Realistically, if the US had retaliated by shooting down North Korean aircraft or bombing some airfields, they knew that the DPRK could likely respond by obliterating Seoul in a matter of hours - with American forces just acting as a sacrificial roadblock. With so many US troops already committed to Vietnam and further engagement in Asia likely to be deeply unpopular at home, the only real card the USA could play to stop a wholesale invasion of RoK would be a nuclear strike - something incredibly risky.
People forget that in the aftermath of the Korean War, North Korea was actually the more advanced and prosperous of the two states. The South's recovery gradually turned into explosive economic growth in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s but things were a lot closer in the 60s and 70s.
With how piss poor & corrupt the RoK were before the economic boom, there were South Koreans actually defecting *North* because the Soviet Union was giving a LOT of financial support to North Korea.
But once the USSR collapsed and the stimulus stopped pouring through in the 90s, that's when NK was hit with massive famine, and their economy has been in absolute shambles since.
It's crazy how much Soviet support propped up some of these countries. I was in Cuba a decade ago and toured the nation museum. On one display there was a timeline of Cuban history calling out big milestones, talking about some of the big events and changes in Cuban history. It stopped in 1990 because after that Cuba went into a recession that it basically never recovered from (of course the embargo is a huge factor here, but the effects were minimized before the collapse of the USSR)
If you think that’s crazy, look into how much money the US was officially and via back channels poring into almost every “economic miracle” Asian country.
Especially Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
Soviet DFIs don’t hold a candle to the volume of American DFI lol
SK was also the government-of-the-month continually allying with the chaebols(like zaibatsu; corporate clans) to get them out of some economic, civil, or political hot mess and led to the six massive conglomerates that control the majority of the SK economy. "Death, taxes, and Samsung" is a phrase for a reason, they just don't add LG, hyundai, SK group, Kumho, or Hanjin.
Yeah, people don't realize Samsung alone is worth what, like 20% of the entire Korean GDP? By comparison Walmart is worth something like 5% of the US's GDP.
To be fair, anyone who makes tractors or excavators at some level makes tanks and/or tank parts. Like jeeps and cars, they use a lot of the same parts.
They also make fully automated friend or foe identifying machine gun sentry platforms.
[**for the past 20 years**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkAmpMy8liQ&t=4s)
Walmart is worth 547.52 billion and USA GDP is 25.44 trillion. 547.52/25, 440 is 2.1%. It was actually more than I thought.
Samsung is worth 398.35 billion and Korea GDP is projected to have 1.761 trillion GDP. 398.35/1, 761 is 22.6%.
If we combined Apple and Google we would have a market cap of 5.68 trillion. 5,680/25, 440 is 22.3%.
You can't really compare market cap and GDP. GDP is the total sales of all products and services of a country for an entire year. It's basically how much money a country makes in a year. Market Cap is the total value of a company as a whole, and is not a yearly thing.
A more comparable metric would be revenue and GDP
Walmart is worth 547.52 billion and USA GDP is 25.44 trillion. 547.52/25, 440 is 2.1%. It was actually more than I thought.
Samsung is worth 398.35 billion and Korea GDP is projected to have 1.761 trillion GDP. 398.35/1, 761 is 22.6%.
Cuba had to radically change their whole agricultural sector when all imports of fertilizer and machinery ended on a dime in 1991, but they *did* change up their ag, and now they should be a model for climate-sustainable agriculture everywhere in the world. In 2001 the US took farm supplies off their embargo, but imports/use of fertilizer hasn't increased since then. More local control over the land and agro-ecological practices have made Cuban farms more productive per acre than the big corporate farms in the rest of Latin America, and farmer median income is at or above the nationwide median income.
It's honestly an incredible success at a nationwide scale, when the same ideas haven't expanded beyond small boutique farms in the US. I'm starting a MA in this field and I'd love to just spend a year in Cuba studying how they made this transition and how the whole system works.
