something that puzzles me about reactionaries speaking about north korea or any communist country, is the idea that they have a dictatorship so powerful that people aren’t able to fight against it, movies and spectacles accused as “staged” or “if he/she fails he/she will die with his/her family”. the typical idea of enemies “being weak and uberstrong at the same time”, like damn…if people in dprk were under a dictatorship so brutal as they say, you would hear more about uprisings and strikes more frequently than in USA, are you trying to tell me that the only “efficient dictatorships” are the communist ones? that capitalism isn’t able to keep people like pinochet or hitler more than a couple of decades and with constant revolts and a huge media industry? ok…
They’re evil baddies! We shouldn’t learn about them! Learning things is evil! Like them! Better to just trust everything we are told about the evil enemy. Life is much easier when someone else tells me who is bad and who is good and I don’t ever question why they tell me things, or what they aren’t telling me.
So…I did learn about them. I learned pretty much everything I could. Watched documentaries from many sources, interviews with escaped citizens, documents/images describing conditions and infrastructure, etc. Very little information comes out of the country, but I consumed everything I could find.
My conclusion? North Korea’s government really is pretty cartoonishly evil. I’ve followed the stories of many governments, and they seem to be just about the worst.
So…why and how are you so convinced they’re not? Have you actually seen any evidence, even circumstantial? If you have, I’d love to see it. If North Korea was really actually fine and the west is just lying about it, that would be fascinating.
So here’s where we need to talk about “sources”
When looking at a source, not only should you read the information within it, but also, you should question where the source comes from, and how they benefit from you believing what they have told you. There is no such thing as an “unbiased” source. We all have biases. Any source that claims to be “neutral” or “unbiased” is just trying to trick you into trusting them without question. Just look at Fox News, I’m sure you don’t think they are a reputable news source, but their slogan is “fair and balanced.” Does that make them actually “fair and balanced” or do they just say that to trick their audience into thinking that? All news sources have a bias, and you shouldn’t trust any that pretend they don’t.
If you have “learned everything you could” but have only listened to sources from the west, I don’t think you really have learned much at all. Does very little information come out of the country, or is that just what you are told so you don’t bother looking for it? Could it be that there is actually plenty of information about the country, but you have been trained to dismiss it out of hand? Our media in the west tells us that North Korea’s government lies all the time after all. But what if that is actually the lie? What if that is just something designed to trick people into not actually listening to different points of view?
If you honestly believe they are cartoonishly evil, shouldn’t you ask yourself “why” they are? And why would they go out of their way to be “evil” like well…a cartoon villain? In real life, people don’t do things just to be evil. That’s not how people are. I’m not saying people can’t do evil things, but people do evil things for reasons that benefit them, not just because they are cartoon villains. So when our media promotes stories of their government being so over the top evil it would make Voldemort and Skeletor tell them to chill out, we should probably question whether any of this is actually happened as described, or if it is just made up. This doesn’t just apply to North Korea, but any and all countries. We shouldn’t automatically accept something at face value just because we are told it, we should look for alternative opinions and explanations and see if those make sense or not. If one side is saying “North Korea is an authoritarian hellscape more like a cartoon than real life.” And the other is saying “North Korea is a poor country like many others, with a lot of issues.” which is more likely to exist in the real world? A cartoon?
Here’s a documentary that interviews a few defectors. The ones that don’t get the spotlight. The ones that don’t get book deals and movie deals and interviews with Joe Rogan. I want you to keep in mind all the things you hear about North Korea’s draconian police force and surveillance state apparatus when they talk about their life in the south.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4Hnl7J9H4
Please watch it, I’m not telling you that you have to become some kind of North Korea worshiper or some nonsense, I’m just trying to spread media literacy, a skill we are not taught. And no one is good at a skill they’ve never practiced.
You want to know why I believe sometimes things are like a cartoon? We live in a fucking cartoon world.
For example, when I ask for evidence of North Korea actually being great and not a horrible dictatorship, and receive a cartoonishly biased YouTube video from someone who just spend two paragraphs giving the most patronizing speech imaginable about good sources 😂
Ah, so you’re a dipshit. Cool. Good luck with that.