afellowkid

Edit: I'm mostly through transcribing the video, mostly just cleaning it up now. Edited since rn I don't need what I was asking about earlier.

I suggest studying some Korean history and reading the works of DPRK's leaders and other DPRK authors directly and over time you can form your own evaluation of what they believe and why they have implemented particular policies at various times. I don't have time to write more on it at the moment but you can find some of Kim Jong Il's views on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, socialist construction, and Juche here.

The "patsoc" ideas which promote patriotism in the imperial core and reject decolonization are much different from the socialist patriotism which is anti-imperialist and decolonial. DPRK does uphold socialist patriotism, which is regarded as part of its internationalist duty of completing the Korean revolution by focusing the majority of its attention on Korea, to make sure their revolution is successfully carried out, and which is specifically against promoting national chauvinism, and rejects racism.

DPRK's emphasis on looking inward for solving its problems and on self-reliance come from Korea's specific conditions. Specifically, Korea has been a battleground for world powers for much of its existence and historically had strong ideological currents of subservience to larger powers influencing its politics, which posed obstacles for progressive/revolutionary movements in Korea since feudal times and into the modern era. After DPRK was formed, it also had to deal with the issue of different influential strains of thought among socialist countries, including its powerful neighbors, Russia and China, during the Sino-Soviet split. The opening of China and the fall of the Soviet Union led to further inner debates. DPRK's emphasis on focusing on its own conditions is a necessity for it to avoid dogmatically following other states' lines and thus committing errors in its own revolution, not a blanket rejection of foreign ideas.

I am still learning about Songun, but from what I have read so far, it seems to have its roots in the Cuban missile crisis where US aggressions were ramping up, and finally came to the fore as policy during the Arduous March, when the US was trying to use the economic upheavals after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the US attempting to end DPRK by intentionally starving its people to death. It was determined that in order for Korea to complete its revolution and defend socialism, it would be necessary to heavily prioritize defense due to DPRK being under constant mortal threat from imperialism. Edit: Also, with DPRK's more recent nuclear developments, I believe the policy of Byungjin (parallel development of military and economy) has returned to the fore, though I may be wrong about that. I'd appreciate being corrected if someone knows.

I recommend this essay on ProleWiki, The Cleanest Farce: How "Experts" Distort the DPRK, and the page about Juche which has sections about Juche's relationship to dialectical materialism and to Marxism-Leninism specifically. Tl;dr is that ML is seen as a correct revolutionary idea but that it, being very old by now and being formulated in the world's first successful socialist revolution, it lacks certain concrete details about socialist construction in the present day and also (naturally) has a different context than Korea's revolution. Therefore it is regarded as a basically correct idea for revolutionaries to follow, but that following it dogmatically is an insufficient application of it, and all countries will need to forge their own path to suit their own conditions as they are confronted with the task of socialist construction and defending the revolution in the present conditions. Juche takes the dialectical materialist view of the world, and it is just dealing more with how people can have a certain attitude and point of view to successfully carry out revolution.

As far as I understand, it's subsidies in this case. US will subsidize elements of the Korean corporation's production as long as they build factories in the US but the benefits will be taken away if they have over the specified amount of production going on in China. And the amount they specify for that basically amounts to not allowing them to make any more factories in China and not letting their existing ones be highly productive.

Here's an older article about it: "South Korean companies that invested in the US to build semiconductor factories will have to limit their manufacturing capacity at their Chinese factories to 5 percent or less for 10 years in order to receive US subsidies. [...] The excessive information demanded as a condition to receive subsidies from the US, runs the risk that South Korea’s advanced semiconductor technology and business secrets could be leaked. There is even one clause that requires the return of certain subsidies if companies earn more than a certain amount in profits."

I learned Esperanto when I was pretty young. Although I wouldn't regard it as the right candidate for the purpose of being the world's second language, I'm definitely glad I learned it. By knowing Esperanto as a kid/teen from the imperial core, I ended up casually chatting with people from China, Iran, and central Africa (mainly Burundi, Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo), regularly listening to radio programs from Cuba, China, and Poland, and seeing lots of Esperanto art and culture that had been made in the Soviet Union. It really did introduce me to a lot of different perspectives that, at the time, I didn't realize were basically censored where I came from. And of course in general I met people from many countries. I would say that in any random conversation or community, I mostly met people from Europe, Brazil, and China.

