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Wiki

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As revolutionaries, we don’t have the right to say we are tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us.

— Thomas Sankara

Automod Index

Our automod has a list of preprogrammed responses which work in tandem with this wiki. You can find a full index of automod responses here

Subreddit Rules

We have an extensive wiki to explain each one of our rules. Please visit it here

Education

These articles seek to explain various fundamental Communist concepts. However, these are often oversimplistic and sometimes reductive and they are no substitute for reading actual theory. Please see the Study Guide for details.

Primers:

Praxis

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

— Karl Marx. (1845). Theses On Feuerbach

Debunking

These articles aim to dispel common myths and misconceptions about a variety of topics.

USSR

PRC

Cuba

DPRK

Logical Fallacies

Israel

Profiles

Dunking

Naming and Shaming

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA)

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Hello Lemmygrad (lemmygrad.ml)
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Hello from r/TheDeprogram over on Reddit. A comrade reached out asking us to also create the community on Lemmy, so here it is.

I'm not really sure what to do with community alongside the subreddit, open to ideas!

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Shit trots say. (lemmygrad.ml)
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Modded Minecraft Java 1.21.5 server, at thecomm.apexmc.co. discord.gg/89UuZtZEpx to get the mods installed. Supports cracked clients and has instructions. Not my own server

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r/TheDeprogram Vaush (lemmygrad.ml)
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Vaush Facts

This page is still a work in progress. This means some information may be incomplete, or some links may be broken.

Fact 1. Vaush claimed Marx and Lenin would have voted for Biden.

Fact 2. Vaush clams that Marxism is an ‘extension of liberalism’.

Fact 3. Vaush refers to himself as a liberal.

Fact 4. Vaush (a cis man) called the non-binary lefty Youtuber ThoughtSlime ‘fragile’ and ‘dumb’ for his opinion on gender abolition.

Fact 5. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush stated “there’s a difference between exploring child sexuality and sexualising children” then went on to ‘joke’ about owning CP. link

Fact 6. Vaush has engaged in forms of Holocaust denial, using common nazi dogwhistles and believes the numbers are inflated as propaganda.

Fact 7. Vaush (a cis man) claims “Trans people do not have a better understanding of trans-ness..."

Fact 8. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush said: “If you are not paying for child pornography there is no argument in favour of morally condeming people who view it.

Fact 9. Vaush said Black people trying to preserve their culture (that was systematically eradicated) is “exactly the same as white nationalism”.

Fact 10. Vaush argued passionately against socialists demanding a $25/hour minimum wage.

Fact 11. Vaush uses the n-bomb unironically for some fucking reason.

Fact 12. [CW: sexual harassment] Vaush is a self-confessed sexual harasser. link Despite this ‘apology’ he went on to ‘joke’ about scaring his victim into shutting up link He said he had ‘done nothing to feel remorseful for’ link and ‘nothing to apologise over’ link. In fact, his own sysadmin suggested he change his handle link to hide from sexual harassment allegations.

Fact 13. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush appears to have a pre-occupation with paedophilia. He:

Asked if anyone had ever fucked a minor as an adult.

Replied with “unironically hot.”

Asked someone “what did pedos ever do to you?

Refered to ‘Salem Pedophile trials..

Joined in this conversation about child-sex bots.

Fact 14. [CW: pedophilia] Vaush has defended the consumption of child pornogrpahy because ‘there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’. link This paints a deeply troubling picture when added to his history of sexually innapropriate behaviour (see Vaush Fact 8), his sharing of drawn CP on Twitter (see Vaush Fact 21) , his claim that under socialism the age of consent "should be lowered" link and this exchange on Discord. link

Fact 15. Vaush admits to being an informant when he lived in Santa Monica, California. He admits to revealing activist identities to the FBI.

Fact 16. Vaush is explicitly anti left-unity: “God, I fucking hate leftists. There is no left unity with me."

Fact 17. Vaush had a meltdown when someone in his chat joked that he couldn’t get laid, and responded with ““Do you have any idea who the fuck you’re talking to? When I got off Tinder because of the fucking quarantine, Tacoma wept. Even ignoring the fact that I have a girlfriend, even if we’re just talking like randos, I’m two hours away right now from being inside someone else. I have two skills -it’s non-monogamy and speaking publicly, okay? Do some fucking research!”.”

Fact 18. [CW: pedophilia] An ‘old close friend’ of Vaush has alleged that Vaush once admitted to viewing images of child pornography. link

Fact 19. Vaush unironically endorsed Keynesian economics, stating “I feel neo-Keynesian economists have the answer.”

