No, all positions are elected. That's like saying Bush Jr. inherited his position from Bush Sr.

Is anyone here posting from NK?

Everyone but you, yeah. Everyone is an evil scheming FOREIGN agent because people with views that contradict yours doesn't exist! (and if they do, they are actually suppressed and don't know FREEDOM like you)

It already does, this thread is proof enough.

…What are you talking about?

I’m curious about an NK resident’s perspective here, on Lemmy.

Because these kind of questions are always followed with some form of chauvinism or racism.

The DPRK has an intranet, and is cut off from the broader internet. It's illegal, for example, for an ROK resident to access a DPRK-hosted website. That being said, many travel to Russia and China (including for work), and there are citizens of the DPRK that reside in New York City for UN purposes, as well as those that work at embassies around the world, such as in Cuba.

Post proof including that leaked video of concentration camps

What video?

Sooo much of projecting and propaganda uhhh

To the contrary, you have to entirely ignore the role of western propaganda to credibly believe everything the west says about a country they committed genocide against, and disbelieve everything said country has said about itself.

There are no "concentration camps." The DPRK has prisons, sure, as do all countries.

Defector testemony is notoriously unreliable. Defectors are discriminated against in the workplace, and as such most turn to spinning tall tales to make a living. Speaking positively about the DPRK is illegal in the ROK and is punishable, as is returning to the DPRK, despite a good number of defectors wishing to return to their homeland.

"Human rights groups" are often heavily western influenced, and as such western biases plague reporting. Famine did exist during the 90s and early 2000s when the USSR dissolved and massive flooding ruined farming for years in the DPRK. These days, however, food is far more stable, and rural areas are seeing priority in development through the 20x10 policy.

You don't really have a leg to stand on here, you are trusting the empire that committed genocide against Korea to be truthful about Korea.

Fuck OP fuck this news source and fuck anyone who wants to justify governmental violence on a repressed population

motherfucker the DPRK is historically oppressed through collective punishment by the fucking Western powers!

HRW is just another way for the empire to have a "justification" to oppress anyone. It's literally an Amerikan front.

Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un have all held largely different positions. All have had high levels in the WPK and sometimes government, but each was elected into their positions. The Kim family has outsized influence due to being seen as heroic figures, this is not a "dynasty" but normal electoral politics surrounding popular figures.

Stealing from @RiverRock@lemmy.ml

I’m not an expert on DPRK history, so instead I’ll try and speak to the prominence of the Kims:

Think back to the enormous popularity the Kennedy family enjoyed in the US for decades. For a good thirty years, if you had a guy named Kennedy on your ticket, he was gonna win. Even Capcom, as recently as 2004, named their heroic American protagonist Leon S Kennedy, because the association of “Kennedy” with “Heroic/good/representative of America’s better angels” was strong in pop culture. It’s an incorrect association, but what matters is it existed.

But what did John, the one people remember most fondly, actually do to earn his reputation? Give a couple well-received speeches, have sex with a trafficked actress, propose a drawdown in Vietnam that never happened, and then get his shit blown smoove off? That’s not much of a legacy when you put it on paper, but here in America our standards are very low. with that in mind, let’s imagine a different history:

The Nazis win WW2. Doesn’t matter how, they just do. After cannibalizing Europe to rebuild their military, they cross the Atlantic with a massive fleet and start systematically dismantling the United Stated via carpet bombing. First electricity goes, then water, then food as every farm, dam and railway is destroyed. After all the infrastructure is gone they start leveling apartment blocks and houses, and entire towns are wiped off the map with few survivors every night. The bombers never stop coming, hitting even ruins where people might be hiding, scouring nearby forests with incendiaries, and allegedly (though I believe it) dropping viral and bacterial weapons with knowledge given to them by Japanese war criminals. Somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of the population is dead, starvation and disease are rampant, every single building has been leveled, and the traumatized survivors are hiding in caves. At this moment John F Kennedy shows up, leads the military in pushing the Nazis out of the northern states with help from Canada, and organizes the rebuilding of the liberated area. When the Nazis consolidate their hold on the southern states and create a military puppet government there to serve as a foothold for invasion, he oversees preparations to drive them back again. Obviously he becomes an instant folk hero, and his descendants both enjoy great political goodwill by association and experience great pressure to live up to the accomplishments of their fathers. //End hypothetical

In the US, a place that has not been touched by war in living memory, we very easily fall into the trap of thinking of other peoples as somehow sillier and more emotional, or more prone to irrational thinking. This is the message that our corporate media has always given us, through careful implication, picture choice, orientalist framing. The unspoken message is always: look at the latest inscrutable conflict these primitives have gotten themselves embroiled in now, aren’t you glad to live somewhere civilized where rule of law prevails?

