North Korea carries out public executions on river banks and at school grounds and marketplaces for charges such as stealing copper from factory machines, distributing media from South Korea and prostitution, a report issued on Wednesday said.
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It’s a really fun drinking game how fast you can trace these articles back to the US government and the CIA.
It took only two steps this time!
And the other sponsor is the National Democratic Institute, which was actively involved in funding fascist and anti-socialist coups in Venezuela, Chile, Nicaragua and more. Oh, and it’s also funded by the NED and the US government.
The TJWG’s executive director is also a member and close associate of the National Endowment for Democracy. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4974ZxosXEc)
So literally all of their funding comes from the CIA/US government.
Yeah i saw that. And i also understand the structural anticommunist perspective the article was written in (“west good, east bad”), for instance if US police murders people people don’t complain that much about human rights.
However! I found this article to be interesting because south korean pop culture is also seen as a political threat for north korea and i think this is just hilarious. North korea and similar countries have no strong queer community, because this is against the gender roles the communist government desires for its population.
True is however also that this article does not contain this queer perspective that much, but i remembered this context from other articles about north korea and such.
If you truly believe there’s something interesting to get from here post it in another community, for example /c/shitliberalssay, but this is simply racist bullshit against an Asian country.
… Korean pop culture is not queer friendly at all, and the gender roles are very very classic in K-pop.
but i have read that k-pop stars are considered to be not male enough?
example: https://studybreaks.com/thoughts/korea-flower-boy-breaks-masculinity/
https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/north-koreas-kim-jong-un-wants-to-ban-k-pop-music-calls-it-vicious-cancer-3838712.html
Do you seriously believe that the DPRK is limiting what haircuts people can have?
As for crackdowns on South Korean culture, all sites seem to lead to this article by Daily NK, whose evidence is a piece of paper supposedly smuggled out of the DPRK. Thankfully, they’ve provided us a look at all 3 pixels of the paper. I guess with all of that NED funding they couldn’t afford a scanner or good camera.
I do seriously believe that many communist countries have expectations towards men to fullfill male steretypes, such as “being strong” and such things. For me it is obvious that all societies have a problem with toxic masculinity and structural sexism. One example is that most government people in both communist and capitalistic societies are male-dominated. Just because you have a socialist country which reduces some forms of patriarchy (for instance badly paid care work), it doesn’t mean it is completely gone. So in essence, the lack of queerfeminist theory is a big red flag which makes the article i linked above believable.
Of course communist countries will also have problems with sexism and partriarchy to some degree, no one here has said otherwise. But to jump from that to thinking that they’ll micromanage their populace to such a degree as mandating haircuts and that the people will simply shut up and take something like that is a stretch.
You’re orientalizing this society and using feminism as an excuse to do so. You can engage in feminist critiques of the DPRK as much as you please, but don’t do so in such a way that reinforces the imperialist understanding of the DPRK. That’s a disservice to non-Western feminism.
I have probably trust issues because my female/trans leftwing environment (people i follow on twitter for instance) usually complain loudly that many/most communist/leftwing men don’t know much about queerfeminist theory and that THEY as women, trans or non-binary people have to explain queerfeminist/trans inclusive theory towards cisgender male people over and over again, because the male people are not very interested in reading in that theory area.
It is true that i don’t understand much abouyt non-western feminism but in the communist areas here on lemmy or lemmygrad or somewhere, i have never read a comment criticizing the lack of female/trans people in high positions of power in communist societies. Or at all talking about that.
So basically: given that china and north korea have much control over how their society works, i kind of expect that they use that to bring female/trans people (or for instance people of color) into positions of power. So basically, i trust female/trans people more in working towards queerfeminist politics as someone like Kim Jong Un. And because i don’t see many female/trans people in those governments (i think they would have said that?), i don’t have much hope.
Non binary communist person from a third world country here. I don’t have a degree on gender studies but I have read a couple of books on feminism plus I have friends AFK that are gay/lesbian/trans/etc, therefore I have had a plethora of conversations regarding these topics.
