#dprk

Are you asking me why it's harder for people to support the DPRK or the early USSR? You're definitely right, I'd say there's a lot less consideration compared to somewhere like Cuba, for example

I think it partly does go back to the fact that Stalin and the DPRK have undergone such immense propaganda campaigns by the west, in my opinion much more than most anti imperialist / socialist countries or leaders

I think with Stalin part of it is the Cold War context, but he also did overlook possibly the most brutal part of Soviet history. And I don't mean that in regard to state repression exclusively, but collectivisation, dekulakisation, the Great Purge, etc etc, all of that did entail violence whether from the Soviet government or from reactionary forces (like the kulaks, fuck the kulaks). Khrushchev did oversee 'deStalinisation' and kind of reinforced the popular narrative in the west of Stalin being a brute. But Stalin was harsh; there's context and he was operating in a particular environment, but he was. Even principled Marxists would agree, Michael Parenti for instance, and Fidel criticised him even more than I would (part of that might have been ignorance though, or a motivation to appease the west or even Khrushchev, because Fidel was facing immense pressure to denounce Stalin)

Anyway I digress. Back to the point: we know how much the west loves to decontextualise or simplify things like this, we see it with most communist history

And I think the kind of changes Stalin oversaw provided an excellent opportunity for the west to slander, especially considering the 1930s was also the Great Depression. Thousands of USAmericans were travelling to the Soviet Union for work, so the motivation to demonise the country was probably quite high (this is partially speculation I haven't researched heaps into USAmerican migration into the Soviet Union but it did happen)

So there is this immense propaganda campaign, it becomes even a part of popular culture I'd argue. So many left-leaning westerners still use 1984 or Animal Farm like "anti-authoritarian" bibles, and it's no secret that those books are anti-communist, specifically anti-Stalin, propaganda

Stalin is called a "red fascist", the Soviet Union under his leadership is called "totalitarian", all phrases that are intended to evoke emotional reactions rather than critical analysis

Westerners are taught in school with the work of anti-Stalinist propagandists; I remember in high school having to write essays about Stalin's "totalitarianism" and being encouraged to use authors like Robert Conquest for my research

It is indoctrination, it really is. If you're asking someone in the anti-communist west to unpack their anti-Soviet bias, there's a good chance you are asking them to unpack years if not decades of propaganda (depending on their age)

Now as for the DPRK, I think much of it is the same in regard to the lifelong propagandising. I mean seriously, the average westerner knows nothing about the DPRK except for bullshit CIA propaganda. People constantly repeat Radio Free Asia claims, such as that it's illegal to wear a leather coat there because Kim Jong Un wears them

The DPRK has been portrayed as almost cartoonishly evil, and it doesn't help that we have so many 'defector' testimonies propped up with CIA propaganda and influenced by financial desperation to create sensationalist narratives. That is really the only information people are given in the west about the DPRK

The propaganda campaign is also a part of popular culture with the DPRK. When people want to refer to a dictatorship, they talk about North Korea. I can't count the amount of times I've heard someone say something like, "just because [blank] called themselves [blank] doesn't mean it's true! North Korea calls themself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea!"

It's almost been turned into a meme in a way. Oh and considering Call of Duty is going to have that game plot about the DPRK invading South Korea. Again, pop culture is riddled with propaganda

You also have to consider that the conflict between North and South Korea is not over. The Korean War never formally ended, an armistice was signed but no peace treaty has ever been established. South Korea is full of USAmerican troops, the country is very much a way for the US to protect its interests. And no conflict is only undertaken through military force, there is often ideological conflict too

If you want to destroy a country (as the US wants to do with the DPRK) why would you let it be popular? Why would you not try to make everyone see it as an existential threat? The US has an absolutely enormous propaganda capacity, of course it's going to use it for this conflict too

All of this means that people in the west go through immense indoctrination, they are exposed to such intense propaganda that often weaponises and misrepresents facts (violence/repression in the Soviet Union, or the DPRK being isolated or having nuclear weapons) to craft a particular narrative. It is immensely difficult to undo this level of indoctrination when there is some level of truth behind it. That doesn't mean the truth is represented accurately, but you can't really deny the existence of purges in the Soviet Union in the same way you can't deny that most foreign tourists in the DPRK will only experience state-endorsed guided tours and that we comparatively know little about the lives of North Korean citizens

