All my life, I've been told by the US Liesmedia, and by my society in general, that some people called "Red Chinese" subjected US Korean War POW's to some kind of a horrible "brainwashing and mind control" program. I've believed this all my life. It never happened. It's all a great big lie. There was about as much brainwashing and mind control as you get from reading this blog.
I was also told that US POW's got tortured. Never happened , at least not by the Chinese. There was some terrible treatment by the North Koreans, but as soon as the Chinese took over, thing quickly got better.
Turns out that a number of US POW's admitted that the US used biological weapons against the North Koreans. The Chinese made videotapes of these confessions and released them for propaganda purposes. The only way for the US government to make sense of these statements was to say that the POW's were tortured and subjected to mind control and brainwashing.
After the war, the POW's who made those statements were released, and came home to a hostile America, where they were threatened with court martial. They quickly recanted and made up a bunch of crap about brainwashing, mind control and torture to explain why they made those tapes.
A new book proves that the US did use biological warfare on North Korea. Evidence includes:
...Reports of sudden deaths from plague, anthrax and encephalitis (brain inflammation resulting from a viral infection), and eyewitness accounts of US aircraft dropping strange objects, including soybean stalks, feathers and cardboard packages containing live insects, rotten fish, decaying pork, frogs and rodents.
Fleas from these airdrops tested positive for plague, which had not been reported in Korea since 1912. And insects, spiders and feathers were found to be carrying anthrax.
Turns out our "free press" never got around to telling me about any of this either. Isn't it great living in a country with "freedom of the press"?
In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::
The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression.
This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples' thoughts.
I'm not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country's infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.
I respond:
huy, you are correct as far as your first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end.
This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom.
The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what you referred to as "control over people's thoughts"), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy.
This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem.
Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc.
These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports.
The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat.
What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all.
The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses' oil workers' union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media.
The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners' lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go.
In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers' orders and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must.
Getting a foot in the door of the Right's media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez.
Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but were actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse.
The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint.
Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power.
Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible.
Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power.
What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it's a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis.
If that doesn't work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population.
One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway.
The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez' Venezuela, Aristide's Haiti and Mossadegh's Iran.
If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replacement by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100's to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup.
What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them.
So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active.
The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics.
All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve.
On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 100% democracy. There's new thinking with a lot of Communists nowadays that socialism is not really possible without total democracy.
When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America?
Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn't Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states?
In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That's a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison?
I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves.
Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed.
People have no idea how much of China's economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways.
The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus.
Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn't matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has.
There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership.
We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, families, single owners, neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this.
The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism.
One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.
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From North Star Compass, dedicated to the restoration of the USSR as a socialist state, a few articles.
The first points out that Bulgarian seniors had their pensions cut by 50% in the late 1990's, such that their pensions are now way below the poverty line.
I don't know how much Social Security pays, but could you imagine if the US government cut Social Security by 50%? Actually, they want to cut it by way more than under the Republicans' SS privatization plan (which seemed to be supported by 100% of the US "free press").
Imagine if US seniors had to live on, say, $500-600/month for a single person? I think they must get more than that, don't they? Surely SS must pay $800-900/month? And now after the capitalist "reforms" of 2000, health care is no longer accessible to the majority of Bulgarians. This article was from last year, so I doubt anything has changed.
One thing is for sure, you won't see any articles like this in the US media. Keep in mind that these changes were supported by the entire US media and by both the Democratic and Republican Parties of the US. Isn't it amazing what kind of evil shit our entire media and both of our political parties support? And the citizens don't have a clue about any of this.
The next article by Irene Malenko puts North Korea in perspective. I've already written about North Korea on here before in a long article. She notes that North Korea is being subjected to the same sanctions that are currently destroying Zimbabwe, so it is really amazing that they are still afloat after all.
North Korea lost 80% of its trading partners overnight in 1990. She asks how Holland or Germany would react if they lost 80% of their trade overnight. Also, the price of oil went up by 10X in less than a year. Let's see how any capitalist society can handle a 10X increase in the price of oil in only one year.
