freagle

Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Eerie are indigenous names, not American nor Canadian. Ontario is a county in NYS as much as it a province in Canada. They all borrow the name from the people that were here before the genocidaires arrived

Hopefully they’ll never return

It is a totally ambiguous example. The US under Truman partnered with the Vatican to save almost 10k Nazis from trial and spread them all over the US sphere of influence with protection, money, jobs, property, etc. and then it immediately took over imperial Japan’s holding of Korea, established a fascist military dictatorship, and killed a million civilians in the North. Around the same time it protected the KMT in the province of Taiwan during the White Terror wherein the KMT established a fascist government that killed tens of thousands of civilians for political control.

It’s completely ambiguous whether or not the US was fighting for freedom or liberty.

Does it matter?

Yes officer, we simulated invading the house multiple times but we spent at least 3 times as much effort simulating how we would defend and against them coming out of their house to attack us.

At no point in this entire exchange I got an understandable explaination of why a regime (several, to take a broader stroke) decided at some point, after having suffered and endured, successfully, an aggression, that brutalizing their people was the way to go.

If that’s what you were looking for, you didn’t ask. I did offer you the explanation though - these are the conditions of siege. All victims of long-term sieges throughout history have had to repress the natural tendency that arises among the besieged population to throw wide the gates and let the barbarians in. That’s why sieges work. Most sieges in history that ended with a loss for the victims ended because the people inside the siege decided to end it, open the gates, collaborate with the enemy, and depose the leadership of the victims of the siege. DPRK is no different. It has been under siege by the West for 70 continuous years.

But more to the point, they don’t brutalize their people, they brutalize some of their people. It’s not like even the simple majority of Koreans in the North have suffered from brutality. And again, on a per capita basis, at worst they are 10% more carceral than the US is to its own people, with the US again have 200% more people per capita captured by its parole system under constant surveillance by the police having their wages garnished. And none of those US numbers include the brutality and incarceration of the borders. The US is far and away worse than DPRK in terms of quantity and percentage. The US is certainly less brutal to its prisoners, but again, you’re claiming that the DPRK is brutal to “its people”, which is an expansion of their actual brutality which is almost exclusively to their prisoners.

China and South Korea the main customers for food exports from NK. Food that is badly needed for their own population and often produced and harvested through forced prison labour, like the factory work

You’ve got to be deliberately blinding yourself to reality. Listen, DPRK was bombed to the literal stone age by the USA. Their people were literally living in caves. And now you’re telling me that the DPRK is exporting food. Do you not understand what a monumental achievement that is? You keep asking why the DPRK isn’t lifting its people up. Are you so committed to holding on to your false beliefs that you can’t see that the only way to become an exporter of food is to solve massive nation-wide challenges through the people? Estimates about farm work in DPRK put the total number of people engaged in farming between 25% and 50% of the total population. Do you really think the DPRK has a slave population that large? Yes, it has prison slave labor just like the US does. But the UN classifies DPRK farmers as slaves because the DPRK has compulsory labor laws. The vast majority of farmers in DPRK are employees or cooperative members. But because there is a law in DPRK that says everyone must work to rebuild the country and that refusal to work is grounds for imprisonment, the UN classifies a massive chunk of the country as slaves. Personally, I don’t think a compulsory labor law is the same as slavery, and I don’t think its unreasonable for a nation under siege that is literally fighting for the independent survival of its people to require that every able-bodied member of society work. We can disagree on that point without having to stoop the level of propagandists that claim the DPRK 10% slaves.

But seriously, how the hell do you not see that rebuilding the food system with its people, by its people, and for its people is literally lifting its people up? Where are you getting the idea that this is not exactly what you’re demanding?

But why can’t they spare just a little bit of money to actually improve the quality of life in the country?

This is where your understanding of the world is failing. The problem is not money. That’s not how any of this works. Do you think that the problem is the DPRK has a capital glut in the richest 1% - 10% and they’re just hoarding that money? Do you think the DPRK got nukes with money?!

The DPRK got nukes with labor. The people made the nukes, and they were paid for their labor. Because, again, the DPRK is under a total economic blockage. They literally cannot spend money to get things from the wider world. They can’t spend KPW on things, because no one accepts KPW outside of DPRK. The embargo is so bad that most day-to-day exchange is done in foreign currencies. That’s not the fault of the DPRK government, it’s literally the fault of Western financial institutions that have rules that will literally cut entire banking companies out of the world economy if they ever deal in KPW. Further, the reserves of foreign currency held by the government are, of necessity, stored in hugely elaborate shell companies with multiple levels of indirection and redundancy because the minute any Western financial institutions traces an account back to the DPRK they freeze the assets, seize them, and shut everything related to it down. And we’re talking about maybe $5B USD. Maybe. It’s likely a lot less. It’s essentially a strategic reserve to acquire emergency commodities to manage shortages whenever they occur, and they occur frequently.

