North Korea

[Ramrod]

It is the closest thing to an official acknowledgement of one of the hidden catastrophes of North Korea: after a decade of food shortages, and four years of outright famine, a generation of its children have stunted growth.

Those few foreigners allowed to visit or live in the country report the same experience: encountering a group of children several years older than they appear. Teenagers look like pre-pubescent children. Young soldiers doing their military service look like 14-year-olds.

Professor Pak Sun Young, a South Korean anthropologist, has conducted studies on North Korean defectors in Seoul, and on refugee children living clandestinely in the bordering regions of China. They had escaped the worst privations of a homeland where between a few hundred thousand and a few million people died of hunger in the late 1990s. She found that 70 per cent of the survivors of that catastrophe were stunted, and 25 per cent underweight. The average 14-year-old boy was 10in (25.4 cm) shorter than his average South Korean peer and 42lb (19kg) lighter. The average 17-year-old was 5ft tall, compared with 5ft 8in in the South.

Poor sods

Link

[Chris T]

So much for socialist utopia.

[downquark1]

This is a very good read:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in602415.shtml

[Defiant]

I remember seeing something on TV about this a few years back. Some TV guys sneaked a camera out of the country. They showed dead babies just left on the streets and spoke about the rumoured cannibalism. Thats a dangerous country waiting to explode

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by downquark1

This is a very good read:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in602415.shtml

Incredible

[Jerrek]

Lets see what the pinkos thing of North Korea: http://www.communist-party.ca/phpBB2...opic.php?t=549

Free health care, free housing, free education including
university education, no death penalty, etc.

According to capitalist media DPRK is full of people who are starved by their evil dictator and have to result to eating each other to survive...

I literally read that once in some far right media, sadly I forget what one it was.

Anyhow...just goes to show you can't believe anything the bourgeoisie tells you.

- There tended to be a number from South Korean newspapers or government sources as well as from US government sources. I don't think I even need to touch on the credibility of the American government and corporate mass media on these kinds of matters. But I'm sure you are well aware of the biases in the South Korean press when it comes to reporting on the North. Biases that are enforced by numerous censorship laws and harsh legal penalties. On that note if you don't consider it changing the topic, may I assume you are also deeply concerned about the restrictive and repressive nature of the South Korean state with all its attendent human rights violations and political prisoners, including people who have been jailed for visiting their family members in the North?

- A good number of the sources you linked wouldn't even be allowed as credible citations in a first year university paper. I mean I honestly have no way of confirming their reliability. I could find numerous sources that claim Iraqi soldiers skewered babies in their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals back when they entered. Or that the Yugoslav army carried out an extensive genocide against Albanians in Kosovo. These were (and are) widely held views reported even in "credible" (ie mainstream) papers and media outlets around North America. Yet these would be false. The result of self-serving claims and deliberate disinformation on the part of NATO and US officials. But I'll keep some of the issues raised in mind for future inquiries, cross-referencing etc.

- When it comes to refugee claims, particularly where there is a politically charged conflict and different sides are using these as propaganda against the other, and creating laws etc. to elicite certain responses, you have to be wary of the kind of testimony that is being delivered. For example it is no secret that the DPRK experienced floods and environmental catastrophes resulting in serious shortages of food supplies from the mid-late 90's (it is also no secret that the US has an economic embargo on them which restricts their ability to purchase foodstuffs on the open market, and also that the US kept attaching ridiculous conditions to aid offers using it as political leverage rather than humanitarian assistance - so something else to consider while assigning culpability). But most nations will not accept floods of economic refugees, so there is often a built-in incentive to claim political persecution. This is a sure way to get you assylum in the USA or South Korea, since you have propaganda value to the state.

- Let's just for a moment assume that every massacre and instance of abuse listed in those artcles is completely true. They would still not even amount to a fraction of the loss of life, torture, mass extermination and chemical-biological weapons damage that the US invasion of Korea inflicted upon the people there in an attempt to deny their sovereignty. That's not a distraction, it goes right to the heart of the issue of why the North feels it has to defend itself, and why Korea finds itself divided today. The other dimension to this is the reality that overall the quality of life improved for the population in many important ways. The standard of living in North Korea has generally been well above the condition for the vast segments of humanity living under the deplorable and life-limiting conditions of deprivation and oppression that are the reality of neo-colonial capitalism in places like India, Nepal, Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, Peru etc. So when you say they will be better off the sooner things are... what? replaced with an American occupation? an IMF managed neo-colonial state? Come on. You aren't the one who's going to have to live there if that turns into another Haiti, so save the paternalistic "I know what's best for you" rhetoric. That's for the Korean people to determine the fate of, not you or I nor Washington. They have the right to self-determination irrespective of what you think of their system.

So, who to trust? The left who considers it a worker's paradise, or the right-wing "propaganda" that Ramrod is posting? I know which side I trust.

[punky]

I saw the BBC program about it a while ago. Where that woman had those 2 minders who actually seemed alright, if unwillingly to answer a few of her questions.

One thing I did see from the documentry is that the people of NK are truely deluded. All the years of brain washing has worked a treat. They are told to blame America for everything. Cancer? That's something America bio-engineered in a lab to North Koreans. Typhoons? They are caused by American weather-generating satelites designed to keep the people NK poor. SK prospering under capitalism, but NK floundering under communism? Thats America's fault.

Even without all the problems with lack of money, technology, food, health care, etc, you have to feel sorry for them.

[Chris T]

Originally Posted by from the quote in Jerrek's post

They have the right to self-determination irrespective of what you think of their system.

Great. I can see all the citizens of North Korea lining up to self-determine their Government. Swap the alleged 'paternalistic "I know what's best for you"' rhetoric of the West for the "I know what's best for you" rhetoric of a one-party state.

That article would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.

[downquark1]

Originally Posted by Jerrek

So, who to trust? The left who considers it a worker's paradise, or the right-wing "propaganda" that Ramrod is posting? I know which side I trust.

I thought CBS was considered a left wing network.