“thanks for the brutal military dictatorship”
“It killed a lot of communists, gave us diplomatic cover to kill anyone we hated under the guise of them being ‘communists’, and helped us take over”
“We were really worried that we would get what was coming to us after the Japanese lost the war, you see, so you can imagine our relief when you came in and helped us maintain our personal power.”
revolting as it may be, it doesn’t get more honest than that
american propaganda truly is a beast of a machine when you can somehow convince a group of people in a country to enthrone the instigators of the Korean war (ie. by dividing up the peninsula and installing a dictator to operate massacres to its citizens in the name of “anti communism”) as saviours.
Even worse is those people were all Japanese collaborators during WWII. Kim Il-sung wanted them tried for war crimes. The US swooped in and gave them protection, which is fitting because they proved to be reliable snitches/kapos.
i mean the guys in office in quisling korea are the colonized bourgeoisie, they do benefit from this relations. The us provides “security” (aka secures the position of power of this colonized bourgeoisie), the quislings provide strategic resources (in this case manpower, electronics and a forward base).
i hear they work 70 hour weeks over there
jesus christ this is embarrassing and i am not even korean
Deeply unserious country
The most cuck of cuck moves.
Breaking: US announces “primae noctis tariffs” on South Korea
Already the case around US military bases
South Korea officially announces they will indeed pay the tariffs imposed by the US in service of its great debt
Douglas MacArthur still won’t love you, dude. Time to give up and move on.
RoK is a good lapdog of the USAno more half measures walter
Daehan Mingcuck
See this type of mentality is why I am not that optimistic about China’s chances of peeling countries away for a big united front against the US on tariffs. We are getting the bloc situation or worse out of these tariffs.
You have the dogs like occupied Korea and probably Japan and a few others who would never turn on their master. You have the fellow white countries that would never sell out white supremacy and their centuries of European colonialism to a communist non-white power (China) in places like Europe, Australia, etc. These disciplined liberals who have shown with Ukraine they’re willing to commit economic suicide to defend liberal capitalism. And you have compradors and wanna-be honorary whites. And you have the schemers and fence-straddlers who are in an abusive relationship with the world hegemon and are afraid to leave it just yet because it’s still so strong and they just fear the world as they think it would be according to the abuser (US) if China rises and would prefer to maintain the status quo if forced to choose, at best to play China and the US off each other for benefits without siding with either which doesn’t help China’s cause.
Now occupied Korea is exceptionally bad in this degree I admit but the more the wind blows in the direction of countries bowing to US tariffs and China being isolated and alone the more countries shy away from joining them and join the pack and the path of what looks like least resistance. As after all though China or Russia can stand up to the US and live, most countries out there aren’t big enough, nor economically strong enough, nor self-sufficient enough, nor nuclear powers or strong enough to resist US military or non-military economic coercion and battering.
Many countries are now presented with a choice “let China rise to a great power and diminish influence of the US: yes/no” and for many who believe they can play China and the US off each other they don’t want to diminish US influence and they certainly don’t want to end up locked into a trading bloc with China and locked out of the west which is the basis of Trump’s threat. That either you throw a stab into China with us, don’t even have to join our bloc, just reduce trade a bit and agree to do more trade with us or you get locked into a room (trading bloc) with China and locked out of the west and that’s alarming to many countries. And the US will tailor their pressure to each country to reel them in while getting maximum extortion benefits up to the point where they might break off and go with China. And I don’t think this will be a sudden demand, it won’t be “decouple with China next year”, it’ll be things like within 18 months you have to have decreased reliance on China by x amount and increased reliance on the US/NATO bloc by x amount and then by 3 years that rises to amount x for both of those.
Now China is pushing back, they’re threatening retaliation against countries that go along with that but it doesn’t help them a lot except with countries who are very deeply economic intertwined with them as those straddling the fence will look at pressure like that with alarm, they will conclude the US was right, that China will use economic pressure to get their way with them regularly and be more inclined to join with the US in its gradualist demands rather than risk a sudden break which is what joining with China represents. This is a very tricky needle to thread and I hope China finds a way but it feels like the deck is somewhat stacked and it’s going to be a matter of time and struggle rather than any master-strokes China can pull off to get the rest of the world on their side or to force the US to back down.
It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma, yes it would be best for all countries if they all stood together against the US on tariffs, it would force the US to back down. BUT because the US can single out countries, can in our prisoner’s dilemma slap them with lesser charges (in this case sanctions) on another crime which it says it will waive if they cooperate there is this fear to break ranks and once people start cooperating everyone rushes to get the plea deal leaving only the hold-outs to then get hit with the full charges.
