Quote:
Originally Posted by Vuze-Sbi
It just a game !!!
it never was 'just a game' after it got commercialized, now its a big business & 'food for the masses' (panem et circenses), imbued with politics on multiple levels & intertwined nationalism/racism/hooliganism/antagonism, especially visible in the extreme fanatic fan-base
as for 'news' originating from western media concerning developments in north korea, one should be very careful not to take them for granted as they are prevalently manipulated to serve certain political interests (in which the usa has a major role), in particular since there is no real alternative news source covering north korea, that would provide a balanced view, independent of the mainstream one-sided 'feeds'
which means our opinions/viewpoints of north korea are largely a product of questionable information which seem to follow a path of stigmatizing/condemning/demonizing that has a peculiar way of continuously aligning (perfectly) with 'western agendas'
here is a lengthy article that shines a different light on the 'korean' issue, providing some comparison between the two korea's throughout the recent history and linking developments in their countries with foreign influences (where again the usa involvement proves to be highly intrusive & obstructive), showing many distortions made to the actual korean history that resulted in a false image that the 'world' now has of it:
'news' reliability:
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While many people can recite the anti-north Korea catechism – garrison state, hermit kingdom, international pariah – they’ll admit that what they know about the country, apart from the comic book caricatures dished up by the media, is fuzzy and vague. But this has always been so. As early as 1949, Anna Louise Strong could write that “there is little public knowledge about the country and most of the headlines distort rather than reveal the facts.” (3) Cumings dismisses US press reports on north Korea as “uninformative, unreliable, often sensationalized” and as deceiving, not educational.
the division of korea:
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It wasn’t Koreans who bisected the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel. It was the Americans. On August 10th 1945, with the Soviets having crossed into the Korean peninsula from the north two days earlier, two US Colonels, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, were ordered to divide Korea into two occupation zones: one American and one Soviet. They chose the 38th parallel as the dividing line. It would give the US control of the capital, Seoul.
different approaches in north & south:
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Kim scorned Korea’s inability to resist foreign domination. The Japanese regarded him as a highly able and dangerous guerilla leader, going so far as to establish a special anti-Kim insurgency unit to hunt him down. The guerillas were an independent force, inspired by a desire to reclaim the Korean peninsula for Koreans, and were controlled by neither the Soviets nor Chinese. While they often retreated across the border into the Soviet Union to evade Japanese counter-insurgency forces, they received little material help from the Soviets.
Unlike the US, which imposed a military government and repressed the People’s Committees, the Soviets took a fairly hands-off approach to their occupation zone, allowing a coalition of nationalist and communist resistance fighters to run their own show.
post korean war situation:
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Laying aside the war years and the three-year period of recovery that followed, north Korea grew at a faster pace than the south from the 1940’s to the mid-60s. So impressed was Che Guevera after a visit to Pyongyang, he declared north Korea to be a model to which Cuba should aspire.
Industry in the north grew at 25 percent per annum in the 10 years following the Korean War and at 14 percent from 1965 to 1978. US officials were greatly concerned about south Korea’s economy, which lagged far behind, raising doubts about the merits of Washington’s right-wing, pro-capitalist, neo-colonial project in Korea. By 1980, the north Korean capital, Pyongyang, was one of the best run, most efficient cities in Asia. Seoul, on the other hand, was a vast warren “of sweatshops to make Dante or Engels faint,” complete with a teeming population of homeless.
usa economic intervention:
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Eager to present the south’s economic system as superior to the north’s, Washington allowed the ROK to pursue a vigorous program of industrial planning behind a wall of tariffs and subsidies, while, at the same time, offering south Korean industry access to the world market. To help matters along, huge dollops of aid were poured into the country.
Still, while growth had slowed in the north, the difference in standard of living between the average south Korean and the average north Korean was never as great as south Korea’s backers would have you believe. And the north had its attractions. While consumer goods were scarce, daily necessities were available in abundance at subsidized prices. Cumings points to a CIA report that acknowledges (almost grudgingly, he says) the north’s various achievements: “compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; ‘radical change’ in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care, and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries until the recent famine.”
further abuse:
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The collapse of the north’s export markets with the demise of the socialist bloc, a series of natural disasters, Washington’s unremitting economic stranglehold, and the diversion of scarce resources into the military, have severely weakened the DPRK economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Under Gorbachev, the Soviets pursued a foreign policy that sought an accommodation with the US. Part of the accommodation involved abandoning old allies. Soviet trade with north Korea was cut in half from 1988 to 1992 and shipments of oil were severely cut back in 1991.
With Gorbachev’s wrecking-ball policies disrupting the economies of the socialist states, the socialist bloc was plunged into chaos, and eventually, oblivion. The north’s export markets dried up, depriving Pyongyang of the foreign exchange it needed to import coal and petroleum. With insufficient petroleum, farm machinery was idled and the country’s chemical industry suffered. With the chemical industry on the skids, fertilizer production suffered. Agriculture was hit hard and food scarcity became a problem, worsening when a series of floods and droughts hit in the mid-90s.
Cut-off from export markets -- a problem exacerbated today by UN Security Council sanctions and maneuvering by Washington to isolate north Korea from the world’s financial system -- the DPRK became a major exporter of ballistic missiles, to earn foreign exchange to pay for essential imports.
conclusion:
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Ignorance is a part of the explanation too, both of the history and of the government in the north, but also of the distorting, unpleasant and dystopian effects of the policies of war, intimidation, and economic strangulation the United States has pursued to bring an end to north Korea. It’s not pleasant to have too little to eat, to be conscripted into the army for an extended period of your life and to be forced to live your whole life under a nuclear sword of Damocles, but these are not conditions north Koreans have freely chosen for themselves. They have been imposed from the outside as punishment for striving for something better than what is offered by colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. Those striving for the same elsewhere, at the very least, owe north Korea some understanding.
Understanding North Korea
by Stephen Gowans
Global Research, November 12, 2006
Code:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3818
