No Subject, was, purportedly, on North Korea

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Apr 25 10:08:35 PDT 2000


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> Jacob:
>
> > >CB: How about the slaves the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and
> > >Washington owned? Did they have any power to dissent? How about the
> > >Native Americans? Did the Founding Fathers allow them to dissent? How
> > >about the all of the white women who couldn't vote?
> > >
> > >How ridiculous to claim that a genocidal, slave, male supremecist system
> > >allowed more dissent than N. Korea 2000.
> > >
> > >CB
> >
> >Surely it is obviously I meant contemporary US society. Clearly, the US as
> >a slave society and genicidal towards native-Americans was much worse than
> >Communist North Korea.
>

But your argument only makes sense if your standard of comparison is a nation at a level of industrial development comparable to that of North Korea *after* the U.S. had killed 25% of the population, wounded another 50%, and left not one single building higher than one story in height in all of North Korea. In fact, there is far less excuse in early 19th century u.s. for repressing *any* part of the population than there was for North Korea in the 1950s.

So far the *only* empirical evidence about North Korea that any of the red-baiters on this list have offered consists of some vague reports of the contents of some article in French, fairly outrageous, even bizarre, distortions of what others on the lisst have argued, utterly unfounded ascription of bad motives, and impressions admittedly gained from run-of-the-mill long distance gossip in the u.s. news media.

No one on this list has even remotely offered North Korea as a "model," but several of the red-baiters have repeated this lie.

The only comparison I can think of to the religious frenzy of these red-baiters is to the ravings of Godena and Adolpho over on the marxist-international list.

Could you please say a little bit about North Korea, and forget trying to judge the secrets of Yoshie's soul.

Is Sam Pawlet slavishly echoing stalinist propaganda?

In all my years on various maillists I have never -- even on femecon-l or milton-l -- encountered an outburst of red-baiting hysteria to match this thread.

Carrol



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