Why do people say North Korea does badly?

I would sooner believe CNN tbh

Oh so you don't actually now how North Korean society works and believe everything Robert Collins said about Songbun in his shitty unsourced book that's based entirely on speculation and wild assumptions.

This isn't the 90s anymore user.

literally made up bullshit

songbun isn't real dumbass

Oh, so just like South Korea

where is the proofs :DD

...

Feels bad man.

It's not even a republic anymore; the "Mount Baekdu bloodline" has a constitutionally defined leading role. Absolutely counterrevolutionary.

not only is there no proof, I'm willing to bet that western news decades from now will cite this thread as evidence.

my position on the topic tbh

i know its not a workers paradise and i know its not hell on earth

so what is it

It is insane but fake news about the DPRK actually DID have originated like that. The rumors of Kim feeding his uncle to the dogs or how everybody was forced to have Kims haircut originated on South Korean internet forums and private blogs. It literally made into CNN and the Stephen Colbert show.

This should be an obligatory watch to all the tankies, the DPRK cocksuckers, and the nuke-happy liberals.
youtube.com/watch?v=oULO3i5Xra
North Koreans are human and it's very, very often forgotten by many sides.

This should be the first thing to consider.

Workers are better off than in South Korea, the manufacturing ones anyway. It's a country that tries its best to survive and provide basic services to its people while having a Mexican stand-off with the rest of the world.

funny that you mention children
huffingtonpost.ca/2016/04/20/south-korea-mass-killings-abuse_n_9738662.html

sorry for HP link

ps: i have no love for best korea

Its even worse than the 90s now

Whats your point?

top fucking kek

Even all western sources agree that there currently isn't a food shortages in the DPRK. There was one after imports of fertilizers and pesticides from the USSR stopped after '91, called the "Ardous March". Today these problems are practically non-existent.

^This guy is correct.

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the country has fucking concentration camps, it's shit

Should North Korean allowed to watch porn?
inverse.com/article/34022-pornhub-north-korea-japanese-game-show-orgasm-wars
pornhub.com/insights/north-korea-insights

Is it bad to gulag counterrevolutionaries?

This. If you seriously believe Amerishit is a better place to live than North Korea, you don't belong on this board.

...

Their whole families get sacked, kids, elderly, it doesn't matter if close relatives didn't know about particular activities. Same happens with defectors. The treatment people get in these camps is far worse than US prisons (with their gang violence and all that). The guards (who are state soldiers) treat them like cattle, they are free to commit rape and other forms of violence against prisoners. There's no proper order in the camps in terms of how these guards are supposed to carry themselves.

Either this board is fucking pathetically retarded now or theres some serious tankie & """anti-imperialist""" shilling going on

Why does anyone still give a shit about North Korea?

For the same reason they give a shit about "islamophobia": their maymays spread more easily in conformist societies.

Huh. I was starting to give this board a chance, but I have realized that this place is filled with goddamn lunatics. I hope for your sake, friends, that you guys figure your lives out. God bless.

This is 1 (one) retard. We call these types "tankies" around here. Get used to the incredibly loud and idiotic minority they form around here.

The article was about China imposing sanctions on North Korea, you can find the same shit at CNN, you illiterate moron.

Socialism doesn't really have that much going for it on a global scale, so why wouldn't you care?

Source? You seem to be incredibly informed about the penal labor system of one of the most reclusive and isolated places in the world. I'd like you to show me where you acquired such rare knowledge.

Do you need your safe space once people challenge your opinions?

Article from Human Rights watch
hrw.org/news/2017/02/08/un-north-korea-exploiting-children
Children in North Korea forage for scrap to pay a poor tax. The only children who are not poor are those of government workers.

thesun.co.uk/news/3567528/north-korea-soldiers-starving-kim-jong-un-nuclear-weapon-spending-swiss-cheese/

express.co.uk/news/world/789447/North-Korea-supreme-leader-Kim-Jong-Un-defector-activist-Yeonmi-Park

Yeah, but no internet tho. Can't shitpost and watch the youtube. Fuck that.

Also have to go around worshipping the Kim's all the time and have pictures of them in your home. Fuck that too.

