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Hitler in Busan
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flotsam

Joined: 28 Mar 2006

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 5:00 am Post subject:

bigverne wrote:

Quote:

And Muhammad didn't.

Your point? Mohammed may not have matched the genocidal feats of Pol Pot and co., but he was indeed a 'very naughty boy'. Well, naughty is a bit of an understatement. It doesn't quite encapsulate rape, slaughtering captured prisoners, assasinating critics and having sex with 9 year old girls.

I wonder how long a Mohammed theme bar would last?

Where, oh where, do these anecdotes of Muhammad's life come from? Jerry Falwell or Dick Cheney? Go on, please cite your sources...

But the last sentence is funny, did you notice the irony?

My god, the censors were right all along...

jaganath69

Joined: 17 Jul 2003

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 7:13 am Post subject:

Homer wrote:

Clothes shop in Cheongju is still a reality though. I'll try to take a pic this long weekend and post here.

Whats the point? Just curious but what do you think it will achieve?

To show that there is a clothes shop in Cheongju called Hitler. Or would you rather it all just went away?

Homer
Guest

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 7:27 am Post subject:

I do not care one way or the other jaganath. I was just curious what your aim was thats all. I have no agenda or interest here. They want to sell such filth...up to them. Just like they allow neo-nazi rallies in back home because of freedom of speech. Its distasteful but it seems here to stay.

patchy

Joined: 26 Apr 2005

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 9:15 am Post subject:

jaganath69 wrote:

bigverne wrote:

jaganath69 wrote:

If ever you are in Cheongju, there is a small hip hop clothes shop just off the main shopping street in Shinnae by the same name. I'm intending to open a Korean restaurant called TojoComfortwomenHappyDokdoisIlbonDdangPia when I return to my home country.

Surely, the equivalent would be opening a Kim Il-Sung, or Mao Tse-Tung theme bar. There are plenty of communist theme bars in the West, but apparently they aren't a problem, even though Lenin, Stalin and Mao killed millions.

Difference being that they (communist themed bars) don't outwardly glorify an ism that supports the killing of a certain ethnicity or religious group. Don't get me wrong, I believe communism to be the most half-assed and potentially dangerous ideology the world has ever seen, but nothing I have seen in the writings of Marx and Lenin is as inherently evil as National Socialism. Deifying personalities like Mao, who was a butcher of the highest order, yes that is on a par with naming a business after Hitler.

Not only communists, but fascists (or 'hegemonists' if you prefer) such as the US: the Korean War started off with the just the Koreans involved and about 20,000 people or less were killed when it involved just them, but after the US got involved and turned it into a war of not just defending South Korea but invading North Korea, 4 million people ended up being killed. Also the US was responsible for turning the Vietnam war into a prolonged war (lasting 10 years) that killed millions of Vietnamese. The US committed the genocide of some millions of native Americans. Americans are killing Iraqis today. The US currently wants to cut off the supply of money to North Korea by bullying countries doing business with NK, so that potentially millions of North Koreans can starve again. The US cares about North Koreans? That's a funny way of caring about them: starve them and kill them to 'free' them?

All religions cause conflict and brew fanaticism, not just Islam. Even Buddhism does too (although I still think it is a more peaceful religion than most others):

http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

"... Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam are heavily laced with violence. Throughout the ages, religionists have claimed a divine mandate to massacre infidels, heretics, and even other devotees within their own ranks. Some people maintain that Buddhism is different, that it stands in marked contrast to the chronic violence of other religions. To be sure, for some practitioners in the West, Buddhism is more a spiritual and psychological discipline than a theology in the usual sense. It offers meditative techniques that are ...."

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/tibet.html

"'........ Slaves were sometimes stolen, when small children, from their parents. Or the father and mother, being too poor to support their child, would sell it to a man, who paid them _sho-ring_, "price of mother's milk," brought up the child and kept it, or sold it, as a slave. These children come mostly from south-eastern Tibet and the territories of the wild tribes who dwell between Tibet and Assam.' [Bell24]

"Although the CCP cites slavery as a justification for liquidating the Dalai Lama's government, the practice was by no means confined to Tibet. It is estimated that in 1930 there were about 4 million child slaves in China proper......"

-----------------------------------

With all the conflicts in the world over religion, maybe the Americans should have left Afghanistan alone when it was in the hands of the Soviets. Under the communists, women in Afghanistan were getting educated and were given equal rights to men in many other ways, as under communism, men and women are considered equal: women even have to serve in the military (see North Korea).