The Korean people in the North rebuilt their entire country with labor, not money. They rebuilt their food system with labor. They rebuilt their medical system with labor. They rebuilt their education system with labor. They rebuilt their communications infrastructure with labor. None of that was because rich North Koreans invested money. It’s because the 10 million Koreans that survived the American onslaught set about to rebuild their country from literally rubble through the application of their labor at all levels.

To me that is the definition of “Truly live by their words and actually elevate the people”

Can we agree that is desirable

The problem is not that I disagree it’s desirable but that you disagree that they’ve been engaged in exactly that for their entire existence.

and would mean a great deal to every nation that is currently taking them as bad actors?

Don’t you understand yet that the fact that other nations see them as bad actors is literally a Western narrative enforced by economic warfare? Anyone who disagrees with this narrative is punished economically, from banks to professors to retailers to farmers to entire nations. Do you think North Korea cares enough about what a bunch of fascist genocidaires think of them to lower their defenses against enemies of the state both foreign and domestic? Your entire position rests on the idea that the global consensus of Western collaborators actually has a moral high ground and that their assessments are accurate and meaningful. They all watched the USA kill 10% of the Korean civilian population and then agreed to an infinite embargo to starve the rest of them into compliance or mass death.

Have a nice one

Right back atcha!

That’s a whole lot of victim blaming there.

As I said, DPRK is literally actively under siege. They face regular military drills from literally the largest and most powerful military in the entire world and you’re saying that by not allowing tourism without significant oppressive oversight they are somehow in the wrong? This is significant cognitive dissonance.

What is stopping them to reach out and strike open talks for peace?

Literally the fact that you think the USA is “dropping the mask” and “catching up to other brutal regimes”. DPRK has accurately assessed the USA behind the mask. They have a more accurate assessment than you clearly did.

One side has to be bigger and reach forward.

Are you serious right now? You think that a country that suffered over a million civilian casualties should “be the bigger” and try to make peace with a globe-spanning empire that has been continuously involved in regime change operations for 70 straight year and actively engaging in funding and supporting an ongoing genocide? Really? That’s your position?

Why keep an armed standoff that benefits nothing and no one besides a chosen few?

They are LITERALLY under an illegal collective punishment regime by the entire West. The West has been literally trying to starve and deprive their millions of citizens of life for decades continuously and unending and you are asking why they have to keep an armed standoff?

You’re going to have to work through this on your own and dismantle your deeply held beliefs about the world.

at what point is it legitimate for one figure to turn himself and his family in near demigods in order to take hold of a nation struggling against an invading foreign power

Is that what happened? Where did you get that information from? Was it from your direct experience living in North Korea? Perhaps you’ve read primary source materials written by North Koreans either inside North Korea or living in China or Russia? Because if what you’re telling me is that you believe this because the people that attacked Korea tell you it’s true, then I have to admit I don’t think you’ve got a firm enough grip on the situation to say that.

But even worse is that you don’t know what you’re comparing against. You’re comparing against the idealized “non-authoritarian” state of white middle class America and Western Europe. The better comparison would be South Korea. And South Korea was under a brutal totalitarian dictatorship for over 60% of the time that North Korea was, and South Korea is STILL an active US military base that runs regular simulations of literally invading North Korea with all of the materiel and soldiers needed to repeat history.

The Kims didn’t take hold of a struggling nation, they were literally leading a cadre of the people’s army. They were instrumental in the struggle for national liberation and then in the struggle for their survival against the genocidal Americans and then they were instrumental in the rebuilding of Korea and the securing of Korea against the dictatorship to the South that was hosting the brutal global war machine of the Americans.

Did the state use a cult of personality as part of their system of control? Absolutely. And we think it’s weird because we don’t think we do that. And yet, we teach all of our children that George Washington was a brave and noble fighter for the rights of people but never teach that he made his dentures by ripping teeth from the heads of his slaves. We teach all of our children that Thomas Jefferson was a leading architect of this great document to enshrine liberty for all men but we never teach that he ran literal rape farms, committed infanticide, raped his slaves as young as he could, and even kept a girl inside a sex hole in his bedroom, and even wanted to ban the transatlantic slave trade so this his “domestically produced” slaves would fetch higher prices. You are not immune from the charge of believing fanciful lies about people who committed acts of mass barbarism that not only do we still celebrate but literally have printed on the money we use every single day.