Stopped reading there. They have been making definite progress and anybody who wants to argue that a nuclear deterrence isn't a necessity for North Korea is a fucking retard.
Yes, North Korea had a food shortage in the 90s due to the stop of fertilizer imports from the USSR. Everybody knows this. This was way before Kim Jong Un ate his cheese. It's fucking funny how people blame North Korea for not doing well but absolutely ignore that there a sanctions in place literally designed to starve them out. How fucking dishonest is this, and it is simply disappointing that so-called "leftists", you know, people who are supposed to subscribe to a materialist analysis, go in line with this narrative that it's somehow the North Korean fault for doing shitty when the entire world wants to starve them out. Simply ridiculous and infuriating. So much for solidarity with nations targeted for imperialism.

For fucks sake, go back to Starbucks

""state""

I'd imagine living in North Korea would be live living on a film set. I cant help but think the buildings in those pictures are facades. Like they're hollowed out and held up with beams on the back side. Everything there looks so artificial and sterile.

You can imagine whatever you want. It doesn't automatically justify imperialism.

There's a difference between saying "America should leave North Korea alone" (which it should) and "North Korea is a socialist paradise on the verge of achieving FALC". The fact is it's a shitty little hermit kingdom ruled by a manlet absolute monarch and there is nothing remotely socialist about it and frankly it would probably be better for the people there if they were annexed by China.

I wasn't really making that sort of statement. Just that all the pictures I see from there has this weird look about them.

You can defect for the cost of a plane ticket lol.

Also, you are doing an absolute infantile mistake by equating socialism = paradise. Socialism isn't a moral category. There is no guarantee that socialism will be necessarily a paradise, especially if it's bullied like the North Korean type of socialism.

I think it's ridiculous to think that a country which constantly is concerned about making ends meet can afford to stage a TV set in the size of a city just for a hundred tourists every year. It's funny, everytime there is a case of shoddy construction in the DPRK the media blows it up, meanwhile in Britain an entire skyscraper burns down and this is just an "accident".

This.
Im not a NK supporter: i barely even consider Juche a socialist ideology, but this is what i've been saying for years.
They are literally against the whole planet, even China it's turning their backs at them now, it's only natural that they aren't a rich and prosperous nation.

Based on Cumings' book, the family of a person convicted into a NK penal camp also gets time. It is in some ways more humane than sending the convict there alone and well in line with the confuchean ideology NK runs on.

This. I un-ironically support the DPRK.

rhizzone.net/articles/songbullshit/
Cumings and Collins and all these other so called "experts" of North Korea who are always super cozy with South Korean government organizations and think tanks are hacks that base their claims on hearsay and cherrypicked defectors stories who are notorious for being made up. Cumings himself has been outright lying about the origins of the Korean War in his earlier book (for which he got critical acclaim and praise form Neocon organizations).

Regardless of whether life in North Korea is "better", it's still not socialism.

Cumings usually gets stick for being too cozy with NK though, and I'm not sure how happy SK orgs or govt would be about how much shit he talks about South Korean prisons and mass executions etc. trying to paint him as an imperialist apologetic seems like a wasted effort. Have you actually read his book?
And the familial imprisonment in this case isn't really songbun, because as I understand it songbun is supposed to be generational.

You sure triggered a lot of liberals with this post

because they're scared as shit that america is gonna melt their city with freedom.
probably because he wants to show that they have modern military capabilities (unlike in the 50s) so america doesn't think it's totally fine to invade

So north korean war is happening

He literally got awards from South Korean government organizations. This is how liberal ideology works, you pretend to be critical towards your own now and then but in the same act you automatically legitimize the regime which is in power, because it allows critique.

The economy of North Korea is still centered about production for use and is largely cooperative. Stop making utopian demands that are in no way attainable for the DPRK in the real world.

explain

If you believe in state capitalism unironically you don't belong on this board.

nobody here has been able to explain how the DPRK isn't socialist
they function on a gift economy, what is more socialist than that?

Korea's fucked either way

if there was unification today the republic of Korea would become a junta as a way of combating the socialists and juchists

workers owning the means of production. instead it's just one family and the state controlling everything.

What does that mean for you? More workplace democracy? What's your proposal?

There is no socialism in North Korea, that's what you shitheads are missing. The Kim dynasty is literally constitutionally enshrined, it's a monarchy plain and simple.

Honestly not surprised to hear this from a Maotist, shouldn't you be nailing dogs to trees or worshiping a mango?

Because you don't like Kim Jong Un it isn't socialist? That's not a very scientific or materialist analysis. Sounds you argue based on emotions instead of facts.

