I will not defend Stalin and I will not defend the CCP. Just because capitalism isn’t good doesn’t mean that we have to glaze imperialist states. Ask Ukraine and the Baltic states how good they had it during the USSR; my point being that pro-USSR sentiments are largely just pro-Russian propaganda.
China is doing some good nowadays, but it still definitely has corruption. There are still billionaires, polluted air, capitalistic factories—which have terrible working conditions and sell cheaply made carcinogenic products, they’re building AI data centres—some of which will boil the water temperature, bans citizens from accessing a lot of websites, etc.
I even decided to join a solidarity website and it mentioned f**cking Kim Jong-Un as a leftist figure ffs 💀. Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is. The site had no mention of actual decent examples like Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King Jr, or even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Edit: did not know that Proudhon was a bigot. My bad; thanks immensely for telling me.
Okay, but to be fair, you’re never going to hear positive things from a defector about the country they defected from.
It’s not that the defector has negative things it’s what those negative things are about.
There is a big difference between “healthcare system sucks” and “we are being taken, raped, tortured, and/or murdered for not loving dear leader.”
Because these people were never, ever paid to say these things.
This feels like victim blaming. If you literally aren’t allowed to leave your country, that’s a sign that things are dire.
Thousands of people have escaped and told their stories.
Who said they aren’t?
You serious?
Yes I am.
You are asserting that north Koreans have freedom of travel?
To a certain extent. I remind myself that I can not freely travel Korea or Cuba, and never have been, but for a possible brief window of time, under President Obama.
But when the only way to leave a country is to defect and escape, that points to it being a bad place.
Yeah you can’t really say “only defectors will say bad things” when the only way to leave (to a country that won’t immediately deport you back) is through a literal mine field, barb wire fences, armed guards in watchposts ordered to shoot to kill, and also punishing every member of your family for 3 generations for doing so.
Pleasurable countries to live in won’t shoot citizens on sight trying to exit.
Yeah, true.
I don’t care what people say about a country, what the country says about itself… Anytime a country says “you’re not allowed to leave”, that’s a huge red flag, indicating that the country is an authoritarian shithole and a horrible place to be.
Koreans leave their country all the time.