So at what point do we decide that the DPRK’s particular brand of personality cult delegitimizes them as a state? I would say only when you’d be willing to say that the US is an illegitimate that doesn’t deserve a standing army to protect itself.

proceed to establish a totalitarian authoritarian regime that lasts to this day and whose acts of violence and brutal control onto the people are very well documented?

Well, let’s see. The per-capita incarceration rate in the DRPK is estimated to be about the same as it is in the US. That’s an estimate because of course we have no documentation about it, and the estimate comes from satellite imagery, the testimony of exiles working with the West, and the standard magic pixie dust that Western NGOs use to make anti-Western state into a pariah. But even in thew worst estimates, the DPRK is only slightly worse than the US on prison rates, but the US has 2x as many people on parole as they do in prison, and parole is literally a condition of being actively monitored by police, often having your wages garnished by the state, etc.

I’m not aware of documented evidence of violent acts of control against the population by the DPRK. I’m aware of violent acts against prisoners, and they’re bad, but I’m not aware of the DPRK, for example, killing hundreds of people every year in police altercations, police riots beating hundreds or thousands of people, national guards firing into crowds of students, or bombing civilian fishing boats.

The DPRK established a state under siege. I don’t know if you’ve ever read through the history of sieges, but the point of a siege is to make the people in the city so desperate for food, water, medicine, and peace that they’re willing to kill their own leader and open the gates to the invading army. Under those conditions, the besieged state is managing violent threats from both the outside barbarians and its own people who crack under the pressure. Failure to neutralize the internal threat from the small percentage that would throw wide gates means the external threat comes in full force and kills the rest of your people. Is that kind and fair and just? No. Is that because the DPRK is a bad faith actor? No. It’s because the US literally decimated their population, poisoned their land, and then tried to starve them through a 70-year siege.

It was obviously a wrong thing to do but who had the means to oppose it? And the will, after a long war? Even more with the nuclear menace looming?

So you’re fine with saying that the US were barbaric genocidal maniacs and nuclear menaces with all of the power and the will to fight while everyone else in the world was really just seeking peace but you still think that the DPRK is the bad faith actor here?

Maybe talking it out will help you see the contradiction in your position. The US’s actions during and after WW2 are not irrelevant history that’s in the past that people should be able to just overcome now. It’s quite literally the living present and it informs every single conflict over the last 70 years.

Do you think The Taliban exist because Afghanistan just breeds backwards people? Do you think al-Qaeda exists because Islam is a bad religion? Do you think Kuwait exists because it’s a genuine nation-state that deserves autonomy? Do you think Iran has absolutely no reason to have a brutal repressive administration despite it being literally the only way it has been able to maintain its autonomy from the West over the last 200 years?

The DPRK is an incredible story of resistance, a literal beacon of hope in an otherwise dystopian doom spiral. They fought for their independence with a people’s army and were so thoroughly destroyed that by all rights they should have been defeated and dissolved, but instead they not only held their ground but they rebuilt their country from literal rubble to a modern state complete with indigenous food production, medicine, education, recreation, and a national defense strategy that has prevented any meddling from the West via overt or covert means, and very very few nations in the world can make that claim. And they did while only having 2 trading partners: China (who was literally the poorest country in the world for most of that time) and the USSR (who was also under total blockage by the US).

The Koreans in the North have, almost without peer, the most legitimate claim in the whole world to self defense and national integrity.

It ends with “e psi”, close enough

The line of “not a good faith agent” was crossed by Truman. The Korean War was an extreme gratuitous war of genocide against the Korean people. That you don’t know the history is the reason you believe what you believe, and that’s by design as the USA is very conspicuous in the way it never ever ever talks about the Korean war in ways that would educate people, because it was unconscionable.

The Korean Peninsula, which is the homeland of the Korean nation, was brutally occupied by Imperial Japan. Japan was violent, rapacious, and monstrously oppressive to the Korean nation. But, as all empires do, they create systems of control that attract the conpromisers from among the occupied people, and they had a bunch of Korean people in their administration of the Korean Peninsula who benefited from selling their own people out.

When Japan was defeated on WW2, the US decided that they should take over the Korean Peninsula from Japan and continue the occupation. This was based primarily on the US’s position that the USSR and China were enemies of the US, despite those countries having been allies in the war.

So before we go any further, we have to mark two lines being crossed by the USA that show it was a bad faith actor.

1 - it claimed to fighting with its allies but after the USSR destroyed 80% of the Nazi forces and took Berlin (West Berlin was in East Germany, btw) and after the Chinese pushed the Japanese out of China, the USA decided that actually they weren’t really allies and that the USSR and China needed to surrounded by the US military and contained with violence and endless proxy wars. Total betrayal.