I think few of the Canadian agriculture schools have relationships with the university in Havana. If you can track down anyone at the university of Guelph they may be able to help you get access to data. (I'm assuming you're in the states and can't get permission to go study)
McGill (Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences) had Cuban agriculture field course for awhile (it was popular with Americans as it was the only way for them to legally visit Cuba at the time) but it looks like they don't have it anymore
[Cuban Agriculture: A Green and Red Revolution](https://www.choicesmagazine.org/2003-4/2003-4-01.pdf)
[Organic or starve: can Cuba's new farming model provide food security? (The Guardian)](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/28/organic-or-starve-can-cubas-new-farming-model-provide-food-security)
[Cuba’s Urban Farming Revolution: How to Create Self-Sufficient Cities](https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farming-revolution-how-to-create-self-sufficient-cities)
[The road to restoration: Cuba’s modern farming revolution (UN Environment Program)](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/road-restoration-cubas-modern-farming-revolution)
It's still a work in progress, a lot of work remains to undo a lot of past damage (both economic and environmental), like everywhere. But again, they're making this transition on a bigger scale than any other country I'm aware of, and that's really interesting to study - both successes and the problems that come up.
I should also mention that widespread urban farming is another part of it. It's common for people to have urban vegetable gardens or keep chickens/goats in cities. This was borne out of sheer necessity, but I think people in rich countries could benefit from growing some food themselves, rather than buying everything off a shelf with no knowledge of how it got there. I mean, I just saw a tiktok claiming clips of unripe fruit were fake factory-made fruit. It's not healthy to be that disconnected from the reality of your own food.
Not that I’m saying that you’re saying this should happen, but there is a reason we don’t generally allow livestock in cities. Livestock + close proximity to lots of people = many public health issues including disease and pandemics in the past.
Vegetables and fruit, yes i agree more people should be growing as much as they can wherever they are, but it gets more complicated when we start bringing livestock in to the equation.
> I just saw a tiktok claiming clips of unripe fruit were fake factory-made fruit.
I swear that people just say the stupidest/most inflammatory things possible just so it can get views. It's like those facebook ads where they say, "Only 1% of people can solve this!" but it's something super simple so it makes people feel smart.
?
“Farm yields are pathetically low, despite Cuba having possibly the richest soil of any tropical country in the world, said Pedro Sanchez, an agronomist at the University of Florida who was raised on a farm in Cuba and returns regularly. “They’re raising one tonne per acre of corn. It’s ridiculous,” he said.”
And these articles are all *before* that move to organic farming and the “agricultural revolution”, what’s the situation now, after it’s implementation?
It's crazy how some countries can survive being targeted by the US' wrath while others wither and die. Cuba has always fascinated me. I'm not educated enough to say if they deserved the treatment or not - on a "tiny opinion" scale, it does seem like nowadays it's more nobody wants to touch it as it's so politically damaging, rather than a real urge to keep them embargoed - but I love how they took basically being locked off from one of their closest possible trading partners, who happens to be the biggest economy in the world, and didn't completely crumble.
I "understand" that a capitalist system like the US will never let a communist state prosper, especially one so close to its borders, you can never let your competing system look anything but weak. It's just..eh. Just a shame is all.
Why does communism need support from capitalism to succeed. Also, why are you using example of Cuba. Shouldn't USSR and China be the more representative example. Cuba is definitely not a success story either.
Cuba's food production has steadily declined since 1980 and has fallen by 35% in just the last 5 years. Earlier this year they reached out to the UN food aid program for assistance.
There was a big decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a bit of a rebound afterwards.
I would take those reports with a heavy dose of salt. I can't speak for the entire island, but my family in Camaguey, Pinar del Rio, Oriente, and Havana all agree that stuff is very exaggerated or straight up fabricated by the government. Things are really bad right now and no one has enough food.
In the past you could get by if family on the outside was sending you money. Now even with money, there just isn't enough produce/bread/milk/meat to buy.
Not to mention that "productiveness" is just one factor... You can technically increase this, sure, but would it still be economical in the end? Balancing out all factors is key.
Hmmm ...
[BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845): "Cuba asks UN for help as food shortages worsen" February 2024
[Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-turns-world-food-programme-milk-supply-crisis-deepens-2024-03-04/): "Cuba turns to World Food Programme for milk supply as crisis deepens" March 2024
[DW](https://www.dw.com/en/cuba-seeks-un-food-aid-as-economic-crisis-deepens/a-68443716): "Cuba seeks UN food aid as economic crisis deepens" March 2024
[Miami Herald](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article286593100.html): "Cuba asks U.N. agency for milk amid food and oil shortages" March 2024
[The Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/01/opinion/cuba-crisis-hunger-economy/): "In Cuba, hunger and open desperation" April 2024
I could go on and on.