RACETRAITOR

Joined: 24 Oct 2005
Location: Seoul, South Korea

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 9:22 pm Post subject:

Where in the hell did this come from?

bigverne

Joined: 12 May 2004

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 2:23 am Post subject:

Quote:

Where, oh where, do these anecdotes of Muhammad's life come from?

I'm not going to derail this discussion by getting into an entirely irrelevant discussion about known and accepted facts of Mohammed's life, which are detailed in the Hadith and the Koran. I suggest you go away and educate yourself. I really have no idea why you brought this up, but I doubt you really want to open this can of worms.

dogbert

Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Location: Killbox 90210

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 5:22 pm Post subject:

patchy wrote:

the Korean War started off with the just the Koreans involved and about 20,000 people or less were killed when it involved just them, but after the US got involved and turned it into a war of not just defending South Korea but invading North Korea, 4 million people ended up being killed.

But how many millions would Kim Il-sung have killed after having won the war so quickly?

One thing is for sure, your ass would be there today, instead of sitting in Australia free to mouth off whatever distorted history you learned from other Koreans.

patchy

Joined: 26 Apr 2005

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 9:06 pm Post subject:

dogbert wrote:

patchy wrote:

But how many millions would Kim Il-sung have killed after having won the war so quickly?

How many did Kim Il Sung kill? What are you talking about? Kim Il Sung didn't kill millions of North Koreans after the Korean War. The deaths from starvation killed those people and that happened during Kim Jong Il's time.

North Korea had to divert so much of its meagre resources, and being a communist country it did not have much fiscal resources to begin with, to its self-protection, against a power that wanted to bring it down and force it to adopt an economic system that it did not want. Any country that wants to protect its sovereignty would have done the same, at whatever sacrifice, and unfortunately NK was poor to begin with, and the cost in human life was great, but it can't be helped: that is reality. NK was at war, a cold war, but still a war, and in every war, there are casualties.

The US staged a siege war on NK, it wanted to isolate it, it stopped every avenue for the NK to trade with other countries during the cold war, firing on ships that carried NK goods, so that NK was not able to engage in trade by sea, and in many other ways as well.

It is just like the US spending trillions on its military and weapons because of the so-called major threat from the Islamic extremists. The only differences are that the threat NK faced (and faces) from the west is 1 000 000x worse than the actual 'threat' (if you can even call it that) the US faces from the Al Qaeda (because Al Qaeda just wants the US out of the ME, it doesn't want to take over the US) and has fewer resources than the US to defend itself.

Thanks in large part to juche, NK has managed to defend itself, otherwise it would be another Iraq. NK manufactures its own weaponry and armory, things like tanks. It even sells some of its stuff to other countries. Not bad for a little 'backwards', dirt-poor, third world country, eh?

Quote:

One thing is for sure, your ass would be there today, instead of sitting in Australia free to mouth off whatever distorted history you learned from other Koreans.

I am not based in Australia, dogbert, I am living and working in Korea.

Lots of things would have been different if the US had not set up camp in Korea and occupied the nation.

Korea's first government, a socialist government, would not have been toppled and would have run the place. They were doing very well, taking over the running of institutions, organizing the people after the Japanese had left. There was peace, unity and cooperation for a short time after the Japanese left and before the Americans arrived:

http://www.kimsoft.com/2001/abook08.htm

Quote:

Gen. Abe, the last Japanese Governor General of Korea, transferred his power to Yo Un Hyong, and Yo promptly formed the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, CPKI, later to become the Korean People's Republic, KPR, the first and the last true government of the Koreans, by the Koreans and for the Koreans. Some American historians mistake this government of the Korean nationalists with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK, founded by Kim Il Sung in 1948 in North Korea.

Yo agreed to safeguard all Japanese nationals and their properties in Korea. Over 700,000 Japanese were stranded in South Korea and 200,000 in North Korea. The CPKI established "People's Committees" in all of the thirteen provinces of Korea, and the committees took control of local administrative and police functions from the Japanese authorities. The very first action of Yo's de facto government of Korea was to form a security force, chi-anh-dae (also called, bo-ahn-dae), to protect the Japanese and to secure public safety. Chi-ahn-dae was manned largely manned by college and high school students led by Korean veterans of various armed forces, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Korean nationalist armed groups in China. Some 30,000 political prisoners were released from Japanese jails throughout Korea. They joined the CPKI and formed various local groups. More than 15,000 Koreans were released from the Japanese Army and labor camps, many of whom were forced into working for the Japanese.