2 - it claimed to be fighting for freedom and democracy but as soon as the war ended it actually changed its story to protecting capitalism at all costs and that meant it had no problem taking over the imperial colonies of other countries and trying maintain them as imperial colonies (Korea, Ryukyu Micronesia from Japan, Vietnam from the French, Indonesia from the Dutch). In fact, capitalism was so clearly the important thing for the US that they literally brutalized Indonesians who fought for independence until they were able to convince the US that they were anti-communist and then the US turned on the Dutch and threatened to pull all their redevelopment funding if they didn’t leave Indonesia. The US clearly was not above killing masses of people for its own selfish goals.

Ok. Back to Korea. So the US takes over for Imperial Japan and the Korean compradors start working with the racist, violent, rapacious, oppressive US occupation. The Koreans who wanted independence decided to fight a war of liberation against the occupier and that also meant a civil war against the Koreans who benefited from being vassals of the empire.

The US responded by literally bombing every single building they could find in the entire country above an imaginary line they had drawn and gotten the Soviets to concede to accept. The Koreans never accepted such a line, but like Yosemite Sam, the US decided that line was real. They then proceeded to drop napalm on the entire country north of the imaginary line and the Koreans living there had to live in caves because they had no buildings to hide in. The US killed over a million civilians, nearly 10% of the entire Korean nation.

The US then proceeded to tell everyone this was about democracy and freedom while establishing a military dictatorship to administer South Korea that ran for 40 years before the US finally allowed the South to have a democracy.

So yes, the Koreans in the North have a massive military defense set up to defend itself, and for good reason. It will not allow another rapacious genocidal invasion like the Japanese or the Americans ever again. The Koreans in the North have recovered from literally total devastation without any help from 90% of the world’s economic actors because after the US bombed them back to the stone age they then established a full trade blockade and would not allow anyone to trade with them at all, something that still stands today. That blockade is not punishment for recent actions, it is punishment for trying to exist independently of the US’s goals of total dominance and hegemony.

So when do we decide that the USA is a bad faith agent? Where is the line when we collectively agree that the US has never been trustworthy, has never been honest, has never been interested in peace nor liberty nor democracy, but has instead lied, cheated, murdered, and genocided with zero consequences for 250 years?

I think that line was crossed a long time ago, and I think the non-white world has collectively seen the US as a bad faith actor for a long time. Hopefully more of the EuroCentric world starts to see it, too, and comes to the defense of the victims before the US plunges all of us into a massive dark ages.

The joint drills in question are literally simulations of invading the North, and the simulation is essentially a game of chicken where the US and its occupied territories act like they’re going to invade but say “no no. It’s just an exercise” and the North has to respond every single time by preparing for it as if it’s a real invasion because it is essentially one real-time order away from being an actual invasion

Fair enough. I just didn’t think the military was so fragile that a single election could turn it from the world police into the keystone kops.

US military logistics cannot be dismantled in 10 months by political appointees. It’s literally designed with a chain of command to prevent that, and it’s certainly not because of budget either. The reality is that the US military has been a paper tiger only capable of fighting shepherds, poor people, school children, hospitals, and babies. The minute they try to fight anyone with a decent capability, they fall apart. And Iran is probably the most capable adversary the US has fought since the Third Reich.

White people mostly didn’t. Black people talked to each other.

Wow, Shapiro was literally giving tax breaks to data centers as recently as last year.

You can’t sign away liability a lot of times. Contract law isn’t as simple as “they signed it!”. There are limits to what can be signed away in a contract and liability is a classic

Funnelling weapons into the losing side of a war is how you get a forever war that devastates the losing side. The West has done it for years. They are killing Ukraine with this strategy.

The idea that Russia isn’t serious about peace sort of flies in the face of the last 30 years of Russian diplomacy. Since 1992, Russia has only had military conflicts with a handful of countries and only at their borders and never to occupy or ethnically cleanse. In the same time, the US has had military conflicts with over a dozen countries none of them around their border, with some countries completely devastated and leveled, at lease one active genocide, and with massive extractive occupation. Russia spent the 90s and early 2000s trying to join NATO to establish a framework of mutual security with the West and the West not only refused but basically strung them along saying that maybe someday if they’re good. Eventually Russia realized the West has no intention of establishing mutual security and now we’re here, where Russia is running out of options if it wants national security.