Of course, the truth is that we export our instability: more than that, our stability depends on constantly destabilizing others and collapsing entire societies into nightmares from which can be easily siphoned cheap labor and resources. These aren’t random conflicts: almost always, they’re our conflicts, our proxy wars, our coups and propaganda drives. “Our” prosperity (mostly the prosperity of the capitalist class, but we do still get the crumbs) is inextricable from their suffering, it depends on it. If other societies are able to stand up for themselves, they can’t be threatened into extortionate “free trade” deals that let western corpos make an insane markup on some tv assembled with rare earth minerals from Vassal Country A by wage slaves in Vassal Country B. That sounds random but it has to be stressed that almost every supply chain for everything in the entire “first world” is built on that relationship, all the profitability of western companies is built on that relationship, and they have before and will again kill untold millions if that relationship is ever threatened.

To tie it all together, my thesis about the apparent popularity of the Kim family (and I say apparent because I can’t know for sure from outside the DPRK either way, but haven’t seen any signs of internal struggles, which you know our western press would pounce on) is this:

-The US and it’s co-belligerents visit an untold amount of conflict and misery on the global south as a matter of course

-Those who stand up to them are remembered fondly by their society, especially if they succeed, especially if they succeed and survive to old age

-Those who stand up are demonized in the western press, especially if they succeed, especially if they succeed and survive to old age

-The people we in the US are conditioned to view as lesser are if anything much more level headed on average than we are, and if the armageddon we made over there happened to us over here the result would probably look less like a socialist republic and more like a loose confederation of death cults

-With this in mind, and knowing that they aren’t actually central to the government of the country, I cannot possibly begrudge Korean society and the Korean state their affinity for the Kim family as a national symbol

https://lemmy.ml/post/50962606/27092779

You do realize this article proves exactly what I said, correct? Korean history is incredibly ancient, and as such part of it has heavy elements of folklore. This does not mean Koreans actually believe in unicorns, but that the iconography is symbolic, and as such it has historic ties. Have you ever spoken to a Korean, southern Koreans included? This isn't exclusive to the north, the South also has mythologized elements (they have a common history), they aren't treated as actual history and instead as folklore. The west reports on this as though northerners believe the folklore, which is wrong.

EVERYTHING IS PROPAGANDA YOU FUCKING IDIOT

JUST BECAUSE ONE VIEW ALIGNS WITH YOURS DOES NOT MAKE THAT NOT PROPAGANDA

Yeah... you just posted wikipedia lol

You do know it’s not just Americans reporting this stuff?

Yeah it's also

No, it does not. The historic link to the mythologized aspects of Korean history does suggest links to material history. The mythologized elements are cultural and not seen as historically accurate, but the locational links are to real, historic leadership. There was no unicorn, but there were generations of kings that did exist. This is not "divine right," it's a tie to history.

Not a single dprk source. Please post a DPRK source saying the things you claim they are saying not westerns asserting this is what they say.

Because their propaganda is the most prolific in human history? Gee I wonder why they would be relevant? 🙄

Lol, this is great

"Supreme Leader" is more of an honorific title, hence the posthumous designations.

As far as being normal, the DPRK pretty much is. It's not some alien dynasty, it's a socialist country under siege.

I just learned they have an embassy here. I should email them asking for a flag

Hell yea

There is no class-based system regarding political loyalty. To begin with, class is a relation to the means of production and distribution, not a category of loyalty. The DPRK has an overwhelmingly publicly owned economy, and the working classes control the state. There is no "king" of the DPRK, no matter what fanfiction you write about it.

Right, Wall Street Journal and other western media cited are doing propaganda for DPRK. That's definitely an interesting take you'll have to expand on.

All I'm saying is that everyone in Italy believes their capital city was founded by the twin sons of Mars, who survived drowning as infants and were raised by a wolf and a woodpecker.

Lmao

This article doesn't even have any functioning links dude

Post direct sources, any videos, actual pictures. "There's so much of this" okay then post it, since it's plentiful.

There’s so much of this, everywhere.

proceeds to post the same link three times

Yeah, so much of this evidence.

Pretty sure Amnesty also took ages to recognize the genocide in Palestine, assuming they have.

You're the one making claims. The burden of proof is on you. Why are you surprised you're being asked for evidence?

What you posted doesn't even fucking work, because all you did was a quick google search and pasted it 3 times and called it "a lot of evidence"

The DPRK is an authoritarian shithole.

Authoritarian, like your parents being authoritarian by telling you to go to bed?

Go back to reddit you fascist.

Trolling? I'm a communist, what I say is consistent with what Marxist-Leninists believe to be true. Again, citing Amnesty USA as evidence against the DPRK is ridiculous chauvanism. Would you exclusively cite Israeli sources on Palestine?

Regarding famine in particular, the overwhelming consensus is that it was driven by genocidal destruction of agriculture by the US Empire, the dissolution of their largest trading partner, and mass flooding in the 90s, which is why their food security is getting better.

The DPRK has prisons. Allegations that it has "concentration camps" are projection at best. Same with "human rights abuses."

No idea what you're getting at regarding the 1930s Soviet famine.

Either way, "democratic socialism" is just social democracy without self awareness. Reform is a dead end, revolution is necessary, and socialism is already democratic.