North Korea was supposed to be doomed. How did it pull this off?

  • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 days ago

    This isn’t even a success story necessarily, it’s a return to the norm. NK was more developed than SK until SK’s “economic miracle” (read: massive injection of productive forces to improve its usefulness as an imperial outpost) and the collapse of NK’s largest trading partner happened in rapid succession to one another.

    • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      7 days ago

      Yeah, the memory holing of how the two Koreas were perceived in the west even 35 years ago is kind of horrifying. The DPRK was almost never mentioned in western media, because the south was a brutal dictatorship that was full of poverty and corruption, while the north was a real success story.

      When the south was mentioned, it was almost in the way Saudi Arabia is today, an awful “backwards” place that is bad because of their foreignness but is an important ally in the region, so you’re not allowed to question why they are the way they are.

      • AF_R [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        7 days ago

        Most east Asian diaspora are extremely bitter and self hating and they don’t know why. But it’s because they fell for the American scam.

        Most immigrants would have been better off in their home country, and they know it. They see their old friends from the country living in houses they own, eating delicious culture-rich fresh food, being around family and friends, working 6 hours a day.

        Then they get home from their 14-hour shift of unpaid overtime, look around in their shitty rented apartment, budget getting tighter every month, surrounded by hate and violence, isolated, eating ultra processed carcinogenic slop every day.

        But hey at least they have iPhone