Security assessments from Western intelligence organizations has repeatedly stated that Russia is not discussing, is not planning, and has not the capacity to invade and occupy all of Ukraine, or any more of Europe. The idea that Russia is just trying to win territory and then it’ll just keep doing it is the premise of Command and Conquer: Red Alert, not a serious assessment of the reality of Russian capabilities and plans.

The path to peace was exactly what Russia was asking for over decades - a mutual security framework. All security is mutual. The reason France and England are at peace with each other is because they have a security framework that incorporates the security needs of both countries. The reason Europe and Russia are not at peace is precisely because the European security framework excludes Russian security needs and does so knowingly and explicitly. How many times have we heard “Russia cannot decide who gets to join NATO”. That’s literally saying “Russia has no legitimate national security concerns that we have to take seriously”. In essence, Europe cares if Europe feels threatened by Russia, but Europe does not care if Russia feels threatened by Europe. That imbalance is the cause of the conflict.

So yes, if we want peace, the answer is to stop the fighting, and the fighting would have stopped over a year ago if the West had stopped propping up Ukraine with weapons, but also, the fighting would not have even started if the West hadn’t been bringing in weapons and military and nuclear readiness to Ukraine in the first place. So it’s sort of silly to say the West should stop arming Ukraine to end the war because the war exists because the West was arming Ukraine in order to create the conditions for war in the first place.

It is the West that is untrustworthy here.

He’s telling on himself. He doesn’t actually know how to do anything and he never did. He’s terrified of losing a.i. because there’s nothing for him to go back to

Yeah, you really can’t stop with the category error, can you?

The CPC isn’t a state. China is a state. It has had official international recognition as a state for centuries. The civil war did not change that. The civil war was for control of the state of China, the state that includes the province of Taiwan.

The majority of the world’s governments recognized the KMT as the legitimate government of the state of China, and some recognized the CPC as the legitimate government of the state of China. This split was largely along ideological lines - most countries would agree that the winner of a civil war is a legitimate government, but fascist anti-communists love supporting illegitimate governments like Juan Guaido or the recent Somaliland decision.

Nixon’s decision was to recognize the CPC as the legitimate government of the state of China. He did not recognize the CPC’s state because there was no such thing to recognize. Likewise, you are attempting to recognize the existence of a Taiwanese state when there is no such thing to recognize. It has never been a nation-state, it has never claimed to be a nation-state, and no government has ever recognized as a nation-state.

If you think history is convenient for my argument, perhaps what you mean is that my argument is supported by history.

All of Palestine was declared Terra Nullus by the imperialist. It is they who setup the system of Westphalian nation-states. This is, as they call it, the rules-based order. The reality is that Palestine should have been granted nation-state status by the entire world decades ago, but racism prevented that from happening, and now we have the situation we have. Some nation states have officially recognized Palestine’s status as a nation-state, but it has not been enough and it is far too late to have immediate impacts.

As for whether my understanding is strange, I would ask you to consider why the KMT itself did not claim Taiwan to be an independent nation state for the 50 years where it was a one-party fascist dictatorship on the island. Why did they find it so important to establish that they were still a faction within China and not a secessionary movement away from China? I didn’t decide that that’s what they would do. My understanding is fully inline with the understanding of the KMT and the CPC and the rest of official governments of the world. It’s really only the uninformed and the politically biased that have a strange understanding whereby the rules don’t matter, the never matter, and only what they believe is the correct moral answer, given their limited understanding, could ever be the right answer.

I love repeating myself in these threads. It’s so fun. Political parties do not control territories. That’s not how anything works. When Japan took Korea, it was not a party within Japan that took it. It was the nation state that took it. When Japan took Taiwan it was not a party within Japan that took Taiwan, it was the nation state that took it. When the US took Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc same thing. You would never say that it was Democratic-Republicans that own the Louisiana Purchase even though they were in power when the purchase took place.

The nation state of China, with its competing factions, reclaimed the island of Taiwan by pushing out the Japanese. The retreating army of the KMT fled to the island as refuge and the British and American warships protected them, setting up the island and the party to be a fascist vassal of the North Atlantic imperial regime. At no time did the retreating army secede nor declare independence. It claimed that despite having lost the war and despite having lost popular support that it was still the rightful government of China. Never mind that it had to kill tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who disagreed. Never mind that it spent 40 years violently and brutally crushing all forms of dissent against its position. And never mind that the imperialists never stopped supporting the KMT with warships, intelligence, arms, foreign direct investment, and diplomacy despite it being about as legitimate of a government as Juan Guaido.

Saying that the island belongs to the KMT is a category error. Parties don’t own territory. Nation states do. This is why the UN doesn’t have separate delegations for Labor, Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, Greens, AFD, etc.