Korea / 조선

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A community about anything related to Korea, such as news about the countries (DPRK and south), discussion, photos and videos, the language, etc.

See also: [email protected], which is intended for memes rather than serious discussion of these topics.

The picture of this Lemmy community is magnolia (목란), the national flower of the DPRK. The background picture is a scenery of Pyongyang.

Rules:

No imperialist apologia. The DPRK didn't start the war. US imperialist invasion was not justified. Neither are their army bases in south Korea. The sanctions were and are not justified.
Be respectful. The imperialist media likes to describe the DPRK people as completely brainwashed, and that it'd be fine to completely destroy that country in an invasion. Don't act like the imperialist media.
Be skeptical of your sources. Don't trust the media that has been known to report many falsehoods about Korea already. (You may still link to them if they write something interesting / worth reading, just be careful.)

founded 4 years ago

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[email protected]

The slander of the DPRK is the biggest slander of a country in history (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The name has been almost permanently ruined. Whenever people hear of it, they always think of no food, 1984, worshipping the leader, getting your entire family arrested for not doing so, all that stuff. And if you say otherwise, they just call you a propagandist who is hiding the truth. And even if Korea's government does anything like build a water park, people say that it is just to "fool the world into believing they are good". Like they can't even build an entire village without people saying that they are just building it to deceive people.

At least China is taken seriously by a lot of people.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Please, we are hearing what North Korea is like from people who escaped it as though a prison. They’ve said finding a dead body discarded on the side of the road is a regular occurrence, that the propaganda there is so rampant you never even realize that your “dear leader” is fat until after you leave. When a humanitarian group went to perform cataract surgeries for the blind, they captured footage of the patients literally praying to a picture of Kim Jung Un thanking him for the surgery and promising to work harder in the salt mines.

Seriously, what is your motivation for posting this?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I lived there for several months while doing research.

The usual line in response to that is "obviously everything you saw was faked!". I could almost understand that line of reasoning if I were a famous diplomat, but I was a no-name grad student. I seriously doubt I was of such interest to the government that they spent that much effort faking multiple towns, villages, and the entire university I was based out of for months.

I did not see "dead bodies discarded on the side of the road". Yes, the Kim family is very well regarded considering everything they have done for the people. There's far more hero worship of other countries' leaders. Look at how much the British love their monarchy, people were on their knees crying at the recent funeral. The US literally carved busts of their founders INTO A MOUNTAIN. DPRK has extensive mining operations, it is a major industry, but salt is not one of their major mined resources, so you are definitely making that one up.

That's not to say that there aren't difficulties to life there, but much like Cuba the vast majority of economic issues that plague the people are the direct result of US-led sanctions. If the US was less dedicated to starving anyone who dared to oppose them, things would look much different.

Please, we are hearing what North Korea is like from people who escaped it as though a prison.

Defectors famously lie. EIther you make patently absurd claims about the DPRK whenever called upon, or you get ostricized/blacklisted. There's a reason some defectors realise their mistake and try to get back home. Do you honestly think that Kim personally executed musicians, or that people push trains to work every day (instead of...walking?).