primitives rapping the socialist paradise of the workers and peasants

[franksolich]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3529652

Oh my.

The primitives are deviating from the party line again.

First, the primitives wanted to boycott made-in-China goods, which would be a detriment to that socialist paradise of the workers and peasants.

And then the primitives got all over China, about this Tibet thing.

And now they're rapping another socialist paradise of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all.

One suspects the primitives haven't been reading their little red book that tells them what to think.

JohnyCanuck  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:20 AM
Original message

Ever wonder what life is like for North Koreans? Hang tight, we might shortly find out.
   
Mother Earth's Triple Whammy
Why North Korea Was a Global Crisis Canary
By John Feffer

SNIP

.......The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?)

In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land -- it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

Big mistake. When heavy rains hit in 1995, this dragooning of marginal lands into agricultural production only amplified the national disaster. The resulting flooding damaged more than 40% of the country's rice paddy fields. Torrential rains washed away topsoil, while rocks and sand, dislodged from hillsides, ruined low-lying fields. The rigid economic structures in North Korea were unable to cope with the triple assault of bad weather, soaring energy, and declining food production. Nor did dictator Kim Jong Il's political decisions make things any better.

But the peculiarities of North Korea's political economy did not cause the devastating famine that followed. Highly centralized planning and pretensions to self-reliance only made the country prematurely vulnerable to trends now affecting the rest of the planet.

As with the North Koreans, our dependency on relatively cheap energy to run our industrialized agriculture and our smokestack industries is now mixing lethally with food shortages and the beginnings of climate overload, pushing us all toward the precipice. In the short term, we face a food crisis and an energy crisis. Over the longer term, this is certain to expand into a much larger climate crisis. No magic wand, whether biofuels, genetically modified organisms (GMO), or geoengineering, can make the ogres disappear.

http://tomdispatch.com/post/174945/john_feffer_are_we_a...

See also "Eating Fossil Fuels".

I disagree with the boldened area in the primitive copy-and-paste job, but never mind.

Rhiannon12866  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:34 AM
Response to Original message

1. Interesting. And we have an idea what they think of us...
   
I saw a "60 Minutes" segment on North Korea and it was absolutely chilling. Young children (they interviewed two little girls) are taught in school to hate Americans. They said that George Bush is a Nazi and that Americans want to kill them. I wouldn't argue with the Bush* analogy so much, but it does not bode well that an entire generation of children is growing up prepared to go to war with the US...

Isn't that what the primitives want to do, indoctrinate young children here preparing them to practice infanticide, and to liquidate all non-primitives?

Spouting Horn  (97 posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:38 AM
Response to Reply #1

3. Extremely weird is about the only way to describe the N. Korean regime.

Check out the "Friends of Kim" documentary (I saw it on Link TV about a yr ago) to see how bizarre it really is.

But it's a socialist paradise of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all.  It can't be weird.

Rhiannon12866  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 10:01 AM
Response to Reply #3

6. I know, after watching "60 Minutes."
   
The thing is that they seem to be kind of obsessed with us, while I'm sure most Americans never give North Korea a second thought. (Kind of like us and FR, LOL.) But we need to be aware of this...

Lydia Leftcoast  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:44 AM
Response to Reply #1

4. Well, so was a whole generation of Chinese brought up to hate Americans and I've never heard of any American tourists being murdered by mobs over there.

Rhiannon12866  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 10:13 AM
Response to Reply #4

7. That's absolutely true. I visited the USSR, just before it fell, went as part of a peace group, with my grandmother. When she first asked me to go, I thought she was insane, since I'd been brought up to believe that the Russians hated us.

But I went, for my grandmother, and it was a wonderful experience. The Russians we met couldn't have been more welcoming, and were thrilled to meet us. And I have since spoken to my friend's third grade class when they study Russia, and I tell them that the Russians are just like us, want the same things that we do, a good job, a nice place to live, a good education and future for their children, and Russians are dog lovers, LOL. Another illusion shattered.

And my aunt visited China, as did my parents, and had the same experience. The people they met were very excited and interested to meet Americans, especially when my parents went there, in 1986. University students competed to speak with my father, to practice their English.

But when my aunt was there, I forget the year, her warm welcome suddenly changed when we accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy...

I dunno.

When franksolich went to the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants just as it was falling down--and on his own dime, not someone else's--franksolich never expected ex-Soviets to dislike Americans, and franksolich was right.

Non-primitive people are people, after all.

Probably this ribbon primitive added that little nuance, that little twist, that little stretchy, to make it seem like some eye-opening "conversion" (her surprise at how friendly the Soviet people were).

And who was president when the Chinese embassy was bombed?

alyce douglas  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:38 AM
Response to Original message

2. how long will it be before you see a McDonalds out there.
   
why drop the sanctions on NK, maybe oil off the coast of NK, you never know about our sick regime.

Lydia Leftcoast  Donating Member  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:47 AM
Response to Reply #2

5. Did you see my initial reaction to the announcement?
   
North Korea has already let a couple of South Korean manufacturers in to use their people as cheap labor. I wonder if North Korea said, "Stop bugging us, and we'll let Wal-Mart come in here and set up sweatshops."

