https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-failed-kim-jong-un-161352701.html

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared to shed tears at the weekend as he thanked citizens for their sacrifices, in the most striking demonstration yet of how he is relying on his "man of the people" persona to tackle his country's deepening crises.

Though the young leader has consolidated his rule over the isolated nation with ruthless purges, North Korea watchers say he has also sought to portray himself as a more traditional political leader than his eccentric father, Kim Jong Il.

Speaking at a military parade on Saturday, Kim became emotional as he paid tribute to troops for their response to national disasters and preventing a coronavirus outbreak and apologised to citizens for failing to raise living standards.

"Kim's modesty and candour, and his tears and choking, were all highly unusual, even for someone who publicly acknowledges shortcomings and has an established pattern of being expressive," said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an independent researcher and former open-source North Korea analyst for the U.S. government.


...


"Our people have placed trust, as high as sky and as deep as sea, on me, but I have failed to always live up to it satisfactorily," Kim said, at one point appearing to choke up. "I am really sorry for that."​

 

Given his grandpa saved the nation from being "bombed into the stone age" and losing 20% of their population and all infrastructure, yeah I would say he really has let down that legacy. see this is why inherited wealth is wrong no matter the system, and why the first half century USSR leaders had it right; a legit worthwhile leader is replaced by his failson, who is replaced by his utter failson of a failson. it is like Xerox. Not that Il-sung himself didnt go off the deep-end, but still NK is regarded by most metrics to be better off and less authoritarian than SK was up till the 80s-and 90s. we like to ignore that we protected SK's dictatorships for half a century

 

Are you really, really, really sure about this? Because most of the info coming out from NK is very thin and government controlled. Not excusing SK's past and former dictatorship here.

If you ever heard about Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector who tried to flee the country because of hunger, then was sold in China as a sexual slave despite the fact she was still a child and got her mother raped in front of her, she said that even in the "Socialist or Communist paradise" that North Korea is supposed to be, it still is "the most unequal society" in the world and has never achieved that paradise where everything is supposed to be fair and equal.

A Westerner might be seduced by the idea of North Korea being "more equal and fair" than other countries around the world, but ask a local person first before making assumptions like these, if this person can even speak out his mind in the first place.

 

China has insisted that an upcoming co-exhibit on Genghis Khan between a European and Inner Mongolian museum on the Mongols not use the words "mongol" or "Genghis Khan". They want to spread their revisionist history outside China.

So the European museum os delaying the opening for three years so they can fill it with artefacts from outside China, so they won't have to give in to this insane demand.

 

Time for the old:
Americentrism +1

 

I heard about this news. According to some French newspapers, I've understood that the exhibition was now being "cancelled", which I also found insane. But if it's just delayed in order to bypass Beijing's authority, fine. One newspaper, Le Monde, called this canceling or censoring cultural events... Or maybe we can call this "cancel [the] culture".

 

Yeah the partnership is canceled but the exhibit will be ready in a few years.

 

I've been reading "The Korean War: A History" by Bruce Cumings, and by his accounting, the South Korean regime of the 1950s was truly vile...and the North Koreans actually behaved better and committed fewer war crimes than the South. That said, South Korea got better over time, and North Korea got worse. And I don't think I'm ready to call Kim Il-Sung a hero.

 

say the person whose assumptions all come from youtube links. You know the 60s happened to be a while back right? North Korea was less closed off at points, but more than that, they had open relations with a certain ally of theirs that hasn't existed for a while now. Supplies and security from the USSR led to better conditions, that is just objectively the case for NK and Cuba.

You ask people to check their assumptions, when people are not even making assumptions, just stating a general consensus that goes against what you expected, you are putting your assumptions first. Anecdotes of recent horrible things say nothing about whether or not your money went farther or housing was more secure between the two in the 70s.

Anecdotes and political repression are not the same as living conditions over the course of decades. Stop viewing nations through an amnesty international lens.

Speaking of Parks, SK president Park was assassinated in 1979 and a US propped up military dictatorship was in control. Park himself a US backed dictator, but this is aside from the point.

