pattusk
Joined 7 years ago
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Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Korea hardly had any nationalist armed resistance by the 1930s. The nationalists camp had either turned to peaceful resistance a la Ghandi (Cho Man-sik), exile (Syngam Rhee) or collaboration (Lee Kwang-su, Ch'oe Nam-Seon and so many others).
Kim Il Sung participated in two attacks on the Japanese in the Korean Peninsula confirmed by modern historians (at Hyesan and Pochonbo, the latter of which may have been led by someone else) and other attacks in collaboration with the Chinese communists (see book above for details).
For those wondering why Korean nationalists would have become collaborators: they thought colonozation by an Asian race was less likely to erase Korean culture than colonization from a white race (as the nationalists believed a Japanese defeat in the pacific war would lead to Western colonization of East Asia)
Comment · 4 years ago
this is untrue, the Korean peninsula had a strong socialist (including non-Marxist forms of socialism) and later communist (as in affiliated with the COMINTERN) movement from the early 20th century and its main influence was the Japanese Communist Party - not Mao. (Incidentally, a large part of the membership of the Japanese Communist Party was Korean - up until the cadres.)
North Korean troops (and earlier the so-called "Yanan Koreans") were also instrumental in securing the Chinese communist victory during the Civil War through their actions in Northeast China. So in a sense they forced communism on China just as much as the Chinese forced communism onto Korea.
> It was Mao foisting it onto Korea. Stalin was a careful opportunist and thought Korea would be too risky and reckless, so he was hesitant but was eventually persuaded by Mao that it was a good idea.
Your statement refers to the Korean War. As archive records now show, both Stalin and Mao were reluctant and Kim Il Sung only managed to convince Stalin by pretending that Mao was on board for an invasion of the South (and likewise lying to Mao about Stalin being on board).
In any case, North Korea was already socialist before the Korean War. And the South also had a very strong communist movement - the first governments that sprouted in Korea after 1945 were "people's committees".
But the US backed dictator Syngman Rhee (selected for his staunch anti-communism, the man was so reactionary his conservatism shocked even US intelligence) managed to politicide the Southern communists in large numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeosu%E2%80%93Suncheon_rebelli...
Comment · 4 years ago
The reference biography of Kim Il Sung is "Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader" by Dae Sook Suh. A relatively fair treatment of the man given that the author is notable for his anticommunist bias: https://www.amazon.com.au/Kim-Sung-North-Korean-Leader/dp/02...
I can also recommend Kim Il Sung's own autobiography, With The Century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Century (wiki page has many links to the full book). Because it was written by Kim himself, it's a lot less hagiographic than what you might expect (he didn't have to worry about censorship). Plenty of embellishments sure, but also shows a very human picture of the man.
To give a bit more historical background on the conspiracy theory: Kim's anti-Japanese actions in the 1930s-40s had received some coverage in the Korean press - despite Japanese censorship. He went into hiding in the USSR in the early 40s and was sent back to Pyongyang by the Soviets a couple months after the August 1945 liberation of the peninsula. Dissatisfied with their first choice for a North Korean leader (a man named Cho Man-Sik), the Soviets intended to replace him with Kim (a convinced Stalinist) after some PR efforts to bolster his public image.
At Kim Il Sung's first public appearance at a rally in Pyongyang in late 1945, people were shocked by his young age (there are several testimonies from people present at the event attesting to this). This was exploited by the anti-communist South to discredit him, claiming that someone that young could never have done the resistance deeds that people had heard about during the colonial period. As Suh's book shows, however, there is a good amount of evidence to support the fact that he was indeed a leader in the resistance against Japanese colonization (albeit not the only one) with several feat of arms (albeit not nearly as many as later claimed).
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
French universities absolutely do have legacy admissions. It's called admissions paralleles (or sur dossier), you can pay your way in with minimal effort and get the same diploma upon graduation.
Comment · 4 years ago
> I thought the overall "shadowy Wall Street elite cabal" in this article was bizarre and a bit nauseating.
Especially since most of it is circumstantial, guilt by association or outright misleading. I don't know of anybody in crypto who still takes enteprise blockchains or the likes of JPM Coin seriously. In any case, it would give little credence to an accusation of collusion between Wall Street and the "crypto elite". It's just a private company using a certain technology.
I see very little evidence in this article to suggest that something different is happening. Gen Z (is it actually only Gen Z?) is stacking multiple jobs because job security and wages are at historically low levels for most of the population.