After all this I am not really bothered by juche gang posts, whether ironic or not, like damn. South Korea was just indefinitely worse than North Korea, it was like a fucking totalitarian state. It wasn’t until the 80s that the economic situation reversed. I mean I don’t think anyone should support the current regime but when you learn that more bombs were dropped on North Korea per capita than anywhere else in the world, ever, it becomes understandable why they’re seen as a backwards country with no development. The country was literally flattened by US bombing campaigns. And then you learn that Kim il sung gave rights to women while Rhee was murdering suspected communists by the thousands. The US was committing atrocities like No Gun Ri and yet in the common image America and South Korea are the good guys. I mean, fuck, I don’t think I can support the direction that Kim Jong un has taken North Korea in, but after learning this it solidifies my anti American views, there is officially no war after WW2 that America was justified in. I can’t believe that anti Korean War sentiment isn’t as high as anti Vietnam war, more people need to know about this
I agree with most of that, but ‘the Kims are very bad‘ feels like a truism absorbed through a lifetime of stories of generals being fed to Piranhas. What makes them ‘very bad’?
Their internment camps sound worse than ours 🙃
A large amount of the mainstream information surrounding the camps comes from defectors like Kim Young-il who ran away when he was 19 and wrote a best selling book about the camps, which he later admitted to largely lying about since there were such large incentives for such a story in the west. There are other instances of defectors and dissidents admitting to making up things and lying.
Prison conditions in countries tend to decline in proportion to wealth, so that's not really a surprise. I've also read (from a liberal source) how their prisoners aren't culturally penalized after being released from their sentence. You go live in the jungle for several years with your family, some guards are garbage and others are helpful but they msotlynstay out of your way, and then you go back to life. In the case that I read about, the prisoner was able to bribe his way back to Pyongyang and join upper-tier social circles after just a few years. Nothing is especially "good" about it, but there isn't much you could say that's particularly bad.
For anyone who sees this, here's a good article on North Korea that's pretty recent: North Korea, Without the Hacks. I do wonder if anything has changed due to covid though, but it's probably too soon to tell.