Keep in mind that the food and medicine aren't included in the embargo.
Also, Cuba receives the majority of its food aid from the UN World Food Programme, which over 50% of the funding comes from the U.S. alone while Cuba's "allies", China's and Russia's, contributions total less than 1% making the U.S. is the top food supplier of Cuba and it's fifth largest trading partner.
Yeah, they don't produce enough food domestically, they didn't before 1991, and they didn't before the 1959 revolution. It's an uphill battle, just like any other poor country that had a dictator 60 years ago. If you look a little farther down, I posted links about their long-term trend written across 20 years, rather than a bunch of newspaper articles written about events in spring 2024 alone.
It wasn't just Soviet support, it was a membership in an economic bloc with the Soviet Union at its core. When the Soviet Union liquidated itself for western investors that vanished. Energy resources especially became hard to come by as you now needed dollars to buy oil where the Soviets were giving you a sweet deal.
Cuba's economy is relatively high when compared to its capitalist Caribbean neighbors though. Like you can say "America is capitalist and it's more prosperous than Cuba" but 99% of the world's countries are capitalist and many of them are poorer than Cuba is.
And it’s under an embargo massively preventing trade with 90% of the world. The state department of the most powerful country to exist on earth is specifically trying to “make the economy bleed” to force or inspire regime change. And yet they are still much better off in some key metrics compared to all their Caribbean neighbors.
I see this claim a lot but it doesn’t seem to hold water.
The eu is cubas largest trading partner and its largest foreign investor. Also most of the largest country’s all have business ties with Cuba (Russian, china, India, Japan, Brazil, Germany, etc). The embargo claims don’t really seem to hold up.
Cuba is also significantly larger than every other Caribbean neighbor. Almost all of them are tiny populations and resource poor and have nothing but tourism to base an economy on.
Jamaica and the Dominican Republic outdo Cuba even despite being significantly smaller.
My point is, comparing Cuba to small island nations with little to no economic opportunity is not the great point in your argument you think it is.
They're also describing Cuba and North Korea being propped up by the Soviet Union.
That's not the action of a socialist nation that's social imperialism. Worker controlled communes dont have satelite states, 90s Cuba and North Korea collapsing is evidence that the Maoist argument about Khrushchev being a revisionist traitor to the revolution is the correct line.
Which is ironic because he oversaw a period of growth and prosperity in contrast to some of the other more "pure" communist countries.
The simple reality was that opposing him was a simple political convenience after his secret speech.
Every developing country in the 20th century has developed with infusions of money from the already-developed world (which generally *got* rich by looting other countries).
I'm not saying direct aid always works the most efficiently in practice, but an industrialized nation helping the workers of another nation industrialize and build up their own economy isn't inherently anti-socialist or something. Hell, I mean, one of the defining features of communism as an ideology is its international character - that people believe their empathy and assistance for one another shouldn't stop at national borders.
Helping another nation develop doesn't lead to that nation's economy collapsing when your economy collapses. The issue here isn't about aide its about "trade partners" which is just a fancy way of saying that Cuba became a sugar cash crop nation for the Soviets instead of for the US. Did they get a much better deal through the Soviets? Absolutely. But they're not on the road to self-sufficiency and transforming their country beyond capitalism through socialist principles by deepening their one-sided, export based production.
DR is higher than Cuba. Jamaica and Cuba were on par through 2010 or so and Jamaica is 1/5 the size. Once Castro died and they started liberalizing the economy is when Cuba has actually had economic growth. What other countries in the Caribbean even have a population to compare to?
Socialism is a fucking disaster and has been proven repeatedly. No country has been able to last long term with an authoritarian government which is required under socialism vs. a liberal capitalist economy.
Total lack of comprehension on your part if your takeaway from the condition of Cuba in the 90s is a blanket statement that socialist economies “do not fucking work”.
Hard for a socialist economy of a Caribbean island nation to work when their closest neighbor, with the world’s largest economy, has a trade embargo on them… people like to leave that part out when they say Cuba or Venezuela are horrible because of “socialism”
Cuba is a paradise compared to Venezuela today. The US embargo is stupid and a huge missed opportunity for American businesses looking for a much less expensive but still educated workforce with a decent social safety net.
