North Korea said Wednesday that a U.S. decision to scale back military exercises with South Korea does not change what it sees as the provocative nature of the drills, dampening hopes for an early resumption of diplomacy between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump.
The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made the comments Wednesday night in her country’s first reaction to Trump’s moves to drastically cut back the annual U.S.-South Korean military drills.
“We think it’s not worth making comments on that and we have no interest in it at all,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by state media. “The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won’t change even though their duration and size were reduced.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s more than obvious at this point that we will not reach any point of contact between our views and that is fine.
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.
And I just remembered this: the main foreign investor in NK is South Korea, that builds factories there, within the constraints the international blockade on the country allows for it. In the same sense that it is 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.
They want nuclear weapons for the sake of deterr foreign threats? Fine. Have them, keep them, enjoy them. May the missiles rust in peace and to peaces in their silos. But why can’t they spare just a little bit of money to actually improve the quality of life in the country? Truly live by their words and actually elevate the people? Can we agree that is desirable and would mean a great deal to every nation that is currently taking them as bad actors?
Have a nice one. We’re bound to cross paths and disagree with each other somewhere in the future again. See yuou then.
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.
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?
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”
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.
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.
Right back atcha!