You’ll see anarchists praising Rosa Luxemburg, who if they had actually read her writings – they would see that she was very clearly one of the “authoritarian” socialists that they rail against so much.
You see them praise the Black Panthers, who were supported financially by the DPRK and aligned themselves with the Juche ideology of Kim Il Sung.
They even praise Thomas Sankara, who purged anarchists and arrested syndicalists.
If these people had succeeded, i have no doubt in my mind that anarchists would call them “tankies,” they would call their experiments “capitalism with a red flag.” And I also have no doubt in my mind that if the October Revolution, Chinese Revolution had been crushed, they would hail Lenin and Mao as proletarian heroes.
I’m not in a big argumentative mood today, so I’d like to avoid any big debates if that’s ok! :)
Lemmygrad is mostly Marxist-Leninist communists, and the DPRK is usually seen as adapting MLism to their conditions.
When you start to dig into the U$ understanding of the DPRK, you’ll start to see that most of the negative, weird, news we read about them is either attributed to anonymous sources or directly comes from the CIA. Most of the insane, hard to believe stuff is pretty likely to be untrue.
The conditions in the DPRK aren’t perfect, but they’re a direct result of being under siege for something like 90 years, sanctioned (literally) to death by the U$, and having something like 80% of all standing structures obliterated during the Korean war. It’s hard, but it looks like they’re making the best of what they can.
If you’re curious, I’m happy to try to dig up some of the source threads from here and reddit. They’ve been talked about before!
Sure, send me some threads if you’re okay with that. I’m not looking for argument if you don’t want it, but I definitely don’t agree out of the gate with your assertion. I’ve read negative stories about the DPRK in all kinds of journalistic outlets that aren’t anonymous and that I wouldn’t expect to be CIA-influenced.
There are countries where I would 100% agree with your assessment of where the blame lies for their situation (Cuba is probably the prime example), but North Korea isn’t one of them. Send me the source threads, I’m curious.
I’m guessing you’re referring to defectors. Many people left in 90’s because of legitimately bad conditions thanks to sanctions and the fall of the USSR. When they go into South Korea they are put into camps where they check if the defectors are spies and then try to brainwash them against communism and against their former leaders. Then once they are free they are often paid large amounts of money to tell (and exaggerate) their story of escape. The more crazy and horrible the story the more they get paid. A decent amount of people want to go back, but the SK government won’t let them. For more information watch ‘Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seol’ which someone already linked.
If you post some links, we can dig into them. Again, not in an argumentative way (insofar as it’s possible with a topic so spicy).
I meant that they’re anonymously sourced, which is very often the case. It might be in the NYT, but it just says “anonymous sources say…”
Like we’ve all seen this one: https://www.newsweek.com/kim-jong-un-firing-squad-conductor-1590226
But the only source is “A South Korean newspaper”. When I tried to find the original article I wasn’t able to.
This random article I’ve found is full of sourced, factual statements. But all the sources are anonymous: https://www.donga.com/en/Search/article/all/20230612/4217131/1
“a government official” “a senior member”
I think you’d be surprise how far the CIA admits to extending. Radio Free Asia is often sourced in anti-China and anti-DPRK news, and they’re publicly linked with the CIA.
I hope you don’t mind a link dump! There’s been a bunch of threads about it over on reddit:
Videos and podcasts: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/lpdjjc/comment/gob7ow4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Some basic text answers about the DPRK: https://www.reddit.com/r/asktankies/comments/te2dyd/do_most_communists_actually_support_the_dprk/
Prolewiki with a basic overview of the DPRK: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Democratic_People's_Republic_of_Korea
Archived megathread of links from r/communism: https://web.archive.org/web/20200118135128/https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cc42bl/dprk_megathread_part_2/
If you watch just one of the documentaries, Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang is pretty good. This is a shitload of links, so I understand it if you don’t check most of it out!