r/InternationalNews 25d ago

Asia South Korean President Declares Emergency Martial Law

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u/gecata96 25d ago

The left-wing opposition party wants to impeach him and he jumps on the gun and calls them DPRK sympathizers and says he will eradicate anti-state elements through military action. The worst Korea seems to be doing very good and fascist lately.

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u/Order_of_Dusk 24d ago

Okay, while information on DPRK is limited and very heavily skewed, I would not go so far as to say North Korea is better than South Korea.

While South Korea is most certainly bad by any reasonable standards, it does at least have democratic institutions whereas North Korea is an autocracy, while we most likely won't know the full details of what's going on for a long time it is not unreasonable to assume North Korea has similar problems as any other similar authoritarian regime throughout history - i.e government corruption, an oligarchic in-group who live comfortably while the rest of the population do far worse off, and other fairly standard problems in authoritarian governments.

Keep in mind, just because one system is bad doesn't mean all alternatives are automatically better regardless of the characteristics of those systems, the liberal democracy capitalist hellscape we live in is awful but obviously that doesn't mean Italian fascism was better (Note: I'm just using that as an illustrative example of how a different system isn't automatically better, I'm not saying anyone here was claiming that.); so yeah I'd hold my horses on endorsing the DPRK, it's probably not as uniquely evil as people claim but I'm reasonably confident in saying it's probably not good.