The usual criticisms of it are pretty much valid in my view. However, just taking it as one language among many rather than pushing it as "the" solution for a world auxlang, I think it's worth studying a bit if it intrigues you. I'd say another valuable thing I learned by being in the Esperanto speaking 'sphere' since a young age is that I really saw what kind of things it takes to get people organized to do something, what it takes to popularize an idea, and what kind of stuff absolutely does not work for getting people to believe or do something (there's a lot of that in Esperanto communities lol). It's also interesting to watch the development of the language, because it is a living language that grows and changes on its own at this point, while also having a regulating body, and a ton of highly opinionated idealists arguing constantly about this stuff. In that sense I find it an interesting window into how people manage and conceive of development in things. Finally I think it's an instructive case in observing the growth and development of an auxlang, which could aid future, improved projects in that vein.

Having studied a few different languages, I will say that in my opinion, Esperanto lives up to the claim of being easy to learn. If you speak a Romance language it will be especially smooth sailing. When I have spoken with people who learned it from a completely non-European language background, they said it took a while to learn the vocabulary and that the pronunciation was difficult in some regards, but it was otherwise easy compared to natural European languages, which I would guess is owing to its lack of irregularities in grammar and spelling, its flexibility in grammar, the lack of demand that people have a particular accent, and the lack of strict collocations.

A lot of people dislike it that Esperanto lacks certain cultural things that natural languages have. IMO that kind of comes with the territory of learning a constructed language. Personally, I think it's fun, as it creates kind of a playful/creative atmosphere. Esperanto serves as more of a tool or vehicle for sharing cultural things than as a deep well of culture in and of itself.

Like most things, the Esperanto community is full of liberals. This becomes somewhat balanced by the community itself being focused on trying to meet people from other countries and the community having a general curiosity for the world and wanting to do cultural exchange. But you will find many liberal and some reactionary opinions flying around in Esperanto communities. The idea/original "plan" behind Esperanto was pretty idealist (although I do think conlangs can have very real, useful applications worth exploring), so the community has a bit of that in its veins.

Personally, I am happy I learned it. I don't use it frequently these days, but I do enjoy listening to a few songs, and I'll always be happy about the friends I made, or to randomly run into someone else who speaks it and have a chat. Is it something I highly recommend? No, not really. But if it interests you, I think it's something fun to do, and you'll meet new people, and may find chances to travel or work using the language if you really look (you'd be most likely to find work in Europe or China using Esperanto if you managed to do so).

Final note: You can take a VR tour of an Esperanto museum in China here. I thought it was pretty cool.

Paul LaCamera

(2021) Gen. Paul LaCamera takes office as new U.S. Forces Korea chief

Combined Forces Command leadership page

Knowing how the wheel of history spins now has given us the ability to predict it and therefore the power to take our destiny into our own hands and shape history after our desire.

I'm not an expert and still in the process of learning about this, but I would say your understanding of it here more or less lines up with my understanding from what I have read so far.

As I understand, Juche dismisses the idealist world outlook as groundless and also rejects mechanical materialism, and holds that the dialectical materialist view is the scientific view of the world. However, it is considered that merely holding a dialectical materialist view does not automatically cause people to start using it as a tool to change the world to humanity's benefit, which is the question that the Juche idea is mainly concerned with: defining and promoting humanity's role in changing the world, and increasing peoples' consciousness of this role. As I understand it, Juche promotes the concept that humans (as a collective whole) not only can but should center themselves in changing the world to benefit them, within the real scientific limits of the world, i.e. with the knowledge of the laws of nature and society which operate independent of human's will. This is seen as a necessary attitude in humanity's emancipation from oppression, as simply having a dialectical materialist view does not necessarily cause people to start acting on humanity's behalf even if it does give them an accurate scientific view of reality's motion.