Now my hope is China’s trade with the US is strong enough, important enough, vital enough that the bourgeoisie force Trump to drop sanctions on China to a level that’s manageable like 25-40% (it’s not going to zero or 10%, Biden alone slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese electric cars, this is a bipartisan project) and that results in a big obvious defeat for the US just like Ukraine. But I won’t underestimate the US, they have a lot of strength, a lot of built up capital, a lot of levers to pull, a lot of leverage from their NSA spying and their Epstein blackmail rings and so on.
If the dogs chose their master, then they’ll find themselves in the same pit. The Triad may inflict a lot of pain in the world on its way out, but it’s still on its way out.
It’s a matter of collapsing in a Suez crisis moment within the next 10 years or fighting on as a credible if declining power that can really mess things up for decades more to come. I’d prefer the former but the latter seems increasingly likely.
This is why I think you’re wrong
US still has the high ground. The commanding heights of international finance. They have a lot of these nations in debt, and they play dirty. They can with sanctions levers crush a country economically by forcing others to not do business with it (and countries know this and this is part of the locking you in a room with China threat). China isn’t going to coup these nations and install a corrupt comprador with military officers that trained in China who they’ve ideologically adjusted and spied on and know who among them will listen to their plea and not report it but the US might and can and has established methods for doing so.
I look at it from a view of human relations as well, the classic case of the abuser and the hostage victim who sticks with them because change is scary and because the abuser has convinced the hostage victim that they’re not strong, that they can’t survive without them and that those trying to help them are actually going to hurt them. The US offers a gradual choice, nothing sharp, just obey a little bit, then a little more, then a little more as they reel you in. With China you have to make the sharp break, you risk painting a big target on your back and being one of only a few who does so and drawing the full might of the empire to repeatedly punch you in the face while others look on. You don’t know how it will all shake out, the prudent, risk averse thing is to take the obeying a little bit choice, is to think you can take that and create wiggle room and strategize and see how things shake out but when everyone else takes the same deal they find themselves in the same place of oh shit no one else small stood up to them we can’t stand up to them at the next demand because again we don’t know if we’ll get repeatedly beat on by this violent, deranged empire using military and economic means. So it’s a kind of ratchet effect. And what’s especially clever about this is they use Trump, a man the US propaganda apparatus casts as an aberration to do this. Many nations will foolishly think that they should make a deal now, give a little and that in 4 years there will be a more reasonable “normal” US president who will reverse this, thus it appears even more wise to capitulate a little now because you believe this is just a passing storm instead of understanding this is bi-partisan consensus and a Democrat in the white house in 2029 won’t roll this back but iterate on it.
And if China is forced into a position of sanctioning/retaliating against dozens and dozens of countries who all take the same deal from the US it acts as a lever pushing those nations further away from China while the US continues to reel them in. It only works if most nations believe China’s threat and find it more credible and fearsome than the US threat. If a large group of nations just accepts it, it further pushes the US point that China wants control over your nation, will not allow you to take actions negatively affecting it, acts only in dangerous self-interest and that it’s better to stick with the trusted abuser you know (USA) than go with China who all US propaganda says is so horrible after all and besides who is after all a communist nation which is naturally scary to all capitalist nations. If they truly believe in the multi-polarity project they might better understand that standing now is for themselves but how many do is the question.
So it’s a calculus that has a risk of being decided based on propaganda assumptions carefully seeded by the US.
I think it’ll be interesting to see who the next Pope is, I think there’s a good chance regardless of any beating on the drums of helping the poor how much that person pushes (which I think was what Francis was after more than any reformism to the way the church views women’s/gay rights) the reactionary culture war, pushes anti-LGBTQ+, pushes anti-trans, pushes “traditional” roles of the sexes with women relegated to an inferior place. Those kinds of things play very well in places like Africa and Latin America where a lot of that red in the top map is and can be used to stir up anti-China sentiment on the basis of casting China as an enemy of traditional values. Because that’s the shift US propaganda outlets themselves have been making under Trump, from trying to portray the US as a beacon of progressive rights to moving to “trad” much in the vein of how Russia pushes its own appeal to reactionaries internationally. This is to say nothing of just having the next pope come out and call China an enemy of Christianity and urge all Christians and believers world-wide to unite against the “atheist communist dictatorship” while playing up Tibet, Xinjiang, etc and insisting that China intends to force your country to allow gay marriage and so on and so forth and use the retaliation China does against countries who agree to US exclusion of China as proof they’re not really for a multi-polar world but for controlling you and that if you’re going to be controlled it should be by a “trad” country like the US who will help you fight the scourge of these scapegoated sexual minorities, of feminists, etc. Is anti-colonialist sentiment strong enough to overcome this? I’m not optimistic in Latin America, in Africa I don’t know.
To be clear there are a lot of places this can go wrong but there are a lot of ways it can go at least partially right for the US and end up with cold war 2.0 bloc situation.
