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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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What’s it truly like to live in communist north korea right now? I know that most of the buzz around how it’s a failed state and they’re starving the people are mostly propaganda, but it’s so hard to tell fact from fiction especially since there’s propaganda within the state as well.
I don’t claim to be an authority, but I have spent the last couple years trying to learn about the DPRK as much as I can from more independent sources (like from people from China who go there as tourists).
From a material perspective… very broadly it seems like it’s better to live in the DPRK than to be poor in the United States, but someone in the US who isn’t poor is probably better off than most DPRK citizens. That of course should not be a surprise, given how heavily the DPRK is sanctioned and how restricted their trade is. Interestingly from the time shortly after the Korean War (after the DPRK was able to recover from having every bit of its industrial capacity destroyed and ~20% of its people killed) up through the 80s, the DPRK was seen as the wealthier of the two countries on the Korean Peninsula.
Honestly, the only way to deny that the people of the DPRK are doing ok materially is to use the line about how whenever you see videos of people having fun a water park or whatever, they’re all just actors. For that, idk I think any application of critical thinking would tell you how ridiculous that is.
That said, there’s some truth to the famine thing, but that’s more an artifact of recent history. There really were famine conditions and suffering in the 90s. But that was more a function of some unique weather/climatic conditions plus the collapse of the USSR. The environmental and terrain conditions in the DPRK are not ideal for farming (cold and mountainous), so there’s a lot less margin for when things go bad. The famines could have been alleviated if the DPRK was allowed to have normal relations with other countries, but at the time the US and their allies used that suffering to try and put the screws to the DPRK instead.
I don’t know enough about the political situation to be able to speak to it with confidence.
What a cruel thing the US did to use the suffering of the north koreans as ammunition against north koreans
Wait till you read about what the US did to the people of Nicaragua by supporting the Contras (who were for all practical purposes a part of the US military), if we’re talking more recent US atrocities…