>>> "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb at jmu.edu> 05/26/00 02:46PM >>>
Charles,
I am talking about the megalomanical part. Certainly Kim Il Sung was a dictator, even if he did (at least initially) have a lot of popular support.
On the megalomania side I simply note that the world's largest free-standing statue is of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. There is a lot more where that came from.
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CB: Maybe he was actually a great leader.
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Certainly the US ruling class as a group has been responsible for a lot more dead around the world than Kim Il Sung or his semi-pathetic son have. They are a lot more powerful for one thing. But they are not a "megalomaniacal dictator." That is one person.
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CB: I used the plural form, below. DictatorS.
The fact that the U.S. dictatorship has more of a collective, doesn't make the North Korean form somehow less democratic.
Class exploitative societies have always been run by an exploiting CLASS, i.e. group, not an individual. History is not a history of great , individual men. It is a class struggle. Kings and tyrants are ciphers for ruling classes.
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Bill Clinton may like to be erect a lot, but has not yet erected a monumental statue of himself anywhere, and may never get one, except presumably at his library wherever.....
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CB: The president is not in the ruling class. The President is not the dictator. There is a group of capitalists who are the dictators, and they are worse tyrants and "meglomaniacs" than anythone in North Korea. In fact , it is the American tyrants who are the worst tyrants in both North and South Korea for the last 50 years.
CB
-----Original Message----- From: Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, May 26, 2000 2:19 PM Subject: Re: seth & defusing korea tensions
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>>>> "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb at jmu.edu> 05/26/00 11:57AM >>>
>Charles,
> The leaders of the US are nowhere near being in
>the league of the late Kim Il Sung.
>
>___________
>
>CB: When you say not in the league, do you mean not as good or not as bad ?
>
>Your leaders are the leading world criminals. The mass murder in Iraq alone
makes them worse than Kim Il Sung. But that is not counting the war on
Korea itself, which makes those American leaders the worse criminals IN
KOREA iteself in this era.
>
>It is clearcut that the US ruling class are more monomanical dictators than
Kim ll Sung .
>
>________
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>
>His son is another
>story and a bit more mysterious.
> BTW, there is a lot of controversy about the details
>of the life of the old man. Some in the ROK claim that
>he was a phoney, that the real anti-Japanese leader of
>the 1930s died. Of course, his official biographies had
>him almost singlehandedly driving the Japanese from
>Korea and leading all kinds of victorious battles in the
>USSR during WW II. The most reliable evidence suggests
>that he rode into Korea in a Soviet tank. But, he did have
>sufficient local support that he did not need the Soviets to
>maintain him in power.
>Barkley Rosser--
>
>