She also notes that there is almost no crime in Pyongyang, and it's not due to the secret police either. It's a whole other mindset there. The streets are clean, with no litter and graffiti.
You find something similar in Belarus, which is still a more or less socialist country: clean streets you could practically eat off, no graffiti, no homeless, almost no unemployed. The absence of drug-sniffing gangs of homeless youth alone (epidemic in the capitalist paradises of Latin America) would seem to be a good thing.
She's correct that the residents of Pyongyang are well-fed. The "Stalinist" (for lack of any better term) distribution system for food and goods has long since pretty much broken down. I'm not sure what has taken its place, but there are farmers' markets and small peddlers everywhere.
The last article deals with the changes that have taken place in the capitalist Ukraine that the Ukrainian nationalists love so much. Ukraine privatized all of its coal mines recently. (What for? Why privatize a coal mine? The state can run coal mines perfectly well.)
Since then, Ukraine has some of the most dangerous coal mines in the whole world. Most health and safety standards have been eliminated, and most of the mines have been bought by foreign vulture capitalists, who according to Ukrainian ultra-capitalist laws, are not liable for any health and safety regulations anyway, even those that might still exist.
Labor unions have been outlawed in most of the mines, and those that remain are completely controlled by management. The last phrase is a jibe at some of my readers who think that "class collaboration" is the way to "end the class struggle" and make workers and management both happy. Further, there's an inhuman speedup regimen going on that is probably also helping to kill these workers.
The last election that was characterized by an Orange Revolution (yet another US-funded color revolution) pitted the pro-US party (responsible for the coal mine horror) against a pro-Russian party coded as evil by the entire US media and the Bush Administration.
The color revolution that the US media cheered on so much (and I assume was supported to the hilt by the Democratic Party too) was all about making Ukraine's coal mines among the deadliest on Earth and other ultra-capitalist miracles, and it had little other purpose. Amazing the chocolate-covered shit the US media sells as the latest and best See's Candies, huh?
The Heroic Protests of Senior Citizens of Bulgaria By Dr. Ivan Angelo October 2007
In the late 1990’s the pensions of the retired people had been cut by 50%, so that now most of them are living way under the poverty line. Then after the reforms in year 2000, heath care is not accessible to most of the retied people.
DPRK: Where Every Day Is Like May Day by Irina Malenko September 2007
Shops are full, and plenty of people are buying. Juvenile delinquency is far lower than in Russia; there are no gangs of glue-sniffing, smoking and drinking kids on the streets. The streets are clean and litter-free; you don't even see trash cans on the street. People are friendly and quiet, as opposed to being rude and loud in capitalism.
Pickpockets are nonexistent, and you can probably leave your bag anywhere in Pyongyang and no one will steal it. There is little hunger in Pyongyang, but unfortunately there is still quite a bit in the rural areas. They lost 80% of their trade partners overnight in 1990 - we have to ask how Holland or Germany would cope with the overnight loss of 80% of its trade partners.
There are also very serious problems due to US sanctions which have hit the economy very hard - these are the same sanctions that have destroyed Zimbabwe - as such it is amazing that N Korea is still on its feet.
Mounting Tragedies in Capitalist Ukraine September 2007
A methane blast in the coal mine killed 63 miners and injured scores more. 360 miners that were trapped in this mine at more than 1,000 meters deep had to struggle against a raging fire. This tragic accident again and again highlights the tragedy of the present privatized mines that lack even elementary standard safety features.
Ukraine now has some of the most dangerous mines in the world, forced to working at high speed and, since most of these mines are foreign owned, they are not responsible for any safety regulations that might still exist. There are no trade union allowed in these mines and, many of the so-called leaders of those that still have a trade union, are bought by the management.
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The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated January 23, 2008:
The power of capitalist propaganda is immense. According to the ruling class media, the only system that starves anyone anymore is Communism.
One hears this platitude over and over - Communism = starvation. It is true that 600,000 have starved to death in North Korea since the 1990's. However, 14 million starve to death every year in the world - mostly in South Asia but also 1 million in Latin America - almost all under capitalist regimes. Not one word of this from the ruling class mouthpieces.
