What was your initial reaction upon learning about the ‘Jeju Island massacre’?
Several years ago, the Full Communism subreddit posted Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul and I watched it and realized all the allegations against the DPRK were just projection
i read about the provisional government that the US showed up and overthrew, and went “oh, so an act of war”
It was gradual, but it started when I watched the Boy Boy video about North Korean haircuts
Once I realized that Amerika was lying about it’s enemies I stopped believing the bullshit
When you start to realize that the absurd claims of America towards the DPRK are false, you realize that they are neocolonial pieces of propaganda that are made to make a people come across as savage.
Exactly. Finding out that I’d been lied to my entire life and that the communists were the good guys was a shocking revelation.
It makes me really cringe at some of the stuff I used to ardently believe in (“DPRK is so savage lmao”), but we all start somewhere. I am so glad that I learned how wrong bourgeois media was because I would have supported some really awful stuff: Xinjiang genocide narrative (it does not exist, and it justifies the funding of terrorism by the CIA in the region), communism being doomed to fail, neoliberalism being the greatest thing, etc… Honestly, I am also glad because communist media is just so much cooler than libservantive media (honestly, I think the mundane or non-revolutionary aesthetic of libservantism kind of helps them, because if people assume that libservantism is simply how societies should be, then they will just stay away from politics due to how boring the constant talks of freedom and liberty are): hamsics and revolutionaries over crusty klansmen and “democracy” that is enforced by bullets.
i found out by watching a video about north korea by hakim and after learning about nk that wasn’t just “kim jong un totalitarian monarchy” and that mainstream western portrayals of nk come from south korean tabloids i was like “ohhhh” and things surrounding nk started to make sense to me
I asked my friend about the Koreans forced to eat their family pets and he asked me “did you ever look into it or did you just accept what a hostile country wrote about North Korea?” and it just clicked.
After that MillenialChaos on Tiktok was a menace to libs pretending to be communist and grilling them with actual knowledge over the Korean war and his proficiency in analyzing citations and tracking them back yo the CIA; this inevitably led me to start watching Blowback and reading their resources referenced.
When I was a lib, something triggered me to read more of US-Korea history and I learned about comprehensive sanctions. I was surprised that I’d never heard about the extent of the bombing campaign and human death inflicted by the US military in what was clearly crimes against humanity.
After that, even as a lib, I totally got why DPRK took the stance it does toward the US and it was clear to me that their stance was rational.
Before this, I’d already I become an anti-imperialist who thought armed struggle was necessary against colonialism. This was a result of reading history and Fanon and would eventually lead me to socialism.
Yeah, I weirdly became a communist some time after becoming annoyed at the amount of communists I was seeing online and I eventually got into literature and videos about communism; it still took a long time to become a Marxist-Leninist, though.
I just slowly started learning more about communism, so when I encountered debunkings of anti-DPRK propaganda when I was a communist (maybe not a Marxist-Leninist yet), I just accepted that America was the bad guy.
“they can’t be much worse than south Korea” in tandem with learning about socialism generally
My favorite show growing up was called Departures and they have two episodes where they traveled to DPRK and Cuba. They were neutral politically but highlighted the two countries in a positive way so I never thought negatively of them. It was my first time being exposed to the Korean war (as an american too) and I thought “that wasn’t a good thing.” Since then for DPRK over the years reading information here, Blowback’s season on Korea, and being outside their embassy in Havana has put it all in perspective.
The lies and obfuscation from the Vietnam War made me start to question all of the past 'murikkkan imperial military ventures. Once you head down that rabbit hole, there is no going back.
the first time i really thought of it was watching madeline pendleton on tiktok. before that i just sort of accepted the shit about north korea as a given. barely gave it a second thought.
Honestly i never had any doubt of it, it is as easy as asking why the hell the US is even there.
I think by watching videos and reading here.
learned about no gun ri. then a tumblr post surprisingly from a pretty big blog that was beginning to show ml tendencies explaining the extent of the bombing and urging westerners not to be dumb. (they were being dumb as fuck in the comments) then other things
