AgProv
Doctor of Disorientation Studies, UnseenUniversity
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2014
- Messages
- 1,339
- Location
- too North to be Midlands, too south to be North
Following through ideas and links and assocations out of a genuine interest - discovered that despite the weight of evidence that North Korea is not a nice place to live, and the general availability of this evidence in the West, and the way it all stacks up in a way no reasonable person could ignore (unless they really, really, make an effort not to) - that you still get a devoted hard-core of people outside NK who truly believe the DPRK to be a workers' paradise where everybody is happy, content, well-fed, well-housed under the benign and fatherly wing of the Dearly Beloved Great Leader. In the past I had just enough of an association with far left politics in Britain to be aware of the existence of a grouping even other people on the revolutionary Left thought were odd and strange. "Tankies", so-called because they believed the workers' revolution needed to go into places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia with lots of tanks, so as to reinforce the dialectic arguments in a very forceful way, and root out anti-social and counter-revolutionary elements by force for necessary re-education. "Tankies" were also the dwindling hard-core whose only criticism of Joseph Stalin was that he could get a bit squishy-soft and compassionate. After Stalin's demise, the need for a Great Leader transferred to Enver Hoxha , Ceaucescu, Jaroslawski, et c.
It seems as if today, the Tankie mentality only really has one place left to go, as there is a dearth of far-left dictators... the world ain't what it was, hey?
Enter the Korean Friendship Association, whose British wing seeks to dispel all those fascist and capitalist slurs on the Workers' Paradise and the Beloved Leader.
https://www.nknews.org/2019/05/leaving-the-british-friends-of-north-korea-eight-years-in-the-uk-kfa/
Anyway. via - indirectly via - the KFA, I found myself looking at some of the things North Korea alleges about the Korean War of 1950 - 54. A lot of them are either batshit crazy or have grown in the telling, for instance. When I got as far as war crimes and alleged mass murders carried out, with slavering glee, by the United Nations coalition, with inhuman American fascists giving the orders, I was poised to dismiss this a a load of invented bollocks too.
Only to discover that in one case, the North Koreans do not appear to have been making it up. The history at this distance is confused and it is entirely possible the NK side is milking it for everything it can get, but something appears to have happened at Sinchon in 1950, as the American/South Korean armies retreated back to the 38th Parallel. (This is the same US Army that also did raw things at places like My Lai, 18 years later, its army tending to have dismissive ideas about "gooks".)
Big question.... how many war crimes were commited by American and Allied troops in Korea in 1950 - 54? Not something taught in our history classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinchon_Massacre
It seems as if today, the Tankie mentality only really has one place left to go, as there is a dearth of far-left dictators... the world ain't what it was, hey?
Enter the Korean Friendship Association, whose British wing seeks to dispel all those fascist and capitalist slurs on the Workers' Paradise and the Beloved Leader.
https://www.nknews.org/2019/05/leaving-the-british-friends-of-north-korea-eight-years-in-the-uk-kfa/
Anyway. via - indirectly via - the KFA, I found myself looking at some of the things North Korea alleges about the Korean War of 1950 - 54. A lot of them are either batshit crazy or have grown in the telling, for instance. When I got as far as war crimes and alleged mass murders carried out, with slavering glee, by the United Nations coalition, with inhuman American fascists giving the orders, I was poised to dismiss this a a load of invented bollocks too.
Only to discover that in one case, the North Koreans do not appear to have been making it up. The history at this distance is confused and it is entirely possible the NK side is milking it for everything it can get, but something appears to have happened at Sinchon in 1950, as the American/South Korean armies retreated back to the 38th Parallel. (This is the same US Army that also did raw things at places like My Lai, 18 years later, its army tending to have dismissive ideas about "gooks".)
Big question.... how many war crimes were commited by American and Allied troops in Korea in 1950 - 54? Not something taught in our history classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinchon_Massacre
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