This is a point that probably isn't made clearer by analogy since 1970s North Korea was well ahead of 1938 Nazi Germany in totalitarianism (and camps).
North Korea is not a fascist or nationalistic regime. And it's only been turned into a concentration camp by the West through sanctions. It's not even any more antithesis to democracy either. The party members are elected. The institution members are promoted by performance like anywhere else. The 'supreme leader' being some sort of a Sauron is a fantasy. Since you're comparing to Nazi Germany, you should also know that Hitler wasn't some sort of a god who bent everyone to his will. He was a leader of a party and a movement with the fascist ideology. Please don't equate Nazism and Communism.
If that is what you believe, I would encourage you to check out these two books on the subject [0][1]. Both are engrossing reads, and paint a damning picture of the regime from different perspectives.
I have taken a strong amateur interest in North Korea for years, and the full body of press, reporting, and firsthand accounts I have read would support the comparison to Nazi Germany.
Yeah I was thinking N Korea is probably the closest modern example to Nazi style fascism. They've got the unswerving loyalty to the dictator for the military good of the country thing going on. Not very good at building autobahns and industrialising though.
I don't think most people realize that the North Korean regime is nearly as bad as the Nazi and Soviet Stalinist regimes. The only difference is that the impact of that regime has been comparatively limited outside of the country. Which in many ways is very sad for the unfortunates trapped inside, since it seems to mean that the world pays very much less attention to their plight.
the GDR was much more liberal than the DPRK (North Korea), In north korea you got some 300,000 people in concentration camps, they also had real famines - and that didn't move the rulers an inch. Also the GDR was a sattelite state of the SU; The GDR couldn't possibly continue as they were about to default on foreign loans, and the SU was about to follow soon.
The treatment of communist guerillas by the South Korean government was substantially more humane (and far less bloody) than the treatment of civil society by the military junta ruling North Korea up to and including the leadership of Kim Tu-bong, who was himself dissapeared by Kim Il Sung in 1949. The problem here is that the hard-left stalinist policies that were widespread in the 30s-50s (and imitated by Mao) required a whole-scale attack on civil society:
* forced collectivization of agriculture
* attacks on schools, press, and bringing all instutions under the control of the party functionaries
* execution of monks, priests and missionaries and destruction of all religious organizations
* seizure of all private property.
Enforcing something like that requires a very bloody attack on the entire civil society:
"Concentration camps came into being in North Korea in the wake of the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. Those persons considered "adversary class forces", such as landholders, Japanese collaborators, religious devotees and the families of people who migrated to the South, were rounded up and detained in large facilities. Additional camps were later established in the late 1950s and 60s in order to incarcerate the political victims of power struggles along with their families as well as overseas Koreans who migrated to the North. Later, the number of camps saw a marked increase with the cementing of the Kim Il Sung dictatorship and the Kim Jong-il succession."
You can argue that Stalinist dictorships destroying civil society are a good thing, but trying to claim that the US "invaded" South Korea with 300 troops is absurd.
> any improvement in those areas happened in South Korea and Taiwan rather recently, in the past thirty years or so.
There was no period of time in which North Korea was more free or respectful of human nature than the South, as evidenced by people continuing to flee to the South from the North, which is why the North had to build walls to keep people in.
It is because the government of the South did not launch a wholescale attack on human nature and provided more freedom than the North that it could evolve in directions that promoted greater individual liberty over time, whereas the North remained mired with famines, collectivization insanity, and repression.
Korea spent thirty-five years occupied by imperial Japan, a regime never much noted for the softness of its grip, and after the war, was partitioned and the northern part given directly into the hands of the Soviet Union as a proto-Cold War quid pro quo. That's not so much what you could call a "slippery slope", as it is torture and brainwashing on a societal, rather than an individual, scale.
This is bad history. The Nazis who emerged in power had no ties to socialism. By this logic, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a purely democratically run country.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, because the reality is that the so-called left-wing dictatorships were literally nationalistic empires with a strong monarchic slant. Just as Nazi Germany was. (If Hitler had won WWII, Germany would have become an imperial monarchy within a couple of generations at most.) And North Korea still is.
The pseudo-Marxist imagery is just a wrapping. Politically, North Korea is a semi-industrialised feudal monarchy. Just as the USSR was an industrialised nationalistic proto-monarchy controlled by an emperor.
If you want millions of deaths, promote nationalism and imperialism. They always deliver.
A question asked in chat just today by a German journalist friend who specialises in Asia and esp the Koreas:
"And im seriously wondering: if there were no americans holding back the sk tyrants of that time, would sk be any better than nk in terms of human rights?"
Comparing the situation in Eastern Germany to North Korea is a bit of a stretch to put it mildly. I don't know first-hand how bad it is in NK, but I grew up in the GDR. Even the worst Stasi actions are most likely tamer than a normal day in North Korea (family members and friends ended up in jail for weeks or months for attempting to escape to the West, but I guess if the same happened in North Korea it's not done with a bit of jail time).
Most Stasi snitches (IMs) didn't need much 'encouragement' by the Stasi, most did it for purely egoistical reasons (money or favours).
The gap between the Koreas is far bigger than the gap between West and East Germany ever was. The latter was arguably ahead of the better parts of Third World (say Brazil or Mexico) in terms of education, health care, infra-structure, industrialization, etc. Compare to North Korea, which still uses mainly manual and animal labour for agriculture, and can barely feed its people.
reply