I dont normally like Medium, but since wikipedia was ignored


However the most significant thing, and the thing that somehow is irrelevant to you, is the actual feelings of the population. See after all your industry is bombed, your nation is nearly geocided and now under embargo, a leader managing to hold the nation together and even outpace SK economically for a generation or so is gonna be seen positively.

You are acting like adults during the 70s and 80s didnt grow up being bombed by the US and raped and pillaged by SK soldiers. That sorta colors the pov of people. Sung was legit popular because of that.

You view things as binary. "thing good, thing bad" as if Sung having done a lot more for his nation than his son and grandson is unimportant cause repression happens, or that SK's as repressive dictatorship being bad is aside from the point somehow. You can't just "well sure it was bad, but that doesn't make NK good" when no one is arguing that. You need things to be "good nation" "bad nation" cause otherwise you cant pick a right side in the past. It is the same as rolling out victims of Saddam when people questioned the WMD claim, obfuscation and hiding behind selective human rights.

Your politics is a series of anecdotes, so much so that uncritical assumptions based on them mean that literally just citing the gdp of a nation is "being seduced" in your view. I have actually met tankies and DPRK stans, they are obnoxious, maybe interact with them to know what that utopian delusion is really like, and not say, citing a view even the NYT agrees with. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...html?mtrref=www.google.com&assetType=REGIWALL
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/gwangju-uprising-korean-war-seventieth-anniversary

You for sure are defending SK's dictatorship by contrasting every NK offense as representing the nation as a whole at all times, and just saying SK had a dictator. I am talking about a specific point in time and why Sung is remembered fondly in NK. That contrast is important, and not even reliant on NK documents, especially info being thin today, since the 1950s-1980s happened in the past.

Please stop demanding people be "really really sure" when you evidently are not sure either. No matter how true and horrific, anecdotes are not arguments nor prescriptive statements, particularly when literally talking about the economic strength under a ruler at a certain time. something that does not require a utopia. Sankara's Burkina Faso was fantastic in its improving of living conditions, but had a long way to go still when Sankara was murdered, acknowledging those achievements or truths is not a claim of a utopia or even being universally better.

Trueanon has a nice short history in order to give context to how things like KPOP came to be and the abuses therein, spoilers, the democracy is only for some and a lot of stuff comes directly, and unchanged from the dictatorship. It is not in the past, popular will is still second to corporations and the US military there. writing that off is harmful to them. Same goes for the simplification of NK and its people. It will only be used to excuse bombing them again. SK was given US capital and their prior dictatorship's goods like tv and music as a means of ignoring economic exploitation etc. NK lost its trade partners, had an embargo, and thus a serious famine that they have not recovered from. The Kims suck and always have, but there is a context there that is super necessary and makes the contrast less "good vs bad" and more "exploited by kept blissfully unaware vs exploited and externally kept poor and starved of a chance at recovery". we would rather they die than have the chance at improved conditions, much like France's ultimatium with Lebanon was. I wouldnt call that freedom

I recommend Noncompete's view, that of someone who lived in SK as a teacher, now lives in Vietnam, and has a very "we need to pull back the white savior stuff" view. excuse the homophobic thumbnail and trump jokes at the start, glad he apologized in the comments

EJ's first point is exactly aimed at both the tankies who wrongly presume NK is a utopia cause they rightly see the west lies about things and moreso people like he used to be who act like they understand the situation or have any authority or that their appeals to authority have any legit authority from the other pov

I really recommend his perspective on non-intervention and viewing repressive governments as to not fall into lies or into human rights used as a means of justifying violence. I get you do care, but be wary of what power will make you consent to

exactly, you dont have to be a hero to improve your economy post utter destruction of infrastructure or to be less awful than another dictatorship trained by the world's best terrorists (us troops). Frankly what i think of Sung and his crazy Juche bs is unimportant, heck what SKs think of him is not relevant, what matters is that North Koreans personality cult aside, have a genuine reason for seeing him as a hero. The same as how African Americans view Lincoln as one despite the opposite feeling among Native Americans, etc.

