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First, North Korea is not a nation defending borders. It is a personal fiefdom that deserves neither the name "nation" nor the respect it entails.That's like, your opinion man. Other fiefdoms, especially rich in oil and fundamentalism, seem to be respected just fine, with their monarchs et al.
>Second, past colonialism does not establish a moral equivalency with the mass-scale starvation, systemic imprisonment, and wholesale torture occurring right now in North Korea.
Isn't some other country the number one in the world in terms of imprisonment? That has like 5% of the world's population, but 25% of it's prison population? And where blacks are disproportionately imprisoned?
Another sadly all too common trope is for people in glasshouses to throw stones, or even worse to look at "the speck of sawdust in their brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in their own eye".
And of course it's "all in the past" (as if colonialism is ancient history),and hundreds of thousands have not died and whole countries been destabilized in the past 15 years, with BS offensives and pretexts like WMDs and such.
>Third, even assuming for the sake of argument that those events were every bit as terrible as the current nightmare in North Korea
What "nightmare" that's any different than any run of the mill dictatorship supported and sponsored by "holier than thou" countries (not to mention beasts like Pinochet)?
There's imprisonment, hunting of dissidents and other stuff, but nothing beyond the ordinary. And if it wasn't for embargoes there wouldn't be much starving either.
Suharto's Indonesia was sponsored to hunt down and kill 1 million or so dissidents -- but those were lefties, so it doesn't count. Plus it was 40 to 20 years ago, ancient history.
Most of the "nightmare" seems to be the same kind manufactured truth used time and again to install dirty lackeys in yet another place (like the dictator's uncle being thrown to the dogs and other inanities). Libya and Iraq today are worse than with their dictators, and as for Syria, their legitimate guy looks like a bargain compared to the fundamentalist madmen that control those parts now.
I've never seen those mocking the "and you're lynching negroes" argument doing it for anything else than to defend their double standards.
It's always: "Sure, we do X bad thing, but it doesn't matter, because it was in the past, or because what's important now is to fight the Y bad thing, or because that doesn't absolve Y".
And, yes, it doesn't absolve Y, but it bloody puts it in perspective. And it also doesn't absolve X, so why those mocking the "and you're lynching negroes" line never seem to have a problem with the X, e.g. the negro lynching but always with what the other side does? Maybe they should begin by fixing their own glass house instead of telling others how to fix their?