Fact 20. Vaush called the LGBT community ‘cancerous as fuck.’ because there’s a “ton of mental illness” and said they should be “excised from the left.” He also called them “less than human” and “fucking disgusting”.

Fact 21. Vaush said that a “large portion of the left is predicated on shared mental illness.” He then doubled down in a future video.

Fact 22. [CW: pedophilia] I’m not going to link to it for obvious reasons, but here’s Vaush admitting to ownership of a Twitter account that shares drawn child pornography. link

Fact 23. Vaush claimed that he was taken out of context when he called trans people 'mentally ill', then doubled down and did it again.

Fact 24. Vaush posted a meme saying that socialism must be ‘balanced with minority rights’, a clear nod to class reductionists.

Fact 25. ContraPoints defended Buck Angel’s transphobia. Vaush called trans people who were critical of this "worthless, mentally ill, basement dweller fucking queer people with absolutely nothing to offer the world" and "degenerates sucking off the back of society like a leech".

Fact 26. Vaush told his followers to vote for Joe Biden while saying of ‘tankies’ (a term used to refer to all Marxist-Leninists by his followers): “Mock them, socially ostracise them, kick them out of your communities. What sort of leftist advocates voting for liberals while ostracising communists?

Fact 27. Vaush freely admits to calling black and trans people ‘subhuman’.

Fact 28. In response to a Tweet saying the left ‘should stand up for the weak and vulnerable’ Vaush replied “Yeah, enjoy your Left, built on weakness and a collective inability to criticise one another. I’ll be over here building my left, which isn’t full of mentally ill crybabies desperately carving out safe spaces and whining about criticism. Debate it if you want, elsewise fuck off”

Fact 29. Vaush called trans people ‘removed’ for taking offence when misgendered“

Fact 30. Vaush Tweeted a literal Nazi meme – glorifying the Nazi-allied Finland for fighting against the USSR in WWII.

Fact 31. Vaush defended saying “fuck trans people” by claiming he has a ‘6-figure’ income for some reason.

Fact 32. Vaush called the Marxist, Iraqi YouTuber Hakim a ‘pseudo-fascist’ and a ‘cancer on online discourse’ because he said Biden will be worse on foreign policy than Trump. Vaush then had a ‘debate’ with Hakim where he politely agreed with everything Hakim said. Following that debate (mere moments after Hakim had left) Vaush said "a lot of tankies are aesthetically and functionally indistinguishable from neo-Nazis".

Fact 33. Responding to Hakim's video on George Orwell, Vaush defends Orwell for being a government informant, calls the USSR fascist, implies Stalinists are worse than Nazis, claims the USSR was allied with the Nazis, says that Hakim (an Iraqi) should have been abducted by the Americans at the start of the Iraq war and forcibly indoctrinated in US propaganda for 20 years, and more. (Full Thread)

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Yeonmi Park, known as a "celebrity defector", is one of the most well-known defectors from the DPRK. By presenting some of the most extreme and absurd testimonies, she has been able to build a cult following and a very lucrative career as the posterchild for anti-Communism.

She is cited more than any other defector because she says exactly what anti-Communists want to hear about a closed-off, Communist country. Today, she is a culture warrior who weaponizes her background for personal gain.

An emblematic example of this in action from The Telegraph, a right-wing British media network:

However, since relocating to America, and earning a degree from Columbia University, she has sounded the alarm over "cancel culture" and political influences on the country's education system...

In an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Park said she was shocked by the political ideology promoted by professors and fellow students at the Ivy League university.

She claimed that while studying for a human rights degree, she was taught that Jane Austen "promoted white supremacy", maths was "racist" and debate over trans issues were silenced...

Ms Park was particularly critical of the way in which discussions around sex and gender were policed on campus, calling it "crazier than North Korea".

— Rozina Sabur. (2023). 'Woke' US schools scarier than North Korea, says defector

Accustomed to privilege

Yeonmi Park has been called the Paris Hilton of North Korea, and lived a life of privilege and luxury among the upper echelon of society in the DPRK before leaving to begin her career as a celebrity defector in the West.

Buried in the shows archives [(“Now On My Way To Meet You”)] are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience.

In one episode in early 2013 she appears with her mother. Family photographs are flashed on the screen and Park jokes, “That’s my Mum there. She’s beautiful right? To be honest, I’m not the Paris Hilton. My mum is the real Paris Hilton.”

Park then goes on to point out the top and chequered pants her mother is wearing “were all imported from Japan” and adds, “My mum even carried around a Chanel bag in North Korea,” to which the host responds incredulously, “There are Chanel bags in North Korea?” Park tells him there are and he then asks another woman if she’d classify Park’s family as “rich.” The woman answers, “Yes, that’s right.”