Venezuela on the other hand went from near Western Europe-levels of prosperity and development in the 70s and 80s to arguably the most complete economic collapse in modern history. Chavez and Maduro managed to combine nearly unequaled levels of corruption with staggering incompetence. The country with the largest oil reserves on the planet can't feed its people - or even get them gas for their cars.
Did they, though? Their current problems are because they banked everything on oil money, and the price of oil tanked. When oil was expensive, they used that money to set up schools, medical clinics and cheap general stores in pretty much every village, which hugely improved the general welfare and was extremely popular. That tells me that all those people *didn't* have access to education and healthcare before.
It's a real shame that they didn't also invest in a more diversified economy, and now that oil income is in the toilet those clinics are understaffed and stores are out of stock. But I still don't think that's worse than before, when all that oil money was going to a handful of rich people in the capitol.
Chavez earned the loyalty of the urban poor by providing many of the social services you've described but he not only was spending money that he didn't have, he was purging the state oil company of any personnel he perceived to be disloyal to his "Bolivarian" movement. When you're already spending more than you bring in - and then remove the only people who know how to run the oil rigs, you're going to send your economy into a death spiral.
There was obscene corruption and inequality in the 80s and 90s but they still adhered to the most important rule of being an oil-reliant economy: keep exporting oil.
Totally agree - things only really fell off a cliff in the past 10 years. I would also argue that Chavez's gutting of PDVSA and replacing the engineers, technicians, and managers with political loyalists may have made the economic collapse inevitable. A petro-state without the ability to export petro is going to have a tough time.
Chavez paid for his massive social programs (which worked btw) with oil money. Oil prices collapsed, Venezuelan oil is more expensive to refine because of its high sulfur content, + US and that’s what destroyed Venezuela’s economy.
It's really fucking expensive to transition to an industrial economy. The biggest industrial economies 100 years ago did it by looting the rest at gunpoint. Now, it's in the whole world's best interest for those rich countries to help the developing ones make that transition. This applies to capitalist developing countries just as much.
Also worth saying that many developing countries have been growing much faster than the US or Britain did when they industrialized. And some seem stuck. There are a whole range of economic policies on a smooth spectrum from capitalism to communism (read: there is no binary between the two), and countries all along this spectrum have both succeeded and struggled.
Singapore and Hong Kong were extremely valuable British cities for 100 years, remain extremely strategic shipping locations, and stayed out of Malaysia and China in part so that they could be rich cities unburdened by a rural population.
South Korea got lots of direct investment from the US, but was poorer than the North for decades before rapidly developing in the 80s/90s by selling manufactured exports to the US (a strategy that Taiwan, Japan and China also used very successfully). Export-oriented development is another way to get money from rich countries into your poor country.
Ireland won independence from Britain after the industrial revolution, and today is somewhat of a tax haven for multinational corporations within the EU. Switzerland makes very good chocolate, of course.
Hope you’re not planning on taking any of the social security we’ve all been putting in for then. Also Medicaid. Hell just die instead of retiring so we don’t have to foot your bill. Thanks.
A huge bit of the Cold War basically being that the USSR, a nation that had lost 1/6th of their population to the Holocaust/WWII and damn near all of its infrastructure in the West, was trying to prop up nations destroyed by war, whereas the US was absolutely on the road to become the global hegemon by WWII's end and was handing out massive economic aid to prevent the Nazis or Communists from appearing again.
It's really not a contest.
America has never seen a very destructive war on their own territory, the civil war didn’t destroy the infrastructure of the north. Meanwhile Russia has a long history of very bloody wars and destruction. Russia still had a feudal society with literal peasants by the time the Russian revolution happened. Russia has always been a backwards country when compared to America and Europe, economic systems withstanding
it's wild to look at people in like 1950 calling the USSR an unstoppable enemy of the US when their last 30 years had been feudal peasant economy -> costly revolution + foreign invasion -> worldwide great depression -> bloodiest theater in the bloodiest war in human history
As you noted, the Red Army endured absolutely staggering casualties and pushed back 80% of the Axis land forces - despite much of their most developed territory being under foreign occupation. They didn't do it without substantial assistance from the Western Allies but it was a feat of arms that was impossible to ignore. Because they then didn't do a massive demobilization afterwards, the Red Army was the dominant non-nuclear military force in the world in 1950. The fear wasn't solely a direct attack on the US but the threat of a conventional invasion of Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia - thus completely surrounding the US with an impregnable bloc of unfriendly powers.