From the point of view of a greedy U.S. corporation, it would be a great deal: workers who work for starvation wages and don't dare complain about anything.

Watch for Wal-Mart merchandise with labels saying, "Made in the People's Democratic Republic of Korea."

Surely that can't be bad.  It's the socialist paradise of the workers and peasants with free medical for all, after all.

[Rebel]

JohnyCanuck  (1000+ posts) Fri Jun-27-08 09:20 AM

...Like the globe as a whole, North Korea does not have a great deal of arable land -- it can grow food on only about 14% of its territory. (The comparable global figure for arable land is about 13%.) With heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides, North Koreans coaxed a lot of food out of a little land. By the 1980s, however, the soil was exhausted, and agricultural production was declining. So spiking energy prices hit an economy already in crisis. Desperate to grow more food, the North Korean government instructed farmers to cut down trees, stripping hillsides to bring more land into cultivation.

Hmm, according to this we only have about 18.01% of arable land and, aside from a few f'd up mater imports, we seem to be doing well. Maybe it's not a land use issue so much as it's a governmental issue. Ya think?

[DixieBelle]

Now wait a minute, the OP is trying to say the NK's famine is due to "global trends"?

I guess you could take "highly centralized planning" as a euphemism for Kim Jong Il's willful destruction of his countrymen. *eyeroll*

Even the U.N. can't avoid the elephant in the room -

An acrimonious policy debate has been taking place within humanitarian organizations about the severity of the famine--indeed, its very existence--and the role of international food assistance in ending it. The questions being raised in the debate are not new; they reflect legitimate concerns about the effect of food aid to a country where those with political authority may have objectives very different from those of humanitarian agencies trying to reduce death rates.

North Korea is notable, even among its former eastern bloc allies, for being the most controlled and reclusive society on earth. Discerning what is actually happening in such a society is no easy matter. Much of the reporting on the famine has been based on visual observation by humanitarian aid workers who have visited or worked in the country. While these visits do provide some information, neither field visits nor the data provided by the North Korean government about the food situation are conclusive evidence of anything because they present conditions as the central authorities wish them to appear to the outside world.

http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr990802.html

This made my blood boil -

And in the late 1990s, when about two million North Koreans starved to death, their Dear Leader - as Kim Jong Il is known - sent his personal chef to Tokyo to buy fresh sushi, to Tehran to buy caviar, to Copenhagen for gourmet bacon and to Paris for the finest wines and cognacs.

If the North had competitive elections, Kim would have a tough record to campaign on. During his decade in power, fuel consumption has dropped by one-third, per capita income has dwindled to 8 percent of South Korea's, and during the famine years almost 10 percent of the population is believed to have starved to death.

"I think he sensed the reality," the Japanese author said, recalling seeing gaunt and starving peasants as the official motorcade raced along one of the nation's three highways. "You could see the malnourished children standing on the land. Naturally he saw these people through the car windows."

While Kim was slow to admit foreign food donations to ease the famine, he was quick to send underlings on international missions to satisfy his gourmet whims. Grapes came from China, mangoes from Thailand, papayas from Singapore, and, from the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, fatty tuna, sea urchins, eels and squid.From France, came boxes of cheeses and enough wine, brandy and cognac to replenish what the author called "the royal wine cellar," a collection of 10,000 imported bottles.

One day, he recalled, the leader's sons came home from boarding school in Switzerland and "reported to Kim Jong Il, 'we ate hamburgers and it was so delicious."'

"So I flew to Beijing, and went to McDonald's and bought a bag of hamburgers," the chef recounted. "Of course by the time I got back to Pyongyang, they were cold. So Kim Jong Il ate cold hamburgers."The experience may have prodded Kim to introduce hamburgers to the masses.

In 2000, he began a campaign to feed university students "gogigyeopbbang," which is Korean for "double bread with meat," also known as a hamburger.

"I've made up my mind to feed quality bread and French fries to university students, professors and researchers even if we are in hardship," Kim said at the time.

For public consumption, North Korean propaganda often refers to Kim enjoying a hearty meal of potatoes at an army canteen. On visiting army garrisons, Kim also often distributes imported packets of Japanese ramen noodles to awestruck soldiers.But in the late 1990s, when the state propaganda machinery was advising famine stricken North Koreans to forage for grass, roots, and edible bark, Kim's conversations with his foreign chef were of exotic ingredients, of new recipes and new cookbooks.

"Before I cooked rice for him, a waiter and kitchen staff had to inspect it grain by grain," the chef wrote. "Chipped and defective grains were extracted; only those what were perfect were served."

"I don't know any other country in the world like North Korea that has such a huge gap between rich and poor," the Japanese chef wrote of a country that claims to follow the world's purest brand of communism.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/19/news/norkor.php

[JohnnyReb]

 ...."In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia."....

Yes sir. Every peasant had either a pick, a shovel or a hoe, no wooden sticks for farming in NK.

[BlueStateSaint]

...."In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia."...

What they meant was that the tanks came with plows and seeding equipment.