this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
115 points (100.0% liked)
chapotraphouse
13538 readers
777 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Liberalism existed when all these things happened and what did it do besides feebly step aside for big business interests? At some point you have to realize the ideology is genocide all the way to its core. Liberalism IS Capitalism.
If you fear that communists are coming for you, then you need to ask yourself if your wages are worth it to sell the rest of humanity to the machine. The clock is ticking and climate change is not patient anymore.
Wait, really? There were that many Christians in the DPRK before the US led genocide? I know the United States intentionally killed 20% of the population and bombed the second most industrialized country in East Asia until there were no buildings taller than one level; but I didn't realize missionaries were that successful.
Good post BTW
There were and are churches there (with the pause for being bombed to rubble by USA) but they weren't at any point even close to being "christian nation", let alone "one of the most christian nations". There were below 10% of christians in Korea around 1950, and the % in DPRK is even less now, it was below 2% at 2005. Even occupied part of Korea, where there is some 30% christians now is nowhere near to be called "christian nation".
EDIT: there are 5 churches in Pyongyang officially, number similar to large village or small town in let's say Poland.
I think at its peak Pyongyang was 1/6th Christian. Which isn't a big deal for Euros but in East Asia the missionaries were salivating at those numbers. It was considered a huge success and both sides leveraged that narrative to cast Christians as either oppressed by the evil soviets or bombed to oblivion by their own bretheren.
Kim Il-Sung himself grew up Presbyterian and dedicated a rebuilt church to his mother after the war. Christianity in Japanese-occupied Korea was actually organized against the empire and was known for sprouting anti-authoritarian movements.
Christian news sources claim there were 3000 churches in North Korea before 1945-1953 (the end dates conveniently change depending on who you ask, but they overlap with wars which tend to be accompanied by human migrations). Pyongyang was supposedly called the "Jerusalem of the East" by contemporaries. All sources agree that after the Korean War there were no churches in the North.
Kim Il-Sung ordered some to be rebuilt, but churches with overt American influence were not allowed to take root. His personal statement on the fall of Christianity in the North was that the people couldn't bear seeing the atrocities committed by fellow Christians. I think it's something in the middle where American missionaries had an incentive to route their flocks to the south to support their fellow Americans, and the believers themselves were simply escaping the egregious American bombing campaigns. The rest is embellishment.
Despite people saying you can't be Christian in North Korea, there are pictures of the churches online. You can go to them. There's a seminary even. So it calls into question the idea of state repression in its entirety because you can refute it with the simple facts in front of your face.
Those are even really pretty architectural designs; no overwrought gaudy stained glass portraits; no crumbling, moldering brickwork; it's not a fuckin concrete-and-glass megachurch like what Osteen and his ilk would build... This is genuinely lovely and I ain't been an Abrahamic in nearly 2 decades now