Park told us in her interview her father was a member of the Workers’ party, as were all the men in her family, and that she expected to study medicine at university and marry a man of the same ilk or higher.

— Mary Ann Jolley. (2014). The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park

Inconsistencies

Citing her experiences as a student at Columbia University, Park styles herself as “the enemy of the woke,” warning that America is on the verge of liberal dictatorship and that “cancel culture” at U.S. colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads. It’s the theme of her new book, “While Time Remains,” published in February by a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. As of early July, the book, which features a foreword from Canadian professor and conservative lifestyle guru Jordan Peterson, had sold at least 35,000 copies, according to sales-tracking service NPD BookScan.

...But while Park’s moral authority as political pundit rests on her experience as a refugee from an authoritarian pariah state, she has been dogged for years by accusations that some of her more lurid tales of state vengeance and extreme societal decay don’t add up.

Scholars on North Korea who are skeptical of Park say she’s symptomatic of a booming market for horror stories from the cloistered nation that they believe encourages some “celebrity” defectors to spin increasingly outlandish claims.

...Experts on North Korea took note of the strikingly different bio that emerged when Park moved from reality TV to the international human rights conference circuit. Her “Paris Hilton” character was nowhere in this story. Park claimed that she never encountered eggs or indoor toilets until she left North Korea, that she resorted to eating grass and dragonflies to survive.

“She once presented herself as a top 1 percent North Korea elite, so she didn’t see any hunger or malnutrition when she was living there,” Song said. “She totally flipped the narrative when she was on to these conferences.”

Christine Hong, a literature professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a board member at the Korea Policy Institute who has studied defector narratives, noted that Park’s new account didn’t even jibe with her mother’s stories of ready access to food and luxuries. (In one “Now On My Way to Meet You” appearance, the mother explained that Park couldn’t comprehend that her less privileged co-stars came from the same country that she did.)

“But no one seems to care,” Hong told The Post. “And the reason that no one seems to care is that, when it comes to North Korea, it’s basically an informational free-for-all.”

...Cracks in Park’s story had already emerged even before her publishing debut. Mary Ann Jolley, a journalist who interviewed Park for an Australian documentary in 2014, pointed out multiple other inconsistencies in a story for the Diplomat, a news site focused on East Asia.

For example, Park claimed to have seen a friend’s mother executed in a stadium for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie. (In other accounts, it was a South Korean DVD.) But other defectors from Hyesan told Jolley that executions were never carried out in the stadium, and that no executions happened in the city during the time period she described.

The largest discrepancy highlighted by Jolley concerned the family’s departure from North Korea. In her initial accounts, Park claimed that she left the country with both of her parents, helped by Chinese contacts her father met while smuggling.

“There were cars to get us because of the connections with Chinese people, and then we went to China directly,” Park said in a 2014 appearance two months before her viral speech.

Park presented a different story in her Ireland speech, saying that only she and her mother fled the country, and that they did so on foot, joined later by her father, who eventually died in China. In this version of the story, repeated in her memoir and in many subsequent interviews, Park’s mother was raped by a human trafficker, sacrificing herself to save Park from the man, and both women were sexually abused and trafficked in China for years before ultimately escaping.

...She told the New York Times that she makes $6,600 a month working for the young-conservatives group Turning Point USA.

— Will Sommer. (2023). A North Korean defector captivated U.S. media. Some question her story.

Park has also received support from the Atlas Network, a conservative organisation which has received funding from the US State Department and the United States Congress.

An even harsher critic of Park’s has been Michael Bassett, a North Korea analyst who spent several years stationed at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas for the U.S. military.

...he has called Park a liar and a “spinstress,” taking issue with her river anecdote and use of the word “holocaust” to describe the situation in the country. ...

He has also claimed that Park is being used to promote an agenda of sanctions against the country and economic liberalization by organizations such as Freedom Factory, a Seoul-based free market think tank where she is a media fellow.

“It sounds like she is being fed a narrative, it sounds like she is being told to perform,” Bassett said.

— John Power. (2014). North Korea: Defectors and Their Skeptics

Additional Resources

Video Essays:

Books, Articles, or Essays:

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r/TheDeprogram DPRK (lemmygrad.ml)
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DPRK

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is grossly misrepresented in Western media. To understand anything about the DPRK today, you have to first understand its history.

