Cross most well guarded border on earth
Realize that it sucks
Go back
:chad: Real chad shit
All fun and games until capitalism cannibalizes itself and destroys the country with Fascism.
I could be wrong, but from what I've heard this happens quite often, defectors from the DPRK don't have a lot of job prospects in ROK (other than shilling) so they return to DPRK.
South Korea will also open fire on its own citizens if they attempt to cross the DMZ north
SK prevents them from leaving the country, which is why this person getting back to the North was such a big deal.
They'll shoot you if you try to cross back, they'll deny you passports and travel rights out of country, they will do anything and everything to keep north korean citizens trapped in the south.
Either that or starve to death because they live in a capitalist hellhole
well thats why we have a vid-doc made in the free south that interviews the citizens of the DPRK that sadly don't make the cut for all of the entertainment shows that talks about how barbaric and brutal the north is.
their quotes from the video make it sound like she’s coerced
Which quotes? How so?
She was a TV personality, of course she ate. Highlighting that south korea doesn’t actually have a lot of food is a really weird thing to say.
She appeared on a TV show because that's often the only job that a North Korean defector can get. They probably gave her a few hundred dollars at most. She's not a wealthy celebrity. Most North Koreans have a hard time landing a job in the south. Poor people in every capitalist country are food insecure. I find her statement 100% believable, especially given the recent documented case of a North Korean defector who starved to death in her apartment in Seoul.
And then there’s this
Lim - who described herself as “human trash”
That sounds to me like she's depressed. I figure most people who are motivated to flee a country which they consider a hell-hole would be depressed.
they all call her a “TV personality” and highlight her appearanceS on tv. (She was on reality shows, did interviews, was on talk shows, etc)
North Koreans are placed on TV in South Korea the same way that a boy who eats cockroaches is placed on Jerry Springer's studio in America, as freaks to gawk at. Do you think that every person who is interviewed on a daytime talk show is wealthy?
Nothing in the article she said implies she was "starving".
Just that South Korea wasn't what she thought...which could mean anything.No, the other poster did.
where?
I went back to the start of the thread and the first person to mention she said she was starving in SK was you.I'm not even necessarily defending the video or whatever, I was just saying you were extrapolating from her statement something that's not evident.
I implied that she could be food insecure despite appearing on TV, because that is a distinct possibility.
yes but the first person to suggest she was claiming not to have ate was somedipshit.
I feel like I am being gaslighted, or I don't undersdtand how a thread works.
TankieTanuki asked you "which quotes? how so?" and then you quoted her and said "of course she ate." as if her statement was to imply South Korea lacks food, when that isn't what her statement mean't...or at the very least it's not clear from the quote that is what is mean't.
1 :meow-hug: to the posting trenches
- Don’t call other users names :hexbear-retro:
I wish you the best, but you may continue to encounter these situations elsewhere
Please understand that people were engaging with you critically because we misunderstood your first comment to mean the opposite of what you meant. We were "attacking" you because we wanted to challenge what seemed like anti-communism, not for any personal reasons. I understand how frustrating it is to be misunderstood and I'm sorry I grilled you like I did in hindsight, but you should also cool down a little and accept part of the blame for not clearly communicating yourself.
Did you learn this stuff from a different article? This one just says she was "forced to appear on South Korean television to make the North appear more miserable than it actually was."
Maybe she was rich and famous; it's possible. All I'm saying is that it's not at all guaranteed given what I know about most defectors. If she was unable to find a job except for a couple token interviews, that would still make her a "TV personality", but she could still have trouble making rent in Seoul.
What she said doesn't necessarily mean that she was lacking food though, just that she went South imagining she would have a good life and eat well, but didn't anticipate the hardships she would encounter that were the price she had to pay to "make it" in the South, stuff she mentions like lying about her country and people, being told to read a script, and other things that are normal for lots of people that have to move away from their homes, like missing friends and family, feeling isolated, and getting culture shock. That's how I interpreted it.
That's quite a reach on your part. Ask yourself why coercion is the first place your mind went and on a scale from 8-10 how much of a role anti-communist propaganda played in that reaction.
You've (1) inventively extrapolated from "I thought I'd live and eat well" to "they said they were starving despite being a TV celeb" (with all kinds of false assumptions about how the South Korea detector exploitation TV industry works) and (2) interpreted self-deprecation of the kind you'd literally see on this exact website as suggestive of coercion.
This is absurd and it's problematic to reach for anti-communist tropes so easily and without coherence. Please try to restrain yourself from feeding such crap through ridiculous speculation.