Mostly because of Camp 13. And don't say it's a myth, there are satellite images of it and people who have escaped and have all described the same shit.

North Korea is no different than any state, it has its own black sites. Camp 13 just happens to be among the most brutal in Asia. Say as much as you like it's imperialist lies, it really does exist and it is quite fucked.

N.Korea sounds amazing.

that's the social organization that the workers choose though. the form of government in which the means of production are controlled doesn't affect whether or not it is socialism.

What do they actually say? You could literally make a satellite image from an American prison and say the same shit. Also, I don't see how most of the GDP comes from penal labor, do you have data on that?

And no prisoner deserves the quality of life of being treated there, and no number of prisoners should be concentrated in one area.

Be it the United States or North Korea. I won't hold special circumstances for North Korea's prison camps just as much as I won't hold the United States'. In America it's drugs, in North Korea it's not sticking with the state. In America's prisons it's forced labor, in North Korea it's forced labor.

I'm not going to defend North Korea simply on issue of their prison systems.

Looks like a really nice place to live, doesn't it?

Also, there's reports of people who have escaped Camp 13 and they give more or less similar testimony about what goes on.

This is a place for people who demonstrate against the state, it involves forced labor, and ideologically distancing yourself from prisoners who receive the harshest punishment for disobeying, and a general neglect of human rights.

These tortures can range from inserting your fingers into a compressor, to breaking bones, to execution by hanging, and prisoners are ordered to beat or throw rocks at hung prisoners to distance themselves from their actions of disobedience.

I won't condone torture or prisons. Just because America has a fucked up prison system, doesn't make North Korea's right.

And before you say, that's just a work facility.

It isn't.

Before satalite imagery of it existed, where people who have escaped documented it would be in that EXACT region, North Korea denied its existence. They said it was propaganda against the state and the prisoners were liars.

Once the satellite photos came in took time, but North Korea admitted its existence and said they would do everything in their power to reform it. Well it's been a while since they said that and the facilities aren't shrinking.

They're only expanding.

telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11353430/North-Korean-Camp-14-gulag-survivor-admits-parts-of-story-untrue.html

I'm not sure what a picture with buildings are supposed to prove.

Well in a bunch of cases, they literally were. To clarify myself here, I am not saying that the prison system in the DPRK is nice or anything, I don't believe these horror stories for a second. You got to realize the extreme conditions under which North Korea operates, and the fact that they are still an underdeveloped country, I would argue that the prisons there are not better or worse than in any other underdeveloped country. In Indonesia for example, they can whip you to death.

They gave the exact coordinates of where the camp was before satalite imagery confirmed the camp's location.

Camp 13 is all but real and even the North Korean government has god damn admitted it.

They've gone from denial to saying they'll close it.

I don't trust the North Korean government on closing any of their prisons just like I trust any other nation's state to close any of their prisons.

You're being idealist about North Korea if you think prison guards in Camp 13 aren't above what was described by escapees who documented it prior to satellite imagery confirmation.

That's a piss poor defense of ideological prisons and you god damn well know it.

I'm not saying they weren't imprisoned, I say that they usually exaggerate about stuff because it gives them fame and money. You hear this from North Korean defectors all the time you see in media. They always get entangled with contradictions. If you want an authentic dissident report you'd have to talk to one of these defectors that are forced to live in a slum at the border in China. You never hear about them in the media, I wonder why.
They deny everything all the time, that's their game. They've been fucking with the rest of the world for quite a while now.
Every prison is ideological. Is just wether or not you call something ideology. When homeless people seize empty apartment buildings, and they go to prison for it, that is also ideology.

Why this obsession about prisons anyway? I mean usually people on this board reject North Korea for lack of civil liberties or muh not tru socialism. I've never seen anybody deciding to whether or not support the DPRK based on the fact how the prisons are.

No you straight said they lied. Now you're saying they're exaggerating.

One, maybe. Two, sure. Multiple that give corroborating testimony and identify where an exact prison is before satellite imagery confirms its location?

That's what's called evidence in most courts of law, most courts of law where straying from political norms isn't a crime.

I don't see this as good. Whenever a government hides its secrets its not good, I won't hold this above American black sites or European black sites, I certainly won't hold it above North Korea just because it's anti-American.

Because that would be hypocritical about the ethics of black sites.

