Is North Korea successful?

They will be shot at their border if they try to leave. It’s one, maybe the only, country who holds their citizens hostage.

It’s certainly not the only country to do it.

I 'm not saying that all whites like America, I 'm just use it as an example to demostrate that moral judgement is very very subjective.

Judgement like ‘trivial offenses’ is another very subjective Judgement, what you consider ‘trivial offenses’ under American system are not necessarily trivial in a feudalist society.

I have never said hunger is a daily inconvenience. And in my reply I use the word ’ accept’ meaning if a guy accepts what the system provides to him, he will not consider that system a ‘tyranny’.

Ok, let’s suppose if there is a massive hunger in North Korea and millions of North Koreans can freely flee their country and go to neighbor countries, will Japan, South Korea, Russia and China and America open its door to let millions of North Koreans in???

Have you ever heard of the Rohingya people?? :astonished: :astonished:

Watching a foreign television show and carrying a common book are not crimes worthy of death, except in your subjective mind, but objectively, not in my mind.

Why is it only those countries and not all countries who may take them in? For North Koreans who wish to assimilate as citizens of other countries, why would there be problems? The Rohingya’s refuse to assimilate into the nation in which they desire to be citizens, that’s the problem.

I think you missed a fundamental point - the choices that the people have are :
actively support the regime, passively function within the regime, or be jailed or executed.

You make it sound like they are willingly signing a contract without coercion.

Phyllo,

Where else are citizens held hostage?

First of all, let me get some very basic things right, in North Korea, if you watch a Russian or Chinese tv show and carrying a Russian or Chinese book, you will not be punished.

North Korea and South Korea, America and Japan are legally speaking still at war, because they have not signed any peace treaty yet, in North Korea, if you sing a song from those countries, there will be some serious punishment, because you are expressing loyalty to the enemy. and this is not special to North Korea,
If you are in the middle of the American civil war you live in the north but you sing the song of the south, you will be punished. If in the heat of McCarthyism you as an American was found reading a foreign book with a title like ‘the essential writing of Karl Marx’ or you were found singing a song named Moscow Nights, you will lose your job and be punished very, very seriously.

How does carrying a Bible in Chinese equate with a war crime deserving death?

The morality of the situation seems to mirror individual morality.

You’re a big strong guy and you come upon a guy beating a woman and a child.

He tells you that it’s his wife and his kid.

So you walk away because it’s not your business to interfere in their marriage. She “signed a contract”. The kid “signed a contract”. They’re getting free room and board.

Is that how it works or ought to work?

And one can up the ante : He buys a machine gun and he’s beating his wife and kid.

Then you definitely don’t interfere because someone might get hurt.

I did not say they are willingly signing a contract without coercion, I simply said that the majority of ordinary people in North Korea will not revolt against the Kim family as long as their basic needs for living were provided by the North Korean feudalist cradle to grave welfare state.

And I merely use the concept of ‘social contract’ i in their ideology to expain why North Korea and Cuba can maintain itself for decades despite American sanction.

Other countries black market goods into sanctioned countries and that’s why those sanctioned countries still exist. If the sanctions were strictly followed by all nations, the sanctioned countries would be decimated.

In North Korea, bible is not allowed. Because in the ideology of that highly- developed feudalist system, the Kim family provides a cradle to grave welfare state to you, in exchange, you give the Kim family your 100% loyalty, if you believe in God, you will no longer give the Kim family your 100% loyalty, because you can only give your 100% loyalty to God. Therefore, believing in God is a serious crime in North Korea.

Along the lines of that 100% devotion to the Kim craziness mentality, families should be outlawed as well for people’s loyalties are muttled with family devotions too. I’ve been reading some articles quoting NK defectors and the black market is huge in NK. Why is the black market huge?

They don’t revolt because it’s practically impossible to organize - the secret police and informants are always watching. Disappearances, show trials and executions are a reminder what happens to dissidents.

And if they did organize, then they would have to face a large standing army without access to weapons.

Then there is the possibility that China would send troops across the border to prop up Kim if there was a successful revolt in progress.

This is the idea that the repression in the USA is just as severe as in North Korea.

People will point to the the internment of Japanese during WW2 (which was a travesty) and make it seem as if it’s the same as the Nazi concentration camp system or the Soviet gulag system. In fact, the scale and severity is completely different.

By capturing Pyongyang , I mean if America does not want North Korea to have nuclear weapons they have to invade North Korea and capture Pyongyang and replace the political system with a new one, as they have done during Iraq war.

I DID NOT say repression in the USA is just as severe as in North Korea. Do not claim that I said something yet in fact I did not say that.

I just said that in a certain period of American history under McCarthyism, there was a very crazy, very witch-hunt game for should-be-leftists. :astonished: :astonished:

First of all, a regime will not collapse simply because a group of ordinary citizens go to street to protest.

A regime without any legitimacy, no matter what kind of regime it is, can not be maintained by the secret police and standing army ALONE for a long time. For example:
When people in the Soviet Union no longer have faith in a future communist Utopia, when people could not maintain their previous standard of living, Soviet Union collapsed almost over night, despite having a large standing arm and a KGB.

If you check history, you will find the reason:

When a political system is losing legitimacy rapidly, the people who take the first move is usually not ordinary citizens, most often those people are the very people who hold power. In order to save the system and maintain the politcal status of themselves, the power holders usually will launch some reforms, an example is the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev.

But if those reforms do not work that well, then the old political structure will change: 3 groups will apears within the old rulling elite,

GROUP A wants to keep the system as much as possible and do some more reforms, it was headed by good old Mikhail Gorbachev.

GROUP B wants to take some action to get rid of the old systems all together and be the new rulling elite of a new system, GROUP B was headed by Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, a very senior official within the communist party at that time.

GROUP C is the group of opportunists , Vladimir Putin, a senior KGB officer at that time, was a member of this group.

When Gorbachev’s reform failed, not all the people, but certainly more and more ordinary people want to get rid of the old system.

GROUP B took some action and allow those ordinary citizens to go to the street to protest, Nikolayevich Yeltsin, who actually controls the police department of Moscow at that time even went to the street and standing on the top of a red army tank to give a speech to urge those ordinary citizens to be more assertive !!! :astonished: :astonished: :astonished:

When GROUP C realized that GROUP B was winning, GROUP C joint hands with GROUP B, and Vladimir Putin, a senior KGB officer, is the man who smiles in the end of the game.

Sure, in a country of secret police and large standing army, ordinary people CAN revolt UNDER CERTAIN circumstances, BUT they can never be the winner. :cry: :cry: