I wish the CIA would’ve let democratically elected communist regimes alone, like Vietnam or certain Latin American countries. It just grinds my gears I guess. We claim to support democracy, except when we say that they’re holding it wrong, or doing it wrong. Who are we to say that?
It's meaningfully a socialist economy, just an insanely corrupt mixed-market economy with a government pretending to be socialist to keep power.
Is that supposed to reflect well on Venezuela or be a slight at France? Because Venezuela isn't exactly doing to hot in the economics department right now.
Here is a source:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/private-cons...
Compared to:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/private-consump...
As well as
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/public-consu...
Compared to:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/public-consumpt...
I thought you were claiming that the overall dollar amount was larger.
"When I arrived in North Korea for the first time on a sunny day in September 1984, I felt perplexed. I came to study at the Kim 11 Sung University, as a participant in an exchange program between the then-USSR and North Korea. It was the first overseas trip of my life, and I was thrilled, but I also had some preconceived ideas - and in the first hours and days it became clear that the situation did not feel like I thought it should.
At that time I was fully aware that I was in what in 1984 was arguably the world's most brutal dictatorship. The Soviet Union was not exactly a democracy itself, but even for us, the people from Moscow and Leningrad, North Korea stood for the embodiment of inefficiency, brutality and, above all, repressive dictatorship. Even the official Soviet media sometimes allowed some subtle hints at what was going on there."
--
"Quite often the inflated tributes to the Great Leader and to the Dear Leader, delivered in a badly edited foreign version, produce the opposite of the intended effect on the audience, making the North into a laughingstock. I still remember how in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer, I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors: it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who were waiting for a haircut. The North Korean propaganda appeared very weird to the Russians - not least because it looked like a grossly exaggerated version of their own official propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of the texts also provided unintended comical effects."
* - Andrei Lankov is a Russian born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Seoul. His books and articles on North Korea are very interesting and worthwhile.
I remember some high-profile expats immigrating to China in the 1950s and 60s, and writing about their experiences publicly to acclaim and disdain. Do you know if any of these are critically well-received?