This has been going since at least 1986 (when the figure was calculated) with no end in sight.
The Soviet Union and China are now synonymous with starvation. There was a famine in the Ukraine in 1932 that killed 1.5 million people. Previously, during the Russian Civil War, there was a famine in 1921 that killed 9 million people. It is a simple truth that under Czardom, the peasant never had enough to eat. His life expectancy was a mere 32 years and lack of food played a role here.
Under Communism, the peasant had plenty of food to eat for the first time in centuries. In the early 1930's, the Soviet Union saw the largest harvests in its history, big harvests that continued for decades. All of this is forgotten, and all we know is famine, famine, famine. One wonders how Stalin doubled life expectancy in the USSR while the people starved.
In China again, we hear that Communism starved the people. In 1958, it is true, there was a terrible famine, the worst in modern history, mostly caused by the stupidity of over-procurement by the state, that killed an astounding 15 million people.
Yet year and year out, millions of lives were being saved every year in China. Under Communism, with the exception of 1958, the Chinese peasants finally had enough food to eat. Like the Russian peasants, starvation and lack of food had stalked the Chinese peasant for centuries.
By the early 1970's, the problem of food in China was finally solved for the first time in centuries. As with the USSR, China also doubled life expectancy under Mao. Once again, one wonders how this was achieved if the people were "starving" as the anti-Communists claim.
In Vietnam in 1944-45, 2 million died during deliberate starvation by French and Japanese capitalist forces when they seized the rice crop. One never hears of this famine. Only Communists starve people.
Cuba has recently lowered malnutrition to 2%, the lowest rate in Latin America. More here and here. It is amazing how they can do that while they starve the population, no?
Here is a Cuban newspaper about how, in Cuba, the right to eat is elevated above the right to shoot off one's mouth. In fact, the paper suggests intriguingly that the limits on free speech in Cuba are directly attributable to the government's ability to feed everyone. The suggestion is that if you let everyone shoot off their mouth, food will be snatched from the mouths of babes:
Ironically, the country that supposedly limits the freedom of its citizens is the only one in Latin America where there is not malnutrition," wrote Periodico 26, an official publication in backwater Las Tunas province, on Feb. 6, alluding to a recent United Nations report stating that only two percent of Cuban children had some kind of nutrient deficit.
"What is portrayed in the U.S. media as an aggression against an individual's free will, is in fact a synonym for nutritional security for most Cubans." The newspaper goes on to say that free meals provided at work centers and schools add another crucial component to Cubans' diets.
In Vietnam, the malnutrition rate of 18% is about 1/2 the Thai rate of 36%, one positive aspect of Vietnamese socialism. When one thinks of Thailand, one never suspects that 1/3 of the population doesn't get enough food to eat. All one thinks of are tourists, skyscrapers, traffic jams, girly bars, beaches and elephants.
In Pakistan, 62% of all children are already stunted in growth by the tender age of five. But the media tells us that stunting only occurs in North Korea. After all, it is only Communism that starves the people.
Let us focus our attention on the capitalist showcase of Niger, in northern Africa, where the human-hunting industry, the most profitable enterprise capitalism has ever developed, yet festers.
Here capitalism has blessed this blighted and unstable land with the worst human development indicators on Earth, where 40% of children are chronically undernourished (And that is in a bountiful harvest!), where the literacy rate is a Medieval 17%, life expectancy is a tragic 44.7 years, the infant mortality rate is an outrageous 151.8 per 1000, and Niger is bested by only one other country when it comes to killing little kids under age 5.
What is killing the children of Niger, or for that matter, kids across the Sahel? None other than the free market. Recently, free market fundamentalists convinced the government to deregulate the grain market, leading to major fluctuations in grain prices. When prices are high, they are so high that families could not even afford to buy food for their kids.
Worse, money that should have gone to education and health care, such as it exists, goes for food. The wonders of the invisible hand of starvation! Incredibly, while the people starved, Niger exported food according to capitalist market "logic". One is reminded of Czarist Russia, which exported wheat every year while the peasants went hungry.