Korean teachers took over schools and produced text books in Korean in no time at all. Koreans took over utilities, water, phone, street maintenance, fire stations, radio stations and public health facilities, and everything ran smoothly without a hitch. Literally overnight, the Korean people formed their own government and took over all governing functions from the Japanese, with the complete and full cooperation of the departing Japanese. Koreans from all walks of life and political ideology worked in harmony, side by side, for the good of Korea. In that brief time period, the Korean people proved that they were quite capable of governing their country, as long as foreign powers and their Korean lackeys left them alone.

I doubt leftists and rightists would have been pitted against one another as they were after the Americans arrived. The country was mostly left anyway as they were sick of the imperialists: the Japanese, the Chinese before them, the corrupt Korean monarchy and nobles.

Just like in China and the USSR, Korea was ripe for major reform: for re-distribution of the land, for equality between the classes, equality between men and women, for equal distribution of resources. These countries had suffered so much under the old systems: warfare, famine, occupation, abuse. In other words, Korea as a nation was in need of a major change, a push of the RESET BUTTON if you will, and communism/socialism was that reset button, a way to shake all the old ways out.

Left alone, meaning without having to fight wars (hot and cold) to defend its choice, Korea would have found its feet, and a system that served it best, not anyone else, not the Soviets, not the Chinese, not the Japanese, not the USA, not the UN. Who knows what that could have been, how socialist or communist they would have ended up. China and Vietnam are communist countries but they are rising economic stars. I think one major factor behind this is that they are whole countries, sovereign entities, not split up, not occupied, not beholden to any other country, no pawns of anyone else. Korea is different, it was split up and an artificial state of animosity was created between the two halves, between people of different ideologies, this division existing today and this has affected the two Koreas and still is, impeding their progress.

But even today, you can see the two Koreas striving to reach an equilibrium: some leftists in South Korea are even more left than some of the people in the North: they want Korea to be more of a socialist welfare state, like NK. The North is opening up, and in many ways, some Northerners are more capitalist-minded than some South Koreans, encouraging industry in North Korea, starting joint enterprises there, engaging in trading goods on the free markets. But NK has to think about its security first and because the Americans are still trying to force regime change and economic system change on it, it is still not an open country, and because NK had prior experience of genocide at the hands of the US, it has to go about things carefully.

Korea might have been like any number of socialist countries you find around the world today, like Sweden, Germany, Australia, Canada etc. There isn't much difference between these countries' systems and communism: universal health care, mass immunizations, housing for the indigent, all these social programs (as well as equal rights for men and women including equal access to education) are what communism and socialism are about. How do you think Sweden pays for all its social welfare programs? Do you think the 90% tax rate (or whatever astronomical tax rate it has) might have a little to do with it? Nothing scary or subversive about it. I am sure there are many Aussies who complain that Australia is run by 'commies'.

But these countries: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Canada don't have nukes aimed at them, they're not threatened with sanctions continuously if 'they don't become more capitalist', and these countries are doing just fine: IKEA is the world's biggest company at the moment, and even though these countries may be below the US in terms of wealth or GNP or whatever, you hardly see panhandlers and homeless people in the streets of those countries as you do in the US. In other words, there is not this obscene gap between the rich and everyone else in thse socialist countries.

But it's easy to single out NK, these people are yellow, don't speak English and don't have a shared history or similar culture with the whites. Of course it's easy to make out they're evil.

Look, I'm not speaking as an advocate of socialism or anything but if you think about it, the US is very discriminatory in whom it attacks and demonizes. One of its closest allies, Israel, has got a form of socialist government, and as I've already said, quite a number of countries in Europe and elsewhere (Canada and Australia) are socialist welfare countries as well.

Even the US follows socialist policies: it provides unemployment benefits, state funding for schools and universities, benefits for single-parent families, free immunization programs, Medicare, food coupons for the poor, subsidized housing etc etc. Really anything involving the government, can be considered a form of socialist policy.

The US has created a mystique and fear around communism and socialism. There are many admirable things about socialism and communism: there is promotion of equality between the sexes, religions are done away with altogether, education is provided free to everyone ... the distortions of its ideals happen when a communist state is under threat: then there are repressions and the gulags you hear about ad nauseum in the western press (at the most there are 150,000 people in NK jails (and half of this number are ordinary criminals - how many people does the US have in its prisons including its gulags (in the US and offshore) today?).