We are not helping or having sympathy with North Koreans if we disregard or downplay the genuine love they have for the guy who did get them out of attempts at genocide. Like im sorry but when did North Korea bomb american cities and intentionally hit civilians? There is a depravity in our actions that we have long since forgotten on that part of the peninsula, one that we need to reckon with a hell of a lot more than we need to reckon with NK itself.

they hate us for incredibly real reasons, and frankly we deserve it
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/wor...y-destroyed-north-korea-once-before-1.3227633

North Korea's crimes are very real, but then what the hell do we call this?
https://original.antiwar.com/john-laforge/2017/08/21/burned-every-town-north-korea/



Honestly why I think "I bombed Korea" surpasses most anti-Vietnam songs. As Amber Frost pointed out with the line "those people didn't even know us" a sentiment lacking in most songs about war which focus on OUR pain and only our pain


Who gave us the right, let alone the right to finger wag now? Once american bombers in Korea are jailed, then THEN we can talk

 

The South Korean regime was basically comprised of all the political elites who collaborated with and abetted the Japanese occupation, while the Communists were the ones who opposed the collaborators. Most Koreans had more communalistic preferences and also hated the collaborators, so there was plenty of sympathy for the Communists. What the Southern regime did then was to smear them as "left-wing traitors" and sent their "patriotic youth militia" to intimidate, terrorize, and murder their own citizens (sound familiar?). So yeah, I can't blame these people if they ended up taking sides with the North.

Also from what I read, I think it's not so much that Americans had bad intentions in Korea. It's that we just didn't do our homework, didn't try to figure out the political situation, and basically just gave a blank check to the Southern regime to keep abusing its people.

 

^ Yeah, the early capitalist regime in SK was atrocious. You can say there was a period when people living in NK were much better off than in SK. That was before Kim-Jong il made some seriously bad economic decisions that completely ****ed the country – and his equally incompetent son doesn’t seem to know any better.

But most importantly, Japan’s new PM sucks. So Much. He is so ****ing horrible I can't even... it's only been a couple of months!

Yeah I just wanted to post that. Abe, please come back.

 

I just found out about this massacre and it is super haunting so I feel like posting it to give some context of how early the US regime in SK was a dictatorship before the war even happened
http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/851568.html
The Jeju Island massacre was us backed military government troops, many of whom flat out had been Japanese collaborators 2 years prior, shooting into a crowd celebrating liberation from Japan in 1948. The US then reinforced after police stations and the literal fascists had been beaten back, drawing a line and saying anyone within the circle was dead no questions asked, lied to them and said to come to the shore and then slaughtered them. We helped Rhee massacre these people, all the while US media back home like NYT cheered on the butchering of children
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-...unts-the-memories-of-survivors/1491561083862/
http://jeju43peace.org/historytruth/fact-truth/

It is a downer but we need to be reminded that we did not have a military government installed in japan, but we did set one up in South Korea and carried out massacres. The Korean War is the result of our bloodlust

 

Yup, totally normal goings-on in Hong Kong...

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-...treaty-so-considering-sanctions-idUKKBN27S1E4

 

In case this has been passed under the radar, yesterday 15 countries in the Asian pacific region, including China, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Singapore, Brunei, etc. has signed the biggest and most important free-trade agreement, the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), but excludes countries in the same region as India and Taiwan, as well as the U.S., at their disadvantage for their economies, especially after experiencing the worst economic crisis during this pandemic. The RCEP, was launched back in 2012 and was supposed to be a response from mainland China against the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) launched under Barack Obama's presidency, but then scrapped and abandonned by Trump on the first day of its presidency back in January 2017.

This shows the idiocy of the Trump presidency: by pulling out from the TPP and scrapping it, and imposing tariffs on the right and on the left, the Trump presidency has further reinforce the U.S.'s strategic rivals as China regarding trade and the economy, since the RCEP will further reinforce the influence and ability of China's government to set up the rules of the game in the world's trade and economy, especially in the post-pandemic era while more countries, with their economies heavily affected by the pandemic, will become more dependent on such trade agreements and rules.

https://ca.reuters.com/article/us-asean-summit-rcep-explainer-idCAKBN27W0WC

 

China has done human testing to create biologically enhanced super soldiers

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/na...biologically-enhanced-super-soldiers-n1249914

 

Yeah this probably didn't happen.

 

And if it did it was like.....testing an energy drink

 

Do you want iZombie, because that's how you get iZombie!

 

YES. 100% YES.

I would kill to have that show back