Going the free market route was one of the dumbest things Niger ever did. It increased poverty, hunger and starvation. Yet the media tells us that this free market project is the only thing that works, and everything else is "failed". I think if the successful project were starving me, I might give one of those "failures" a shot.
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By now you surely have heard that North Korea has a nuclear bomb and has tested it, although the bomb appears very small, the test did not go well, and it has not yet been put on top of a missile. I am not at all worried about this bomb, though maybe I should be.
I have been studying North Korea for years, and this is the basis for my carefree attitude about their nuclear bomb. They simply are not going to use it in an aggressive manner as it is strictly for defensive purposes.
For those reasons, I actually support North Korea's getting a bomb, as I figure they will never use it anyway (unless we are so stupid as to attack them) and it is only them having a bomb that keeps us from attacking them.
I think all sane, rational countries being threatened by nuclear powers should have the right to get WMD's to defend themselves. Most countries in the world qualify as sane, and certainly North Korea does. All the nonsense about "crazy Kim Jong Il" is just US propaganda crap. For an example of an insane, irrational country that should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, consider the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
I actually dislike the regime intensely, but there are positive notes amidst all the terror of the gulags and the corruption of the elite.
For one, I really feel that Kim Jong Il has been trying his best to feed his people, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of capitalist regimes in the Third World, whose governments do not make the tiniest efforts to feed anyone, as this is seen as the responsibility of the individual.
The World Bank, the IMF and the US government routinely try to attack and even destroy such governments if they try to feed their people. Jean Bertrand Aristide, for example, was overthrown at gunpoint by the US, France and Canada, in part because he was spending large sums to give millions of poor Haitians one free meal (lunch) a day.
The World Bank and the IMF usually demand that these governments scale back or terminate any government feeding programs in order to continue to get loans from these institutions.
My understanding is that the northern part of Korea has never been able to feed its people, even before the Communist regime. I suppose it has always either relied on imports from Southern Korea or China, or else, if that was not forthcoming, it simply lacked enough food. The country is very cold and mountainous with rocky soil and it is hard to get crops to grow there.
Some background on the famine: North Korea had the worst floods in 100 years in 1995 and 1996, followed by the worst drought in 100 years in 1997, which also involved famine. All this happened after the economy collapsed in 1990 with the loss of Soviet economic cooperation.
To give you an example of what was involved in this 1990 collapse, note that the price of oil immediately climbed by 1000% (10 times) in the space of a year. They simply could not purchase enough oil to run their factories and farms so the whole country pretty much shut down.
For those enamored of the theory that Communist states like Cuba and North Korea can only be maintained by massive aid from outside to "keep them afloat", we should note that from 1946-1960, South Korea received 4 times the aid to South Korea as the Soviet Union was giving to North Korea. For most of the 1950's, the US provided 50% of the entire budget of South Korea. Which state is the welfare case, anyway?
The US has been deliberately trying to destroy their economy from Day One so we should talk about their economic problems. Right now, we are trying to cut off the regime from the entire world banking system. This means that factories that make consumer goods have been unable to import the materials necessary to make those products.
During the starvation crisis of the 90's, my perception is that the world did not exactly step up to the plate for avert the crisis. The US continued embargoing North Korea, as they have since 1950, and as they did during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-1962 in which 15 million Chinese died while the US scurried to block all food aid.
The embargo has recently been strengthened in an effort to cut off the North from the world financial system. The US and other nations played politics with the food aid during the famine, a disgusting display of cynical Realpolitik in my opinion.
Regarding the number of deaths in the famine, anti-North Korean polemicists claim that 3-4 million people died. Fine, they can claim that all they want but they need to prove it. The Asian Development Bank says that 500,000 died*. See for that figure. Others put the figure at 600,000.
It was a terrifying, nightmarish time and the horror stories from the era seem for the most part to be true.
So, what happened in North Korea from 1995-1997 has continued to occur on a greater scale and to the same degree every year since then in India. So how come we don't hear how India starves its people? It should be noted that the regime has not been able to feed its people for the last 10 years and 40% of the youngest generation are stunted from malnutrition.