In all honesty, dogbert, I can see you don't know much about Korean history and the only things you come out with are the things that everyone reads in the western media and has heard about. I've read those things too and believed all of them but after having been exposed to other sources, I can see how I was brainwashed and how many people still are. I believe NK has a right to exist and choose its own way, and if you have read the history of the people in North Korea, especially during the Japanese occupation, you will see they have earned the right to be whatever they want, adopt whatever economic system they want without inteference from anyone else.

And before you start with the "but NK started the war" bit, I would suggest you read some books on that subject (and it's not only Cumings who states this BTW), and you will find that most academics agree that it's not as simple as all that, that the South, manipulated by its American master, also had a hand in making sure a war was started on the peninsula.

And as I reminded ajgeddes elsewhere, you, dogbert, would not have been able to work in Korea earning good money for the type of work involved, if it hadn't been for the sacrifice of the student protesters and other leftists who laid down their lives to overthrow the US-backed dictatorship that was repressing the country. If it hadn't been for them, Korea would still be a military police state, you would see soldiers with guns everywhere, a nation under martial law, and foreigners would not be coming in the numbers they are now enjoying the freedoms of a democratic country, free to criticize Koreans and their government.

-------------------------

As for the Hitler Bar, this is free speech, even though some people may object and ask for it to be closed down or think it should be firebombed, the owners prosecuted or the whole thing made illegal (a la Holocaust denial in some countries like Austria and Canada(?)).

I would not like to see a Tojo bar either but I would also recognize it is a person's right to free speech.

The thing that I find disturbing is that some of the same people who think the Hitler bar has no right to exist have no problem with things like the Yasukuni Shrine. The Yasukuni Shrine is not someone's private place of business, it is a public place of official worship, supported and built by the authorities, and is visited by the Japanese PM.

As I have said before, the Japanese may have the constitutional and democratic right to build such a shrine and have their government officials worship there, but if they are going to do that, no way should they think any 'apology' or 'regret' they express is going to be taken seriously by any country that they express it to, and if their continued worshipping at the shrine affects their relations with their neighbors, economically and/or politically, then so be it.

Last edited by patchy on Wed May 03, 2006 10:15 pm; edited 2 times in total

patchy

Joined: 26 Apr 2005

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 9:22 pm Post subject:

RACETRAITOR wrote:

Where in the hell did this come from?

I was trying to make the point that religions in general (and not only just one particular religion) seems to be the cause of many of the conflicts in the past and today, and one good point about communism is that religion, 'the opiate of the masses', is done away with altogether under communism, i.e. communists believe in secular societies. Eg. the USSR was trying to turn Afghanistan into a secular state.

patchy

Joined: 26 Apr 2005

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 10:03 pm Post subject:

dogbert wrote:

... sitting in Australia free to mouth off whatever distorted history.....

It's not distorted history that the Korean War was a very limited war in terms of casualties before the Americans became involved. Look it up.

xeno439

Joined: 30 Nov 2005

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 10:29 pm Post subject:

bigverne wrote:

jaganath69 wrote:

Lenin killed millions? You had better check your history books son.

RACETRAITOR

Joined: 24 Oct 2005
Location: Seoul, South Korea

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 10:58 pm Post subject:

patchy wrote:

RACETRAITOR wrote:

Where in the hell did this come from?

Well holy crap, sign a book deal and write your novel. I don't know how you go from directions to a bar to Mohammad and all that bullshit.

bigverne

Joined: 12 May 2004

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 12:03 am Post subject:

Quote:

But these countries: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Canada don't have nukes aimed at them, they're not threatened with sanctions continuously if 'they don't become more capitalist'

They're also multi-party democracies that allow their citizens basic human freedoms, and which do not maintain a huge network of gulags, in which hundreds of thousands have died. But continue with your absurd comparisons.

bigverne

Joined: 12 May 2004

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 12:05 am Post subject:

Quote:

Lenin killed millions? You had better check your history books son.

OK, I stand corrected. He killed thousands. Anyway, change Lenin to Pol Pot and that statement is still true.

dogbert

Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Location: Killbox 90210

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 12:16 am Post subject:

patchy wrote:

dogbert wrote:

... sitting in Australia free to mouth off whatever distorted history.....

It's not distorted history that the Korean War was a very limited war in terms of casualties before the Americans became involved. Look it up.

That's because the Americans (the U.N., more precisely) became involved in the first few days. So the Koreans had only a couple of days to slaughter each other on their own.

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