Texts about Juche seem to primarily focus on asserting that it is correct for humans to center their own needs in how they shape the world, and also focus on discussing humanity's historical pursuit for independence and methods of preserving that independence when it is achieved through progressive revolutions, with the primary focus now being the struggle to end imperialism and capitalism and to defend and evolve socialism, in order to remove exploitation from society and continue on humanity's path to pursuing independence from all restrictions, both natural and social, overcoming them with a methodical and scientific understanding combined with an attitude of intentionally centering human needs and desires in the way humanity consciously shapes the world.

If someone sees something wrong with my understanding, please let me know. I am still in the process of learning about this.

Geopolitical Economy Report

I started watching this a while back due to your recommendation, haven't finished yet, but it's been an interesting film so far.

I also found this article somewhat recently, it gives an overview of Italy's settler-colonial project in Libya: Genocide, Historical Amnesia and Italian Settler Colonialism in Libya—An Interview with Ali Abdullatif Ahmida

In the late 1920s, the Italian fascist regime implemented a campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern Libya to create more land for Italian settlers and quell armed resistance to colonization. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida’s new book, Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History, examines this forgotten case of settler-colonial violence and the processes that led to the forced relocation of over 100,000 Libyans to special camps, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands.

Italy looked at Libya as the “fourth shore,” an extension of Italy like the French treated Algeria—the same mentality. It was a shorter period of colonization (1911–1943) but very brutal. The dream was designed by the so-called liberal colonial state in 1911. The goal was to settle between 500,000 and 1 million Italians, especially the landless peasants from southern and central Italy. They were supposed to be settled mainly in eastern Libya, in the fertile Green Mountain area. The Italian settlers also thought that they would be welcomed by the local population, assuming the Libyans had resented Ottoman rule (1551–1911). That was a big miscalculation. The Libyan resistance to Italian occupation continued for a long time. When the fascists under Benito Mussolini arrived in 1922, they came with an even more vicious, more brutal plan—they decided to clear the land of Indigenous people. [...] The settlers believed that since Libya had been part of the Roman Empire they were simply reclaiming it so they could have a place of their own. The idea of reviving Roman Africa was a very integral part of the propaganda to justify colonization.

Regarding your announcement--thank you OP for starting up this project, I looked forward to it each week that it went on, and appreciated seeing everyone's reflections on the texts. I also liked the simple format and gradual pace. I hope everything works out well with your IRL needs and commitments. Take care!

My study response--As last week I found myself unable to answer the study questions quickly enough, I am going to go with a bit more of a free-form response this time so I don't end up taking too long to participate. And since I barely participated last thread, I'm just going to make my reply this time be about the text as a whole.

If anyone sees errors in my response, please let me know. I'm not trying to write authoritatively but rather to check my understanding and see whether I can summarize a few of the major points.

Thanks again OP, I'm glad you started this study group.

Watch the 2016 film "Donbass" by Anne-Laure Bonnel, to see the things people are referring to about the violence there over the past several years. Warning that if you look into what was going on in Donbass during those years, you are going to see a lot of footage of people dead/dying in the street with their limbs blown off. This film shows a bit less of that than others do.

Also here is a clip from the documentary, with footage of the 2014 burning of the trade union building in Odessa, where Ukranian nationalists burned the building down and beat and shot the people who jumped out of the windows to avoid burning. The people in the building were Russian speakers who were protesting a ban on Russian language, and took refuge in the trade union building when the right-wing nationalists showed up. The person being interviewed is a former Ukranian soldier from Donestk, who left the military because he didn't want to join in the violence enacted on the region. Warning that you will briefly see bodies of people who burned to death.

Reminds me of this Aime Cesaire quote: 

[C]olonization works to decivilize the colonizer [...] each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; [...] a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "c---" of India, and the "n---" of Africa.

[...] [T]hrough the mouths of all those who considered and consider it lawful to apply to non-European peoples "a kind of expropriation for public purposes" for the benefit of nations that were stronger and better equipped, it was already Hitler speaking!