North Korea has liberated women to a radical degree - there are more college-educated women than men. The regime does an excellent job of taking care of orphans (especially) and children in general.
There are many orphans. - 30% of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, mostly by US carpet bombing, often with napalm, that was frankly terrorist warfare - a devastation comparable in degree to those experienced by Poles, Russians and World Jewry in World War 2.
The US, under Curtis LeMay, destroyed just about every city and town in North Korea, often with blatant napalming of entire cities. When napalm was invented in 1945, no one imagined that it would be used wholesale against entire cities.
As early as 1952, almost every civilian in North Korea was living in either a cave or a tunnel. There are still a huge number of orphans - if you meet North Koreans, you will find that almost everyone lost at least one relative in the war.
North Korea has excellent in the treatment of the handicapped - sending them to the many special schools and programs that are set up for them, finding employment for them and making special efforts to find them marriage partners.
As with the orphans, there are many handicapped, mostly due to the devastating war, and the North Korean people treat the handicapped with a kindness and deference that would surprise most residents of the capitalist dog-eat-dog West.
North Korea has truly free housing and practices preventive medicine on a comparatively high level. Prostitution is a memory and it is impossible to bribe a cop. North Koreans had a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than South Korea until 1980, and until the tragedies of the 1990's, North Korea's rates of these 2 indexes were on a par with advanced industrialized states.
North Korea had higher per capita growth rates than South Korea for decades until the 1980's. By 1980, visitors riding trains from North Korea to China were shocked at how much better off North Korea seemed to be than China. North Korea's rural areas were neat and well-built up, with well-maintained farm machinery in ample supply. In contrast, China, both cities and countryside, appeared squalid.
Since then, the system has foundered. It is not so much that the system itself is a completely failed model as capitalist propagandists assert but that it is a limited model. That is, you can get superb economic growth in both agriculture and industry for decades under Communism (the experience of the Soviet Union and Mao's China are instructive).
But after decades of growth, the system seems to reach a law of diminishing returns and also bogs down into bureaucracy. North Korea has now significantly liberalized their economy to the point where it is not really a totally Communist economy (certainly not a "Stalinist" system - North Korea's model never really resembled Stalin's USSR anyway) at all anymore.
A lot of the enterprises are virtually being run by workers themselves and the cities are crowded with farmers markets and stands for small entrepreneurs.
Nevertheless, many of the horror stories you hear about North Korea's gulags are probably true. Still, there is a problem with these stories. It is now acknowledged that most information from North Korean defectors is pretty much useless. Sometimes they have good information if you can get to them before South Korean intelligence does. After that, they are about useless.
Defectors' stories are most valuable for telling us what life is like in their immediate surroundings. Few top-level defectors have left North Korea over the lifespan of the regime, so our understanding of the inner workings of the regime is limited.
The notion that North Korea would give their nuclear weapon to terrorists, or God forbid Al Qaeda, regularly heard in the US media, nearly qualifies as a paranoid delusion. The whole notion of "giving a nuke to terrorists" which Americans have been hammered with nonstop since 9-11 is sort of silly and fantastical anyway.
To look into this requires a brief primer on nuclear weapons. I am not an expert, but here goes.
For starters, let us look at the nonsense about the suitcase nukes. A modern nuclear weapon, as I understand it, is about as big as a very small car - say a Volkswagen beetle or an electric car. If you put it in your living room, it takes up a good part of the room. You can put it in a large truck, but a suitcase!? Come on.
Furthermore, most modern-day nuclear weapons are either launched from a missile of dropped from a bomber. A common misconception is that a nuke is detonated on impact. You could put a nuke in a truck and drive it into a building 100 mph, drop it from a plane, shoot it on a missile, set it on fire, or even attack it with another nuclear weapon, and none of that will detonate it.
The only way to detonate a nuclear weapon is to fire a detonator at the atomic core inside the nuke. In modern nuclear weapons, the detonator is a very large precision instrument located inside the nuke itself. It must be fired just right, with mathematical precision down to fractions of a second and many other variables lined up perfectly.
