Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

I'm not normally a defender of military dictatorships, but I fail to see a valid comparison between the horror that is North Korea over the last 50 years and the nastiness that was real enough under the S. Korean dictators. One difference is that the last one, Chun Doo-Hwan voluntarily left office, leaving a system of elections in place in a thriving economy.

Here are a couple of excerpts and a link to an article on the Asia Times Online site.


"The story is scarcely a classic, but written more than a decade after his escape, it was one of the first North Korean refugee biographies to be published in the West (first in French, then English), and it offers a plain, grim, moving story of prison camp life through the eyes of a child and boy. Kang's co-author, Frenchman Pierre Rigoulet, had been a contributing editor to the Black Book of Communism (first published in France in 1997), and it was perhaps his contribution to tailor Kang's story so North Korea is presented as one more example of the atrocity of communism, a monstrous perversion. Kang and Rigoulet make no attempt to locate North Korea in the context of the trauma and tragedy of Korean history, the half century of Japanese colonialism, the externally imposed division, the terrible civil war turned by external intervention into a catastrophe, and the prolonged Cold War that continues on the peninsula to this day."

"It is unlikely that Suh's story will find its way on to the presidential bookshelves, and doubtful anyway that Bush would want to read much of it. Kang's simplistic tale of good and evil, freedom and communism, much better suits his preconceptions than any complex historical insight into the Korean division. Suh's book would be much more difficult for him to understand, not only because it tells of political prisons and immense suffering under a US-installed "free world" regime, but also because the repression described there is now a thing of the past. With the presidential blessing, publishers will no doubt take steps to make Kang's book available to "all Americans"

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/GG26Dg03.html

[thebum]

Too bad North Korea isn't communist.

[Kuros]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Emu Bitter]

thebum is right. North Korea isn't a communist country.
It's not a marxist country either.
Marx said that a successful revolution of the proletariat could only take palce in an industrialized country.
Therefore, Marx's vision hasn't even been attempted yet.

[Ya-ta Boy]

While you may be technically correct, having to say "North Korea, like China and the Soviet Union are one-party-dictatorships-with-centrally-planned-economies-and-a-penchant-for-killing-their-own-people-through-planned-starvation-,-mass-executions-and-'re-education'-camps-in-the-name-of-creating-a-workers-paradise" is just too unweildy. I'll take the risk of being understood by everyone at the cost of being totally accurate when talking about a failed political/economic experiment.

[thebum]

What's wrong with using communism according to it's definition?

[Gwangjuboy]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[thebum]

The article is partly about North Korean communism...it's hard to discuss something that doesn't exist. And I would love to discuss the definitions, theories and practice of communism. I might start a thread on that later. I would also like to discuss North Korea. However, I don't think it will be possible to do either as long as people are ignorant of what communism really is (i.e. equating places like North Korea with communism).

[joe_doufu]

[joe_doufu]

[khyber]

[joe_doufu]

[junkmail]

Communism may not be one party dictatorship by definition, but every attempt at it has resulted in exactly that.
It's a disproven theory, can't we move on?