Recent article about this: https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coa...

Great article. Easy to read for a layman yet comprehensive.

This is a very good article, makes sense of the current organization.

Neat article, though I think it misses some things. Shame it's buried under a dead comment.

US propaganda > Russian and Chinese propaganda. They do it very effectively, unlike the others that spew lies most people can spot from ten miles away.

I mean what I said. I don't care for power structures either way and would gladly see the CCP dissolved, but these apologetics of US war crimes and direct interference in democratic process of other nations is repulsive, and I'm not going to entertain the absurd idea that it is somehow justified or good.

> as an African

Your last name wouldn't be something like Viljoen, would it?

Could you please not use HN primarily for political and ideological battle? Your account is showing a clear pattern of that already, and we have to ban such accounts. Lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Also, please don't cross into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that as well.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Dang, the post this person is replying to is starting an ideological battle.

Ok, I've replied there too.

North Korea was never a Soviet pet project. It's a Chinese buffer state that the Chinese don't even particularly like, but that they keep up because it's either that or have the US military, which they previously fought in the Korean War and which threatened to blow nukes up and which likely used biological weapons. Both the USSR and China materially supported North Korea, but since the Sino-Soviet split, the Kims learnt to play the Chinese and Soviets off each other and therefore maintained a very high level of autonomy.

As a fellow African you'll know from France's (and Belgium's) involvement in the continent what exactly democratic and peaceable world powers do with weaker powers.

Building on this, North Korea is not even communist in the traditional, political sense of the word.

Most of modern NK’s philosophical underpinnings are based on Juche, a syncretic philosophy of traditional East Asian thought and that of the Kim dynasty. References to Marx, Stalin, Lenin, etc, have been excised from this doctrine. NK is a very hierarchical society, reflecting traditional Korean social order.

And, to the point you made, NK is the way it is because of the inextricable psychic damage of the Korean war. Neither the South-allied or North-allied forces acted honorably and it shows in the distrust to this day. NK’s Juche-thought reflects a certain degree of psychological damage, like that of a child who never had any adult to trust and grows to trust no one and rely on no one.

All this to say, I think reducing this to communism == bad is an incredibly reductive leap. North Korea did not begin as a communist project, it began as an anti-imperialist one (against Japan). It’s evolution has been a result of the intense paranoia associated with a massive, incredibly destructive war (imagine if a third of the towns in your country disappeared in a decade). This was a war of few prisoners between fellow countrymen. Imagine had the South pushed the yankees back and then militarized their entire border.

I, of course, would rather live in the West than NK. It’s just far more complicated than a rote line.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological (or nationalistic) battle and especially please don't use HN primarily for such purposes. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

I've always been critical of the US, especially their foreign policy but if I had to make a choice I also would prefer that they be in charge rather than either of the other two. Or rather that would have been my answer before trump came along and the country entered into a state of hyperpolarization. How would I now wish for times like the G.W. Bush era where one would rightly get upset about things like the Iraqi war, US policing the world etc. As Europeans we were rarely a target of these things. The stakes were ultimately low for us. But now it's not clear anymore what will become of that country. And if the US ends up collapsing under its own weight, then I don't think we're headed for a bright future. And the stakes have never been higher.