this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
1028 points (98.1% liked)

Political Memes

10386 readers
1373 users here now

Welcome to politcal memes!

These are our rules:

Be civilJokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.

No misinformationDon’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.

Posts should be memesRandom pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.

No bots, spam or self-promotionFollow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.

No AI generated content.Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Idk man, I'm no fan of the whole Kim cult of personality thing. But anyone with a cursory understanding of modern Korean history could see that the foreign policy actions of the DPRK are largely quite rational, if also informed by the trauma of the Korean war.

The United States dropped so many bombs that Koreans took to living in caves. American pilots complained that there simply wasn't anything left to bomb.

I think what's actually cringe is sitting on your computer and being a smug prick about it

[–] Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

What a load of steaming bullshit lmao

Nothing about the current North Korean regime or the Kim dynasty is in any way, shape, or form logical, rational, or justified. The Kims are unhinged tyrants who have fucked over their entire country to give themselves power.

The very notion that war "trauma" leads to totalitarian regimes like this is nonsense made up by Marxists to justify the existence of this indefensible regime. There have been soooooooo many countries that went through war since WWII and were devastated by it, and none turned out like this.

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

America went crazy over planes flying into a couple towers and started two wars over it. Now imagine it was every building in the country.

[–] Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's a creatively disingenuous way to describe 9/11

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sorry, there was also a plane that hit a pentagonal building, and one that hit a field. Still not much compared to having your entire country bombed to rubble.

[–] Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Once again, that's a very disingenuous way to describe 9/11

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

First of all, 9/11 was and still is the biggest and deadliest terrorist attack in modern history. Nothing comes close in terms of death toll or scale. 9/11 was and still is the single biggest attack on US soil since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor during WWII. It was so unprecedented that it left the world's wealthiest, most advanced, most powerful did in complete disarray.

The Al Qaeda terrorists managed to successfully infiltrate the US mainland, hijack 4 civilian planes from an American airport, and crashed them all at targets meant to damage the country's national symbols. Even though one of the planes failed to hit the target thanks to the heroic acts of the passengers on board, they still managed to crash a plane into the Pentagon and 2 planes that destroyed the WTC, killing over 3000 civilians.

It was shocking, so horrible, and so insane that virtually every country at the time expressed condolences and support to the vicitms. Even America's enemies at the time like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea condemned the attacks. There were vigils held in over 100 countries. In the nearly 25 years since then, the only events that received a similar level of global condemnation was ISIS during 2014/15 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That's about it.

9/11 was not a minor event by any means like you're trying to make it out to be. The fact that you're trying to downplay what it was just shows that you're 100% engaging in bad faith from the get go.

Second of all, the only two active wars that US has engaged in since then. There was the Afghanistan war started in 1999, which was done because of 9/11 because the Taliban worked with Bin Laden and refused to extradite him to the US when asked. There was also the Iraq war which was done under the false pretense that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't started over 9/11.

When countries get attacked by terrorist like this, they usually attack back very hard and very quickly. When India had Pahalgam attack back in April, they nearly went to war with Pakistan. When Israel was attacked by Hamas, they bulldozed Gaza. When France got attacked by ISIS they become the leaders on the fight against ISIS. When Russia got attacked by Chechen separatists, they want to war with Chechnya. No country is going to sit idly when a massive terrorist attack by an external entity is carried out against them. The US is no different.

Finally, there have been A LOT of countries since the Korean war that have been devastated by war. You have Iraq, Ukraine, Yemen, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria, and the list goes on and on. Yet not a single one of them ended up being as shutoff as North Korea. Even countries that were completely burnt down like Japan and Germany managed to recover after WWII just a decade prior to the Korean war starting.

The point is that this idea that "war trauma" is the reason why North Korea turned out to be the way that it is complete horseshit and has zero basis in reality. If that was the case then half the world would be as isolated, extremist, and tyrannical as North Korea... but they're not. The reality is this notion is nothing more than piss poor excuse to justify the evils of this regime from people who are unironically dump enough to support it. There's nothing rational, logical, or sensible in the way that North Korea is run today.

It's so closed off that people their can't visit their relatives in the South, people can't travel abroad, they can't even access the internet. The people there are just as clueless about the world as we are about them. Our only source on the society there is from defectors who made the brave journey of escaping, and all of their stories consistently describe the most horrific shit happening inside the country. From slavery to starvation to torture to pure 1984 styled tyranny. How is that okay to you? What part of this regime or how its run makes sense to you? It's indefensible

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

2 buildings vs. all of them. Incomparable.The rabid dog genocidaires of the United $naKKKes will assuredly be punished for their crimes

[–] Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Last I checked the Korean war didn't happen because of 9/11, it happened because North Korea, which was funded and armed by the Soviet Union, invaded South Korea with the intent of occupying the whole peninsula by force against the will of the people in the South. The US intervened on the behalf of the legitimate government of Korea, and pushed pack the Kim Il Sung's invasion back to the 38th parallel. Because of America's intervention. South Korea managed to transform itself from an impoverished and backwards dictatorship into one of the world's freest, most prosperous, most advanced nations. North Korea on the other hand remained an impoverished and backwards dictatorship that only managed to get worse because the Kim dynasty put their people through a massive famine and some of the world's worst tyranny.

If you're going to sit here and try to unironically simp for fucking North Korea of all places then kindly go fornicate yourself with a lead pipe.

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 minutes ago

You're extremely mistaken regarding the Korean war. The South was not the "legitimate government" of Korea, it was an American-installed dictatorship made up of collaborators from the previous Japanese occupation. The North had a much greater claim to being the legitimate government, and Kim Il Sung, having fought the Japanese rather than being a collaborator, would have won nationwide elections had the American occupation allowed them.

The 38th parallel was not an internationally recognized border, and didn't become one until after the war. It was just the demarcation between the two occupation zones. South Korea made plenty of incursions into the North before the war, it's just that the North pulled the trigger on an all-out invasion, and they had every right to do so given that half of their country was occupied by a hostile imperial power.

Nobody's "stanning" North Korea, you dolt. We're talking about history, and the history is that the United States pursued a campaign of genocidal terror-bombing against North Korea, destroying every city, town, and piece of civilian infrastructure. They used biological weapons developed by Imperial Japan's Unit 731, they doused villages full of people with napalm. It is in no way inaccurate to say that it was a war of extermination that you undertook against them. To top it off, after the armistice, you imposed a perpetual economic siege and military encirclement, in their eyes threatening to resume hostilities at any time. Is it any wonder that they would end up "sooo craaaazy and evil"? All I said was that the US went a lot crazier per building destroyed than they did.

[–] GrammarPolice@lemmy.world -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's one thing to say that the history of the DPRK is unfortunate and that whatever happened shouldn't have, it's also another to say that whatever their handling of the situation, no matter how poor, corrupt or unhumanitarian is therefore justified.

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago

Perhaps not justified, universally, but I'm not going to make a sweeping generalization one way or another. Reliable information about internal DPRK dynamics is difficult to come by anyway, when you have to sift through defecors paid by South Korea to make their accounts more shocking, and made up nonsense about haircuts

For the things we do have solid evidence for, namely DPRK foreign policy, You have to take these things on a case by case basis, and place them in their proper historical and political context.

Going around and calling the DPRK a crazy rogue states is at best ignorant of the contributing factors, and at worst actively racist and orientalist.