[Fwd: No Subject, was, purportedly, on North Korea]

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: No Subject, was, purportedly, on North Korea
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 12:08:35 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Jacob:
>
> > >CB: How about the slaves the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and
> > >Washington owned? Did they have any power to dissent? How about the
> > >Native Americans?  Did the Founding Fathers allow them to dissent?  How
> > >about the all of the white women who couldn't vote?
> > >
> > >How ridiculous to claim that a genocidal, slave, male supremecist system
> > >allowed more dissent than N. Korea 2000.
> > >
> > >CB
> >
> >Surely it is obviously I meant contemporary US society.  Clearly, the US as
> >a slave society and genicidal towards native-Americans was much worse than
> >Communist North Korea.
>

But your argument only makes sense if your standard of comparison is
a nation at a level of industrial development comparable to that of
North Korea *after* the U.S. had killed 25% of the population, wounded
another 50%, and left not one single building higher than one story in
height in all of North Korea. In fact, there is far less excuse in early
19th century u.s. for repressing *any* part of the population than
there was for North Korea in the 1950s.

So far the *only* empirical evidence about North Korea that any
of the red-baiters on this list have offered consists of some vague
reports of  the contents of some article in French, fairly outrageous,
even bizarre, distortions of what others on the list have argued,
utterly unfounded ascription of bad motives, and impressions
admittedly gained from run-of-the-mill long distance gossip in
the u.s. news media.

No one on this list has even remotely offered North Korea as
a "model," but several of the red-baiters have repeated this
lie.

The only comparison I can think of to the religious frenzy of
these red-baiters is to the ravings of Godena and Adolpho
over on the marxist-international list.

Could you please say a little bit about North Korea, and
forget trying to judge the secrets of Yoshie's soul.

Is Sam Pawlet slavishly echoing stalinist propaganda?

In all my years on various maillists I have never -- even
on femecon-l or milton-l -- encountered an outburst
of red-baiting hysteria to match this thread.

Carrol