Compare Haiti and Yemen after years without communism. shrug
It might be worth recalling that North Korea was the industrial end of the country, prior to the Japanese occupation and subsequent post-war division. Following the Bodo League Massacre, Northern Communists flooded across the border to aid their comrades to the south. Their industrial advantage made short work of the Southern capitalist-backed military, which was quickly rolled back almost to the sea. Only UN intervention prevented the South Korean Capitalists from suffering the same fate as the Chinese KMT.
US intervention in Korea came via the overwhelming superiority of air support. The Korean Peninsula suffered more bombs dropped in the next three years than all of Europe endured during WW2. North Korea - Pyongyang in particular - was flattened.
Even then, following the Chinese entering the war with MacArthur’s ill conceived invasion, and the border being reset to the 53 parallel, the peace dividend favored the North. Communist economic planning with the benefit of support from the USSR gave North Koreans a significantly better quality of life than South Koreans living under the Rhea/Park dictatorship and subsisting on aid from Japan/US.
It wasn’t until the collapse of the Park regime and the introduction of the tech industry in the 1980s that South Korean quality of life surged. That, combined with the collapse of the USSR cut North Korea off from at-cost agricultural supplies. The North spiraled into a horrible depression in the 1990s while the South rapidly accrued wealth from its US export businesses.
There’s a ton of history you can absorb if you don’t just take the propaganda at face value. The isolationism of Northern politics came with costs, relative to the benefits of being an occupied country in a tech boom. But the book is far from closed on where these two countries end up.
If the US can’t keep its shit together into the next century, countries like South Korea could be faced with similar economic pitfalls while NK and Cuba are no longer locked out of global trade through a Wall Street blacklist.
Compare Haiti and Yemen after years without communism. shrug
It might be worth recalling that North Korea was the industrial end of the country, prior to the Japanese occupation and subsequent post-war division. Following the Bodo League Massacre, Northern Communists flooded across the border to aid their comrades to the south. Their industrial advantage made short work of the Southern capitalist-backed military, which was quickly rolled back almost to the sea. Only UN intervention prevented the South Korean Capitalists from suffering the same fate as the Chinese KMT.
US intervention in Korea came via the overwhelming superiority of air support. The Korean Peninsula suffered more bombs dropped in the next three years than all of Europe endured during WW2. North Korea - Pyongyang in particular - was flattened.
Even then, following the Chinese entering the war with MacArthur’s ill conceived invasion, and the border being reset to the 53 parallel, the peace dividend favored the North. Communist economic planning with the benefit of support from the USSR gave North Koreans a significantly better quality of life than South Koreans living under the Rhea/Park dictatorship and subsisting on aid from Japan/US.
It wasn’t until the collapse of the Park regime and the introduction of the tech industry in the 1980s that South Korean quality of life surged. That, combined with the collapse of the USSR cut North Korea off from at-cost agricultural supplies. The North spiraled into a horrible depression in the 1990s while the South rapidly accrued wealth from its US export businesses.
There’s a ton of history you can absorb if you don’t just take the propaganda at face value. The isolationism of Northern politics came with costs, relative to the benefits of being an occupied country in a tech boom. But the book is far from closed on where these two countries end up.
If the US can’t keep its shit together into the next century, countries like South Korea could be faced with similar economic pitfalls while NK and Cuba are no longer locked out of global trade through a Wall Street blacklist.
So a minority of countries in capitalism and 100% of socialist counties had massacres, famine, death and failed miserably.
Where were feeding these statistics? Conservapedia?
Firstly, you’ve got it backwards. 100% of Capitalist nations had massacres, famine, death and failed miserably.
Modern socialist states are some of the most peaceful and prosperous in the world.