I don’t think it’s fair to criticize these countries for not having that many queer people in positions of power, you need to understand that they are countries with deep scars due to imperialist invasions that just now are starting to see what one could say is a more or less decent life, and in all those years when these countries where recovering from these scars, queer people are the ones who suffered the most. Their societies, just like pretty much any society in the world after colonization, have/had to different degrees patriarchal frameworks that enabled men to go higher in any social strata, that means anything non male will have a hard time getting anywhere, which means less non male professionals. This is true for every country in the world, not only communists ones. In my country there are barely any laws that try to prevent women from being forced on housekeeping jobs, either because they have to do it for their families or because employers only hire male people. Cut them some slack, it’s not as if there weren’t any queer movements in those countries, also, China for example has some pretty decent laws in women’s rights, but simply because it is not equal to any first world country doesn’t mean they’re hell, and trying to eradicate communism from those countries simply because of that will not help that fight, but will make it worse.
Nonbinary Marxist here — queerfeminist theory is not synonymous with ‘anything pro-LGBT’, but is a very specific outgrowth of idealist, liberal ideologies roughly related with postmarxist anti-Marxist ideas. Instead of analyzing the material, objective world, they proclaim a world of all equally as valid “experiences” that you are not allowed to question if you are not yourself part of the groups associated with them. They believe language policing and representation in media would solve the resentment of conservative people against LGBT people and women, instead of sexism and bigotry being a direct result of capitalist division tactics.
Queerfeminism is a liberal ideology that works with representation and appeasement politics and not on a revolutionary modus. Proletarian feminism is the way to go, and queer liberation can not come through ‘queerfeminism’ but instead through a workers’ revolution with the right programme.
and queerfeminist theory is not synonymous with being liberal, as for instance also (radical) communist/marxist/anarchist variants of that exist.
I agree that materialist analysis is necessary, but some parts of non-liberal/radical queerfeminism contain materialist analysis?
I disagree that workers revolution leads necessarily to queer liberation. For that to happen you need to include analyse for instance power structures and similar stuff. And this is part of the radical variants. So for instance: worker revolution can also lead to a society in which male workers decide everything and have much power.
A workers’ revolution will not succeed in liberating the working class and building a classless society anyway if it can’t even identify and fight capitalist division strategies in their own lines. Any communist party that’s successful necessarily unites the entire proletariat, and if they don’t, they’re not successful (for long). Of course a communist party needs to analyse everything correctly, and that includes things like queer issues, but that applies to all topics including others like national liberation or the women’s question. You don’t need a specific queerfeminist communist party as opposed to a normal communist party in order to solve LGBTQ issues. A good communist party has a correct program.
Queerfeminism itself is a very specific ideology that is decidedly liberal and idealistic. It’s like Marxism a certain school of thought, not a general set of values. Queer liberation plus feminism does not equal queerfeminism. It’s a term that means a specific ideology spearheaded among others by Judith Butler.
It’s true that communist spaces could do with having more queer feminist theory under their belts, I won’t deny that. Luckily, there exists communist feminist literature, so encouraging people to read that would do wonders. I try to recommend Caliban and the Witch as much as I can because of how it outlines the effects of early capital accumulation on the bodies of women. I know of Leslie Feiberg as well, though I’ve never read any of their work. There’s plenty out there if we look, and we should definitely look.
In fact, if you think it’s a problem, you should share texts or express your ideas to Lemmy and Lemmygrad. I’m sure people will appreciate it.
Even better, read some non-Western feminist texts and try to apply them to the DPRK in a constructive way. This means that you’ll need to have a better understanding of the DPRK, though. Just like truly understanding queer people’s problems involves stepping outside of the mainstream media’s views on queer people, the same is true for the DPRK. You’ll need to read Juche works, learn its history, read news straight from them, etc., and not be satisfied with what some reactionary news source has to say about them. Don’t toll the line of capital and imperialism, because giving the West more leniency on its attacks against the DPRK won’t do the people living there any good, including women and queer people.