Yeah, I agree, but most aren't politically ideological. There's politics involving the amount of prisoners in the war on drugs, and that's fucked up. And it's not any less fucked up here, and if America can brutalize its prisoners, so god damn well can North Korea.

Some things about a state can be indefensible. I'm not suggesting "freeing North Korea", I'm simply saying that North Korea has elements that are fucked up and its prisons are certainly one of them.

The person who most accurately described where Camp 13 was located gave grisly details, and I don't think he was lying. I think to think that prisons in North Korea are just A OK in human rights is naive

Because I know a thing or two about the DPRK and I know that their expanding prisons are a serious threat to their citizens, as prison expansion just means more prisoners. Which means stricter rules and enforcement usually.

I'm speaking on behalf of the North Korean people, not their government.

The only justifiable anti imperialist way you can defend camps like 13 is if they were American POW camps. But these are on their own citizens.

Everything else about North Korea is mostly bullshit criticism, but its prisons and mass arrests are a problem I would say is legitimate.

The pretty towers aren't the point.
They're not socialists, they're state capitalists.
In America and Europe there are pretty towers too, it means nothing.
Get your head out of your ass (ideology).

Fuggity

No one outside of NK actually knows much about the country besides Pyongyang.

Who the fuck appointed you as the personal expert spokescunt of the people of DPRK?

Why should I be thrown in with the psychotic DPRK supporters?

What separates state capitalism from socialism?

Giver me one reputable source for this statement

What the fuck is it with the tankies and their support for North Korea? What happens in a person's mind that makes them defend the most verifiably dystopic society in history? Why are they so obsessed with "anti-imperialism"? Why don't they verify their claims about North Korea being a totally great place to live for themselves?

State Capitalism is when the states owns most of the economy as the biggest shareholder but production is still focused on exchange and profit making, and state firms compete with each other. In socialism production is centered arround use under a planned economy, and workers control is directly enforced due to a revolutionary trade union system, cooperatives, worker councils, proletarian democracy, etc.

You're simply clueless if you think NK is even close to the worst/most "dystopian" society on Earth.

Name one country with a more totalitarian government than North Korea.

Why? You are not going to believe it anyway. Here is a book as pdf about socialist construction in North Korea if you want to bother:
docdroid.net/9oceFLp/ellen-brun-jacques-hersch-socialist-korea-a-case-study-in-the-strategy-of-economic-development-monthly-review-press-1976.pdf
Literally the leftists version of "why don't you move to Venezuela". I never said that living quality is as good as in Denmark or whatever, they are opposing the entire rest of the world, what do you expect them to perform like? They are doing way better than any capitalist nation would do under the same circumstances. Now fuck off back to /liberty/you orange AnCap and imperialist apologist.

Yeah totally a measureable variable. Daily reminder that AnCaps who fetishize coops are not leftists.

Just because totalitarianism can't be measured with a number doesn't mean it doesn't exist and isn't apparent upon observation. You M-Ls (and derivatives) are beyond saving. The societies you want to create are objectively worse than any neoliberal capitalist country.

Do you want "no moar wars" or do you want balls-to-the-wall military spending?

Stop calling Americans bastards and maybe they'll help you out.

No socialist uprising lasts without turning into a 50-year dictatorship maintained by sham elections. That's what you're not getting.

The government is usually run by the Communist Party so government structure absolutely is relevant.

Cuck more

Those people are usually persecuted by the Chinese or Russian governments for being illegal immigrants.

Prison ass-rape is how communist ideology spreads.

They're sell-outs or trolls. No one unironically is in support of North Korea except status signallers.

Peak idealism. Totalitarianism is an empty word that is always used simultaneously with "freedom to politicially organize" by liberals. Totalitarianism in the original sense of the word is the idea that the state, actors associated with it, and the general mechanizations of underlying motions of the ruling system is able to penetrant even the last resorts of private social fabric, the total dissolution of a private or a communal space as a dichotomy to society as a whole. Capitalism is totalitarian according to that as well, it enslaves your life way more compared to how feudalism did communal life, everytime you buy something on Amazon the NSA knows more about you than any other secret police in history, if you delete your Facebook employers will wonder why you did that, if you don't buy the appropriate clothes nobody will want to date you, and so on. The capitalist mode of production is totalitarian by default. To measure totalitarianism based on sole polticial freedom is anti-materialistic and liberal to the core.

