>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 04/22/00 03:55PM >>>
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>What's your (or anyone's) socialist alternative for North Korea?
That's an excellent question, and I don't know the answer, and I don't think you do either. NK-style "self-reliance" is a disaster. On all but the most slavishly devoted accounts, the country is desperately poor and governed by a bizarre personality cult. In what ways are "socialist" North Koreans any better off than the proletarians of capitalist South Korea? Do you really think a small country can disengage completely from the outside world?
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CB: Doug, are you saying there some personality cults that are not bizarre running some countries somewhere ? What would you call the British monarchy ? A non-bizarre ( non-exotic ? foreign ? ) personality cult ? Or is that adjective just a gratuitous exaggeration making North Korea worse than some straw country ?
So, if you are against a small country disengaging completely from the outside world , are you for lifting the U.S. embargo and removing the troops ? or what. Are you saying North Korea should yield to the demands of imperialism in changing its system in order to engate the outside world ?
Are you saying you can't fulfill your wishes in changing U.S. policy, therefore, North Korea should change its system the way the U.S. and imperialist countries , and social democrats want it too ? Or that you wish NK would get rid of its "bizarre personality cult" ?
CB
>I wish that U.S. leftists took seriously the necessity of removing
>the American military presence from the Asia-Pacific theatre (which
>would help North Koreans _a lot_), but I'm afraid anti-militarism &
>anti-imperialism in America are practically dead.
Oh really? There are few things I'd like to see more than the U.S. military pull out of everywhere, and I bet most of the people who constitute the U.S. left, such as it is, would agree. So who, aside from the NATO-loving social democrats, are you talking about?