Japanese Occupation

Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, and the Korean people experienced harsh colonial rule. During World War II, many Koreans were conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army and forced to work in labour camps. The peninsula was under Japanese control until the end of World War II in 1945.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided by Western powers along the 38th parallel. With the support of the USSR, the North formed the Provisional People's Committee for North Korea, which was headed by Kim Il-sung, a popular, Communist, guerrilla leader who had fought against the Japanese in occupied China during the war. This committee acted as an interim government and a few years later was proclaimed as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

In the South, it was a different story: Seeing the popularity of Communism, the U.S. formed the U.S. Military Occupation and Establishment of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). They installed Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese as officials and advisors. Syngman Rhee was later installed as a fascist dictator to lend the state an air of legitimacy as a sovereign state.

As attempts to reunify the country failed, largely due to U.S. refusal to risk the whole peninsula becoming Communist, the DPRK invaded the South to liberate their fellow countrymen from the US occupation and reunify their nation.

The Legacy of the Korean War

It's hard to overstate the sheer destruction wrought upon the Korean peninsula by the U.S. Air Force (USAF). During the war, the US dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had dropped in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. This carpet bombing, which included 32,000 tons of napalm, often deliberately targeted civilian as well as military targets, devastating the country far beyond what was necessary to fight the war. Whole cities were destroyed, with many thousands of innocent civilians killed and many more left homeless and hungry.

USAF General Curtis LeMay in an 1988 interview with USAF Historians:

We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too...Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away [with nukes], no, we can't seem to stomach that.”

The USAF targeted dams and agricultural infrastructure. The destruction and ensuing floods threatened several million North Koreans with starvation; according to Historian Charles K. Armstrong, "only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine."

The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war's end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II...

Russian accusations of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets did not register with the Americans at all. But for the North Koreans, living in fear of B-29 attacks for nearly three years, including the possibility of atomic bombs, the American air war left a deep and lasting impression. The DPRK government never forgot the lesson of North Korea's vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again... The war against the United States, more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the war's end.

— Charles Armstrong. (2010). The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950-1960

In the eyes of North Koreans as well as some observers, the U.S.' deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure which resulted in the destruction of cities and high civilian death count, was a war crime and historian Bruce Cumings has likened the American bombing to genocide.

Out of the competing barrages of propaganda that have shrouded the 1950-53 Korean War, we are finally getting conclusive admissions that some of the worst atrocities, blamed at the time on the enemy, were in fact committed by our side - and we knew it...

The massacres of civilians during the Korean War are the most shocking to read about. The commission is working through no less than 1200 cases, including about 215 incidents in which US and allied air forces strafed groups of refugees and other civilians. The victims total 100,000, which the commission says is a conservative estimate.

One of the worst incidents preceded the Korean War, in 1948, when the new Syngman Rhee government installed in Seoul by the United States ordered its army to suppress a leftist revolt on Cheju Island. About 30,000 local people were gunned down.

By early 1950 Rhee had about 30,000 alleged communists in his jails, and had about 300,000 suspected sympathisers enrolled in an official "re-education" movement known as the Bodo League. When Kim Il-sung's communist army attacked from the North in June that year, retreating South Korean forces executed the prisoners, along with many Bodo League members...

The American commander-in-chief, Douglas MacArthur, got a report about the killings, but there is no evidence that he tried to halt them, or investigate, according to a search of US archives by an Associated Press team under the veteran correspondent Charles Hanley. The massacre was blamed on the communists.

— Hamish McDonald. (2008). South Korea owns up to brutal past

Defector Testimony

Defectors present biased or exaggerated testimonies to gain sympathy or support from foreign governments or organizations. The prospect of fame and fortune encourages some defectors to exaggerate their experiences or provide sensationalized accounts.

One of the most well-known defectors, [[r.TheDeprogram Yeonmi Park|Yeonmi Park]] regularly presents some of the most extreme and absurd testimonies; she has been able to build a cult following and a very lucrative career as the posterchild for anti-Communism.

The more bombastic the claims are, the better ammunition they are for Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) (e.g., Radio Free Asia) to use in their propaganda campaigns against Communism.

Of course, there are also defectors with less exciting claims, as well as those who even come to regret their decision to leave the DPRK, but Western media never amplifies their message to nearly the same degree.

Additional Resources

Video Essays:

Books, Articles, or Essays:

Podcasts:

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I have screenshotted all the answers I could but am having trouble posting them. They are still up as of time of writing.

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Many thanks to the person who shared that you can ask your local Chinese embassy for a copy of „The Governance Of China“.

I reached out to the Chinese embassy in Vienna and got not only a super friendly response, but also an invite to the embassy + 6 copies of the German translation (2x II, III, IV)!

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Elon's Plan For Europe (www.youtube.com)
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