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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

It's not starving its people to death though. Many people are on the edge of poverty, sure, but you will find exactly the same thing in USA, South Africa, Phillipines etc. I have been to Pyongyang and driven though country areas in North Korea so I've seen how good and bad it is.

The human rights abuses are what is truly shocking but again some of the things that go on in China, USA, Phillipines, Israel/Palestine for example are also truly shocking.

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How's that "not starving"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine

"1994 to 1998"

Relevant Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Poverty in the US is a big problem, but it's not remotely on the same scale. If you've visited NK as a tourist, you've only seen what they want tourists to see.

Obviously there are bad things about North Korea but the amount of Americans running around in circles and screaming about it as if there are no comparable human rights violations in capitalist countries will never cease to amaze me.

It's really weird for me to observe how Westerners fetishize NK. On one hand there's all this exaggerated hysteria of "NK is going to bomb us" (never going to happen), where people fall for obvious posturing (oh, and the dictator of Korea is constantly portrayed as silly, while at the same time condemned; pick one). Then there's the overt "concern" for its citizens by people who haven't even taken a second to research how the situation came to be or what to do to alleviate it. No shit a country under heavy sanctions [0] and with its manufacturing centers razed after a war [1] isn't going to do so good. I don't think democracy is the citizenry's main concern, nor is its situation only of the country's own making. If people cared, they'd donate to international food banks and contact their congressmen about the matter instead of gloating about how "free" they are in their homes and how grateful they are to not be under the C-word menace while their own country goes around suppressing democracies and murdering innocents in the name of "freedom". As an American, I've noticed that my people tend to revel in ignorance and will readily eat up any propaganda thrown their way without any critical thinking involved (and to the obligatory comment saying you can't generalize 50 states: well our President represents those states and he's emblematic of the problem).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_North_Korea

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-war-crime-nor...

To compare the DPRK to first world nations such as the USA is beyond the pale. I can't even comprehend this.

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