• Armen12
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    10 months ago

    Go look at the status both countries are at today instead of referencing 70 year old events. Whatever path South Korea took clearly worked and North Korea’s path did not. A rational, intelligent person would admit when they were wrong and concede

    • BLU_Raze@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Haiti and Cuba also took very different paths. Many people would prefer to live a half-decent life with access to healthcare and higher education than live in a hyper-privatized country in the sphere of US-influence.

      On the other hand, people will risk a lot to take a higher salary at any expense, like the Irish who moved to the US while being treated like shit, just because they had a much higher wage.

      North Korea, for its awful geography, long history of natural disasters, and low % arable land, while being sanctioned, was immediately wrecked once the USSR dissolved and they had no one to save them. South Korea, a still-developing nation, received a lot of money from the US to bolster their country, much like Poland after the fall of the Warsaw Pact and Soviets. In addition, the US makes a massive profit off keeping countries like Poland and S. Korea in their influence, so higher wages and greater consumerism is encouraged, and easier to achieve, in a way that feels like consistent quality-of-life improvements.

      I don’t deny that many people will risk everything to escape sanctions and to move into a country where they can make $300,000 annually, but that doesn’t make poor countries evil or anything. People get paid millions to flee North Korea, make it through solitary confinement in the South, and get a successful career in the US, like Yeonmi Park (okay, maybe not millions - that’s a gross over-exaggeration: https://www.nknews.org/2015/06/claims-n-korean-defector-earns-41k-per-speech-completely-incorrect/). However, the higher salary and higher standard of living comes at a massive cost to many countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.