This a process that is enormously difficult, and large states with huge budgets and legions of physicists have had a very hard time doing it, with the project often taking years or decades, and many projects ending in failure. The notion that terrorists living in Afghan caves can make one of these weapons, smuggle it into the US and detonate it is hysterical.
It is testament to the ignorance or duplicity of the US media and politicians that such scenarios resonate across our land to terrify a public that is uneducated about these complex matters.
Another notion, constantly parried about on the "Terror Channels" of the US media, is that Kim Jong Il wants to attack South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or especially the US, with his nasty nukes. I don't believe this. The relationship between the South and the North is enormously complex, but the South (and especially its US patron) threatens the North as much as vice versa.
I do not think a North Korean goal is an unprovoked attack against South Korea, and certainly not Japan or, ludicrously, Taiwan. Any North Korean attack on an US target, forget the US mainland, would be met with such a devastating response that North Korea would be history. A Northern attack on the South would be similarly suicidal.
The North has not spent 40 years rebuilding its land from the total devastation of the war to blow it all on a suicidal war of aggression. On the contrary, I think that North Korea would eventually would like to reunify the South and the North. The South Korean population seems to agree, as 80% oppose the US' belligerent stance towards the North.
I am not sure why the US media, which resembles a Halloween haunted house attraction meant to scare your pants off for sheer entertainment, is always trying to keep us terrified of dubious threats. Unless they just want to keep us chronically terrified for other ulterior motives.
If anyone should be afraid of anyone, the North should be afraid of the US. We are still officially at war with them, as we never signed an armistice. The US holds regular war games with the South aimed at North Korea. Plans to attack and wipe out the regime are being constantly updated, the most recent of which is frightening in its attention to trivial detail and baseless optimism about success.
37,000 US troops at 100 installations dot the South Korean landscape. The largest US bombing range in Asia is the scene of bombing practice 5 days a week, year-round. The US stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, menacing the North. Those are gone, but they have been replaced by nuclear-armed ships and planes that the US surrounds the North with.
On January 8, 2002, three weeks prior to the declaration of the Axis of Evil, George Bush presented a "Nuclear Posture Review" to Congress, ordering the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for nuclear attack on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, in addition to the non-Axis states of Syria, Libya, Russia and China.
From their point of view, the North is mystified at why we vilify them. They see themselves as opposing the apparently illegal division of their country (engineered by the US) from the start.
They are angered at being blamed for starting a war that they see as a civil war between a minority of collaborators with the Japanese who occupied their land (those Koreans supporting South Korea) and the majority of Koreans (those Koreans supporting North Korea). They are proud that they held off the US and its UN allies during the war.
For these acts, which they see as heroic, they feel they have been unfairly tagged as "hostile nation".
A couple of new books** have come out in the past couple of years advocating attack on North Korea. The nonsense about the North's petty nuke that reverberates from the media machine is downright frightening. For those who wish to hear an antidote to the insane drumbeat of warmongering hostility against North Korea, consider this a beginning primer.
*Meredith Woo-Cummings, The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, Asian Dev. Bank Inst., Tokyo, 2001
** Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 300 pp., and Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. 868 pp.
Independent Left journalist in California. Trustafarian in a shackteau, slumming it up in the barrio. Revolutionary, Leftist nationalist, Christian, liberation theology, replacement theology. BA Journalism, MA Linguistics, Green Party, Communist Party USA, Democratic Party.
Generally, topics focused through a progressive yet heterodox lens. Discusses race a lot. Also lots of shock and horror videos - if it bugs you, don't read or watch. Pan-humanist universalist, non-racist race realist, despises the PC, Cultural Marxist, Identity Politics, Western New Left. Iconoclast, smashes all party lines, angers everyone. Notorious provocateur; if I'm not making you mad, I'm not doing my job. Channeling Andy Kaufman, Tony Clifton, Lenny Bruce, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Kinky Friedman, Hunter S. Thompson and Wally Gator. Shoot first.