In your hurry to defend north korea from imperialist propaganda
Unless you're (correctly) calling your own words imperialist propaganda, this is not describing anything I've said to you.
Oh do try to dig yourself out of your own ass, you seem to have gone too far up there.
Reddit tier faux condescension has no place here. Kindly go fuck yourself until you've figured out how to talk to other people.
Now see, I read your comments before saying anything and no, you actually did lead with these insinuations and then doubled down on them. If you meant something else, that's on you for failing to communicate because no fewer than three separate people (100% of responses) have the same understanding as I do.
Are you capable of any self-crit whatsoever?
Because there's no irony there.
You're avoiding very basic self-crit, here. In fact, you went out of your way to excise the preceding sentence to avoid the new bit of self-crit I highlighted.
Go have your shitty imperialist thought process elsewhere until you can handle conflict among comrades without becoming a huge lib stooping to misleading selective quotation.
Reread this thread, comrade, in 5 minutes from the start, you both got side tracked here a little bit
I've reread it twice, not sure what more I can get from it.
Comrade initial point was, as I’ve understood it, that quotes were deliberately pulled to seem (to the western audience) co-erced and obvious lies (?), and he would like to see the full video (?). it doesn’t seem like revisionist ploy :meow-tankie:
That's what they're telling you they meant now, though it's contradicted by their later comments where they suggest that the quotes in question suggest coercion. This is their brain recognizing anti-communist propaganda and then... actually ending up justifying it. You can see the various interactions about what it means to be on TV as a defector and their imaginative thinking on what the quote on eating well means.
I'm happy to cordially assume they didn't mean to do that and instead meant to say, "here's something that looks like propaganda playing up tropes" and then aggressively bumbled their way through responses, though.
Hmm, maybe it’s language barrier, that is how I initially read it: two comments are designed to seem coerced, and are obviously either untrue (cause she is minor tv thingy) or mistranslated or whatever context. Than some posts about definitions of tv celebrity, blah blah, and then you are calling each other names :sadness:
That's an interpretation I entertained initially until I read the deeper comments where they start speculating about starvation and being a regular on certain TV shows. It's also why I didn't reply top-level - the next chain down is where things start going off the rails. No language barrier, your reading of that first bit is valid.
Unfortunately they seem to prefer insults and belligerence as a smokescreen, something I'm happy to return because this isn't a debate it's a leftist forum where a modicum of anti-imperialism is the very least we can ask from obviously Anglo comrades.
Seems that there's a particular kind of conversation you'd rather have and it's best described as petty bullshit. Please take a little break and reconsider that going forward.
lol you've now told yourself a victim narrative. I hope you don't actually do anything like this irl, the orgs would suffer.
I guess having the last word is important to you, even if it's expressions of Anglo insecurity, so you go right ahead buddy.
I look forward to your eventual self-crit.
I am talking about how articles about this take quotes out of context to present a narrative
That's true, but Deutsche Welle is a German state media outlet which seeks to present the narrative "North Korea bad", so I doubt the context would make things seem worse (although I'd like to see the video too).
Edit: Oh, maybe that's what you've been trying to say all along lol. I see you edited your original comment for clarity.
eat and live well there
This could mean "eat well and live well," depending on how you read it (and the translation). If all she had was a low-paying job with high living expenses, eating well may have been an issue.
watch "CRASHLANDING ON YOU" its on netflix and its a perfect apolitical romatication of North Korea to Trojan horse it to everybody to spark interest...
(and the Main Actors are together now)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUThdaetvno :comfy:it is Trojan Horse -Libshit- at the End
spoiler
___ All the North Koreans return to the North out of their free will
Other defectors have reappeared in the North to be displayed on similar programs, prompting speculation they were kidnapped by Pyongyang
It really is all projection, isn't it? This is exactly what the south does to DPRK citizens
lot of those shows are funded by libertarian think tanks that pay their guests at a ratio of more money for more ridiculous stories. Which is why you hear of horror stories of things like "I was born in a concentration camp and was raised as a literal animal not understanding speech or words", or "My mother gave birth to me on a bed of concrete rubble, rebar, and glass shards"
Yeah. The Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang documentary really blows the lid on that sham industry. One television producer told a woman that her defection story wasn't fantastical enough to air, so they offered her a script.
You can track certain defectors stories and see how they grow more and more harrowing, insane, and contradictory over time, exact same thing with """Xinjiang survivor""" testimonies too.