That kind of misrepresentation of facts operates within a broader framework for analysing the world that has been shaped by liberal institutions and media. Because the indoctrination isn't just made up of specific claims, it's an entire way of thinking and understanding the world that has been constructed. If a communist says something positive about the DPRK, that's not just attacking the claims that a liberal believes, it's also attacking their way of thinking and often their upbringing too. You're challenging their confidence in their entire worldview, their intelligence, and often their morals too

ALSO let's not pretend that, in regard to the DPRK, a big part of it isn't just orientalism. It absolutely is. The west is saturated with orientalism and racism, and nobody even cares about challenging it when it comes to the DPRK, even if they might in other circumstances

But anyway, in my experience at least, other communist countries and leaders haven't been faced with the same level of propaganda. I mean it's context dependent. Based on my observations, for example, USAmericans seem more actively hostile to Fidel than Australians because Cuba is more relevant to the US and thus more of a target in their institutions. But generally speaking, the propaganda is much more intense when it comes to the DPRK

A five year old would know North Korea wouldn't sentence their soccer team to firing squad after they lose a game

While economic downturn and severe food shortages did not bring about the DPRK’s collapse its adversaries had hoped, the crisis was spun in Western reports to accuse Pyongyang of “starving its citizens” and purposefully collapsing food production to cause its people suffering. In doing so, the intention was both to demonise and delegitimise the Korean government internationally. U.S. President George W. Bush would characterize the country in the aftermath of the crisis in 2002 as: “a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction; while starving its citizens.” Similar statements were made by a number of officials, including Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton in 2002 and Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power in March 2016 and have been widely published by Western press since. An assessment of the history of food production in the country, the reasons for its collapse in the 1990s, and the means by which it was restored afterwards, seriously undermine the Western claim that the conditions of the Arduous March delegitimized the Korean government and were engineered by Pyongyang.

Before the division of the Korean peninsula, the southern half had been the breadbasket of the country, with its land and resources far better suited to agriculture. Following the partition the DPRK sought to develop sustainable agriculture without extensive reliance on food imports—a difficult task given its generally poor soil quality and high mountain coverage. In order to attain high enough crop yields to feed the population it invested heavily in both the mechanization of agriculture and the development of a considerable fertilizer and chemical industry. A London Times reporter motoring through the country in early 1950 described “a countryside as trim and carefully husbanded as any in Asia,” with crop yields rising considerably in later years as more advanced technologies were applied. According to the CIA, the DPRK attained food self-sufficiency in 1970 with a growth in grain production rates far ahead of population growth rates. CIA reports from 1978 comparing these successes to the ROK stated that grain production was growing faster in the North, and that living standards in rural areas “have probably improved faster than in the South.” The agency further reported: “North Korean agriculture is quite highly mechanised, fertilizer application is probably among the highest in the world, and irrigation projects are extensive.”

[…]

The DPRK’s energy-intensive food production was seriously threatened by the Soviet collapse and the resulting closure of fuel and fertilizer imports from the USSR. Blacklisted as a “rogue state” by the Western Bloc and placed under harsh economic sanctions, the DPRK struggled to import necessary inputs for its agriculture sector from other sources. International organizations such as the World Food Programme responsible for preventing famine remained widely inactive at this time, allowing the crisis to worsen. Although the DPRK was not facing famine, its agriculture was struggling due to the unforeseen political events of the early 1990s.

Food shortages in North Korea only reached critical levels when the situation was exacerbated by natural disaster, with independent observers reporting floods of “biblical proportions” and devastated crops, arable land and economic infrastructure. The United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs reported: “between 30 July and 18 August 1995, torrential rains caused devastating floods in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In one area, in Pyongsan county in North Hwanghae province, 877mm of rain were recorded to have fallen in just seven hours, an intensity of precipitation unheard of in this area…water flow in the engorged Amnoc River, which runs along the Korea/China border, was estimated at 4.8 billion tons over a 72 hour period. Flooding of this magnitude had not been recorded in at least 70 years.”

Senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and expert on U.S. foreign policy in Asia Selig S. Harrison, a figure who played a central role in negotiations between the U.S. and the DPRK under the Clinton administration, noted regarding the sudden environmental crisis: “The areas most severely damaged in the 1995 and 1996 floods were the ‘breadbasket provinces’ in the south and west that produce most of North Korea’s grain. Moreover, even before the floods struck, North Korean agriculture had been paralyzed by the loss of the Soviet oil that had fuelled its tractors and fertiliser factories.” Referring to North Korea as “a mountainous country with only 18 per cent of its land arable,” he noted “despite this ambitious irrigation, reclamation, and mechanization programs that have brought impressive increases in food production.” Harrison stated that the crisis was further exacerbated by a cut in food imports from China in 1995, a drastic fall from the 600,000 tons imported the previous year, due to growing demand in China itself and the new blanket ban on food exports by Beijing. This “left Pyongyang in the lurch just when the floods struck,” exacerbating the setbacks from a loss of Soviet trade, Western economic sanctions, natural disaster and the already poor suitability of the terrain for agriculture.

As the DPRK’s extensive grain reserves were largely stored underground, a precaution against American air attacks taken since the Korean War, they were destroyed by flooding. According to the UN, the floods in 1994 and 1995 destroyed 1.5 million tons of the country’s grain reserves. According to the UN Development Program’s 1998 report, reserves of rice and corn fell from 3–4 and 4–5 million tons respectively in 1989 to significantly less than 1 million tons each in 1996, and the loss of reserves at a crucial time spelt disaster for Korea. The impact on infrastructure was also catastrophic, with 85% of the country’s power generating capacity lost and around 5.4 million people losing their homes. Mudflows blocked transportation and communication networks while coal mines were flooded—further exacerbating the country’s energy crisis. Though the flooding of 1995 could be considered the largest, most severe of the 20th century, 1996 brought equally heavy flooding followed by a severe drought in 1997.

[…]

A number of reports indicate that the United States and its allies took more direct measures, alongside their economic sanctions policy, to exacerbate crisis in the DPRK during the Arduous March. Kim Ryeon Hui, a North Korean citizen living in Seoul who previously resided in China and witnessed the effects of the Arduous March first hand, stated regarding U.S. actions against the DPRK at this time:

During the Arduous March when food reserves were empty and farming was impossible, the U.S. blocked oil from coming in so 70% of our factories were shut down. We couldn’t produce anything. The state needed produce to distribute to the people but we had nothing. All of a sudden [from 1995] our collective food source was devastated. We simply had no choice but to starve. South Korea doesn’t share borders with other countries, but the north and China and Russia do, and with China there is no concept of a border so people come and go as they please.

Back then, we crossed back and forth from China even more and our government let it be because the government knew it couldn’t provide, so we traded goods in China and brought food back home constantly. And the damn Americans from the CIA operated in this border and did this: They would approach DPRK citizens and say “go cut off a cow’s tail and bring it to me. I will give you a bag of rice for a cow’s tail. Go cut down and bring me electric wires. I will match you the weight of the wire with rice.” Why do you think the Americans wanted cow tails? We didn’t have oil or electricity but we still had to manually farm to produce what little we can. But tractors don’t work because gasoline imports are sanctioned by the U.S.. So we had to use cows instead to plough the fields, but when cows lose their tail they lose their balance and power. In order to ruin agriculture even more and to starve out the people, the Americans wanted cow tails so North Korea can starve to death.

Against the near unanimous expectations of U.S. intelligence, the DPRK did not collapse and would begin a slow recovery from crisis in the late 1990s. The conditions of the Arduous March did, however, provide its adversaries with a pretext to delegitimize the government in Pyongyang for failing to provide for its population—with some Western sources blaming the state for an astonishing 3 million deaths in a population of little over 20 million. However, as data from a number of sources showed, while birth rates did not rise during the Arduous March period and remained modest, the population continued to grow at a stable rate. If deaths from starvation or starvation related illness did occur they remained relatively few in number. The World Bank estimated the North Korean population at 21.58 million in 1994 and 22.3 million in 1997, with growth rates remaining consistent with prior and later years. Its sources included the United Nations Population Division, Eurostat, the United Nations Statistical Division and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, among others. The International Institute for Strategic Studies cited the population at 23,112,000 in 1994, the year before the Arduous March, and at 24,681,000 on the year it ended in 1997. While there is little doubt that the general health of the population did decline, and the standard of living plummeted during this period, Pyongyang’s adversaries spread exaggerated and often entirely fabricated stories—the more horrific the better—to further smear and delegitimize its leadership in order to justify their further pressure for regime change.

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