SEOUL, South Korea - Kim Jong Il, North Korea's mercurial and enigmatic leader, has died. He was 69.

Kim's death was announced Monday by the state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media. The leader, reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine, was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

He has already designated his son, Kim Jong-un, as his heir apparent. The Dear Leader took over the reigns in North Korea sometime between 1992 and 1994 after the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, who had ruled the country for 46 years.

The Kims seem poised to extend their more than 60-year dictatorial dynasty, but North Korean politics has long been shrouded in misinformation and mystery to the rest of the world. It is worth noting that many of the conditions that sparked the recent uprisings in the Mideast, like mass poverty and rampant corruption, exist in North Korea. That said, dissent is apparently crushed so thoroughly, it is hard to imagine any real democratic reforms in the The Democratic People's Republic of Korea anytime soon.

christmas_cheer posted:
gotta be quicker if you wanna post threads with the pros

posting from the future when no one replied to ur awful 'voice of reason' troll thread

DRUXXX posted:

christmas_cheer posted:
gotta be quicker if you wanna post threads with the pros

posting from the future when no one replied to ur awful 'voice of reason' troll thread

what, are you blaming me for that? and babyfinland upvoted you. well it wouldn't be the first time. i have been blamed for just about any unexplained behavior that happened in the history of LF, no matter how uncharacteristic it may be, such is the status of my legend.

anyway if i have an active account you can safely assume i am posting only under that account. is it really so implausible to you that someone, somewhere might think you guys are a bit nutty.

aerdil posted:

guidoanselmi posted:

was only only a few days off. hmm.

if this happens im joining the koreans. gonna be a big wig in occupied communist san francisco.

g'luck. i hear this guy wants his job back:

Michael Parenti: Must we adore Vaclav Havel?

From Blackshirts and Reds (1997):

Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? No figure among the capitalist restorationists in the East has won more adulation from U.S. officials, media pundits, and academics than Vaclav Havel, a playwright who became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic. The many left-leaning people who also admire Havel seem to have overlooked some things about him: his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and unrestrained free-market capitalism.

Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy and fervently anticommunist family, Havel denounced democracy’s “cult of objectivity and statistical average” and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis. He called for a new breed of political leader who would rely less on “rational, cognitive thinking,” show “humility in the face of the mysterious order of the Being,” and “trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world.” Apparently, this new breed of leader would be a superior elitist cogitator, not unlike Plato’s philosopher, endowed with a “sense of transcendental responsibility” and “archetypal wisdom.” Havel never explained how this transcendent archetypal wisdom would translate into actual policy decisions, and for whose benefit at whose expense. Havel called for efforts to preserve the Christian family in the Christian nation.

Presenting himself as a man of peace and stating that he would never sell arms to oppressive regimes, he sold weapons to the Philippines and the fascist regime in Thailand. In June 1994, General Pinochet, the man who butchered Chilean democracy, was reported to be arms shopping in Czechoslovakia - with no audible objections from Havel. Havel joined wholeheartedly in George Bush’s Gulf War, an enterprise that killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. In 1991, along with other astern European pro-capitalist leaders, Havel voted with the United States to condemn human rights violations in Cuba. But he has never uttered a word of condemnation of rights violations in El Salvador, Columbia, Indonesia, or any other U.S. client state.

In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market “reforms.” That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment. He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew, the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law. in 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and former communists from employment in public agencies.

The propagation of anticommunism has remained a top priority for Havel. He led “a frantic international campaign” to keep in operation two U.S.-financed, cold war radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, so they could continue saturating Eastern Europe with their anticommunist propaganda. Under Havel’s government, a law was passed making it a crime to propagate national, religious, and CLASS hatred. In effect, criticisms of big moneyed interests were now illegal, being unjustifiably lumped with ethnic and religious bigotry. Havel’s government warned labor unions not to involve themselves in politics. Some militant unions had their property taken from them and handed over to compliant company unions.

In 1995, Havel announced that the ‘revolution’ against communism would not be complete until everything was privatized. Havel’s government liquidated the properties of the Socialist Union of Youth - which included camp sites, recreation halls, and cultural and scientific facilities for children - putting the properties under the management of five joint stock companies, at the expense of the youth who were left to roam the streets. Under Czech privatization and “restitution” programs, factories, shops, estates, homes, and much of the public land was sold at bargain prices to foreign and domestic capitalists.

In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution. Havel himself took personal ownership of public properties that had belonged to his family forty years before. While presenting himself as a man dedicated to doing good for others, he did well for himself.

For all these reasons some of us do not have warm fuzzy feelings toward Vaclav Havel.

aerdil posted:
that video is good evidence that liberals are reactionary scum

the desire for liberation can only be realized iniitally as a reaction to stimuli. scum with a true liberal is never truly a pristine amalgamation; the difference between the prime fasciarch and the prime totalitarch is the totalitarian is still not exempt he's own governance.