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Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anyth
by petcat 11mo ago
Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades.
- VWWHFSfQ 11mo agoIt will definitely go down as one of the biggest failures of mankind. Especially since it was so easily preventable if MacArthur was permitted to just take the whole peninsula.
- antonymoose 11mo agoThink how many tens of millions could have been saved if we had ended the Soviet Union as Churchill advocated, before the world got nukes.
- denkmoon 11mo agoThink how many tens of millions would have died in such a war. Just for some other evil to pop up anyway.
- etc-hosts 11mo agoYou mean when Churchill wanted to hire 100,000 "former" Nazis to invade the Soviet Union?
- TheBicPen 11mo agoDoes any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.
- temp8830 11mo agoGrow an "ender" first. And when you do try - keep in mind that many tried before you. The Swedes. The French. The Germans. They all got their comeuppance, and so will you.
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- timschmidt 11mo agoChina was already sending troops and material to the front lines when MacArthur was ordered to stand down. Pushing further would have meant a hot war with China.
- petcat 11mo agoA hot war with China in 1950 was going to end quickly with the firepower USA had on-hand.
- timschmidt 11mo agoThere is no way we could match them in numbers on the ground. Such a conflict would have inevitably led to us nuking them as a result. Which is probably the reason decision makers chose not to.
- petcat 11mo agoAnd maybe that's really the humanitarian failure. That USA didn't nuke China in 1950 or 1951. Would have solved a lot of problems for generations of people.
- yongjik 11mo agoWow, just half a dozen comments from why we're not saving North Koreans to "we could've nuked China and solved a lot of problems." Some Hacker News threads are on their own level.
- etc-hosts 11mo agoYou know the US destroyed nearly 75 percent of all buildings in North Korea during the Korean War, right? NK is paranoid for very valid reasons.
- AngryData 11mo agoOr how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".
- jojobas 11mo agoSo, piecemeal cede every bit of land to the evil? Like Trump wants with Ukraine now? If you exclude the outliers like Campuchia and Nazi Germany, even the most benign commies are always way more deadly than the most ferocious fascists.
- AngryData 11mo agoWhat makes 1950s Korea evil? You are equating North Korea today with Korea of 75 years ago, they aren't even remotely similar. You don't think your nation getting bombed to literal fields of rubble wouldn't change views and political stances afterwards? Unification was supported by both sides among the people, most South Koreans supported communism and 70% of them supported unification with the North. South Koreans didn't even support their own government, they were dealing with internal insurrection from their own people. The North was an industrialized nation and the South was a poor farming country and their unification would of been hugely beneficial to both. The war would have been over in another 2 weeks without intervention and a minimal amount of casualties, and it had only been 3 months from the start of the invasion. The only people not in support of it at the time was the political leaders of SK at the time because it meant they personally as individuals would lose power and wealth, and the US who was on a crusade to crush and kill anybody who dared support communism. Korea never should have been split in the first place, but the US and USSR had to be little bitches and force their will upon these people. Killing 5 million people, most of which were innocent civilians, in the name of "fighting communism" is evil, not the idea of a unified nation of people supported by those same people.
- nl 11mo ago
- nephihaha 11mo agoNorth Korea is a buffer state and continues to exist because of China.
- s5300 11mo ago[dead]
- joecool1029 11mo agoI will get buried for saying this, but DPRK survived as a people, investing everything into a nuclear program to survive. The reason nobody did anything is they firmly built a defense against intervention, and given how the korean war went, how various US interventions looked after that, it was the correct thing to do. The most the US could do to them in recent years was murder some innocent fishermen. It has tried to starve them and failed.
- jojobas 11mo agos/DRPK survived as a people/Kim dynasty survived in power/g. Sure it was a correct thing for Kims to do, millions of Koreans be damned.
- justsomejew 11mo ago[dead]
- AngryData 11mo agoIf anybody gave a fuck about the Korean people they wouldn't have split Korea up to start with, they wouldn't have stopped the reunification of Korea, and they wouldn't have bombed millions of civilians to death.
- kakacik 11mo agoAny proof of your emotional statements? Order of scale of those civilian deaths contradicts literally every public statistics out there. You seem to have... very strong while also contrarian opinions in this thread to be polite, leaning heavily into apologist position for North Korean government
- AngryData 11mo agoThe North Korean government is trash, but that doesn't mean I gotta ignore the plights and opinions of Koreans 75 years ago or pretend that bombing them to rubble was somehow a good thing because today they are lead by a despot. Millions of people didn't deserve to die just because the US had a dumb ideological crusade against communism when the vast majority of people in Korea supported it.
- AngryData 11mo agoExcept we aren't blameless either for the state North Korea ended up in. We leveled nearly every building in the country, we even targeted rural thatch huts with bombing runs. We dropped so many bombs on North Korea that the bombers started dropping bombs on thrice bombed rubble and open land because they couldn't find any targets left to attack. Why should we be surprised that a strong arm authoritarian leadership rose up among the chaos and put every effort towards military power and obtaining nuclear weapons at the expense of everything else? I can't even say that they made the wrong decision either, North Korea still exists as an independent nation which is amazing in itself.
- TheBicPen 11mo agoAt least NK's human rights abuses are contained within their borders. I hope future generations will look back on the many US invasions of foreign countries over the years and all the war crimes that took place during those invasions with the scrutiny they deserve.
- hulitu 11mo ago> why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades. Why in that country ? US controls much of western opinion and made a lot of atrocities, yet, nobody cares (see the ongoing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_military_strikes_on_alleged_drug_traffickers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_military_st... )
- keybored 11mo agoPeople scoff at North Korean propaganda.[1] Then they turn around and say this with a straight face. America bombed North Korea back to the stone age. Now we in the West wonder why it’s so F’d up by its very own volition. [1]: This is not to say that North Korean propaganda is not real.