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Nobody will ever love you, Holla Forums.

Liberals are going apeshit at your post, at least i would get free healthcare, fuck you first worlders

Lmfao what the hell, I got banned for imperialism for complaining about North Korea's prison camps as being a negative part of itself, that should be criticized.

I did, actually. I appointed myself spokescunt

Holy shit, I thought them skyline pics were of China for a second. Pretty impressive. I thought Pyongyang only had a buncha boring old Soviet housing block-looking government buildings to "brighten" the skyline up with.

the USA

The USA doesn't even have a fucking government that exists outside of its outside interests and prison system. It's market is the only thing that exists as an actual state.

Outta curiosity, would a guy like that taste good if you'd spitroast him and cut slices of him off like a giant horizontal kebab?

How much of him's actually meat instead of just tasteless blubber like the shit that keeps Arctic whales warm underwater?

This the US totalitarianism comes from private ownership and encroachment in our lives mixed with hegemonic ideology. We don't have a stereotypical big bad government. Just a shitty ineffectual one run by pigs.

except for the government

Pyong-Yang is a modern metropolis with a subway system like Tokyo. Everywhere else is Mad Max.

A blessing in disguise, tbh

If by "love" you mean gay prostitution, no thanks.

No it means actual human empathy, I don't think your parents even love you if they truly knew you.

Nobody to trade cricket recipes with.

So is the city only for muh privileged partisans like how Moscow's kinda like an exclusive playground for oligarchs?

My lefty parents. Sure.

That's low, man. Low. Lower than the average North Korean's daily calorie intake.

Yes it's to win spendthrift investors over to socialism, and like you said a lot of labor jobs are being converted to services jobs so that cities can become playgrounds for the elite.

People don't have freely select residence within NK. You can't just decide to move into the capital. (Practically speaking, my theoretical freedom of movement is very limited by my wallet, but that's still less bureaucratic how NK does it.)

well they have a subway system
using donated out of date trains from the east berlin underground that went out of date in the 70 or so

We honestly don't know how the recent building boom in North Korea is organized, there is speculation that it might be investors (donju) but this is mere speculation. Why do you say unsourced stuff?
38north.org/2017/07/hferon071817/

Everything I've seen from videos and pictures outside Pyongyang don't imply that at all. Sure it's not as glistening as Pyongyang, the roads are a little bumpy, and some houses have solar panels instead of access to the electric grid. But it is not Mad Max at all, the other cities look pretty much as clean as Pyongyang.

Actually the trains are from 1998, and are from unified Germany, and not from the GDR.

Their success rate is something like 80%, it's pretty high. It's just that in the west you only hear about failures

An error occurred during validation.

This video does not exist.

Sorry about that.

ya north korea is actually paradise but they wont let us know

youtube.com/watch?v=j7VgV2qEqZw
youtube.com/watch?v=DyqUw0WYwoc

Outdated. Nobody denies there was a food shortage in the 90s. The guy says he was surprised when he saw plastic bottles in China. Obviously this is heavily outdated, every footage from North Korea shows that plastic bottles are widespread in the DPRK now.

hmmm

You realise it's a totalitarian theocracy? If you want to accept yet another toxic pile of garbage as the unquestionable truth, you're welcome there, I believe.

healthcare that is 50 years out of date and severely limited. you think the kids starving on the streets in some regions of the country have access to it?

redbubble.com/people/mrhandsome/works/27580245-mecha-kim-jong-un?asc=u

I'd like to have a source for that. Especially for the starving children in the streets.

I want this.

While browsing the youtube, I found this video by Zizek explaining how the model of North Korean worker's party is not patriarchal autoritarian, but it is exactly in its own official propaganda thought of as matriarchal.

youtube.com/watch?v=NRfgKrmI9Po

To support this, one song by Moranbong Band. Turn on the subtitles and watch if you don't understand korean. If you do then listen.

youtube.com/watch?v=i4NgkxkBZi0

While the translation is a bit clunky in places, the overall message is clear. As Zizek claims, the worker's party is a mother that breastfeeds her children, guiding them to flourish.

this, based kim is best kim

Some DPRK art also presents the leaders as having rather soft and motherly features, doing things like putting a blanket over a student who fell asleep while studying.

Starvation was only a thing in the 90s because of the collapse of the Eastern Block.