~~Assuming you didn't mean for that~~ *~~not~~* ~~to be in there, of course the depression affected other countries as well. But the US already had an industrial economy by then, as did Britain and France and others. I'm just saying it was one thing after another for a country that was trying to build itself up from nothing.~~
Or if I have it backwards, and the USSR *was* uniquely unaffected because their economy wasn't doing much international trade, that's kind of a catch-22. Like it only happened that way because their economy was decades behind everyone else
You do know that the USSR industrialized during its first five year plan starting in 1928, right?
So by the start of the depression (1929) they were about a year into their effort to uplift their economy from the medieval era. They weren't decades behind, they were over a hundred years behind. By the end of the depression (1939) the Soviet economy had managed to catch up to be a couple decades behind the other advanced economies. Pretty amazing if you think about it.
Having a country torn up by war can have effects that echo for generations. Some historians believe that the current corrosive politics of the American south can be traced back to Reconstruction being too conciliatory and ending too early.
I dunno, it's anecdotal (do not trust a random guy on the Internet saying a guy said anything) but a close friend of mine from SE Asia visited the country, was given a looser leash than Western folks do.
If the economy is still in shambles, they're doing a decent job of hiding it the past handful of years.
Sadly one of the reasons they are doing a better job feeding their people is because there are a lot fewer of them. We'll probably never know the true numbers for the 90s - 2000s famine but it is believed that 5-10% of the population starved to death.
My grandfather was an officer in the Merchant Marines and has traveled all over the world. His descriptions of Korea in the mid to late 50s were on par with his descriptions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He described massive levels of poverty, starvation, and people living in makeshift shelters, even in winter.
The 50's are... Complex.
As per Curtis LeMay, 20 percent of the population of the DPRK/North Korea was annihilated and strategic bombers were literally told to stand down because there just **were no buildings over one story worth bombing anymore.**
Another interesting story from my grandfather was about people rebuilding in Japan post ww2. Before cargo containers, they would have tons of dunnage sawn from old growth in the Pacific Northwest to make scaffolding to get goods out of the hold. Typically, my grandfather said they would make delivery, then dump the dunnage overboard on the return trip in international waters, then pick up new dunnage at Port back in the US. In Japan the yard workers negotiated to take the dunnage for rebuilding efforts. It's interesting to think about, but at one point, there were houses being built in Japan from old grown in the PNW. Who knows if any of those houses still stand. History is wild.
His outdoor stories are always interesting to reflect back on. Being a merchant marine, he went to school at Kings Point NY. He rowed crew on the Hudson River. Back then if you so much as fell in the water it was a mandatory multiple day stay at the hospital.
Another boat story that always brought a smile was delivering cattle from Argentina. These obviously aren't the real numbers, but they'd load 50 cows and then deliver 50 to 100 cows from the same shipment. Pregnant cows got you two for the price of 1 delivered.
A less happy boat story was finding dead stowaways from the south American trips. They would sneak aboard and hide among the produce, but some would get but by banana spiders and other critters and unfortunately passed.
The PNW still exports a fuckload of lumber to Japan. They're not stupid enough to turn their country into a checkerboard disappointment of clearcuts and monoculture, but we're perfectly happy to ruin ours, so they buy foreign instead.
> and monoculture,
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/17/science/japan-s-cedar-forests-are-man-made-disaster.html
except they are, the Japanese Lumber industry is just stagnant, its a big contribution to why pollen allergies are so bad.
People have no idea the amount of people who would die in Seoul. Last I looked it was around a million from the all the artillery and alot of it can't be counter batteried because it rolls back into a mountain.
And that’s even taking into consideration that a somewhat significant amount of DPRK artillery and rounds are substandard. Even with gun/shell failures they still have enough lined up to cause truly horrific loss of life in Seoul
MacArthur had a lot of answers for things, but in the end he was an ineffective, shitty, blow-hard of a general, with more bluster than actual skill. His ego got a lot of men killed. If it weren't for politics, he would have been shit-canned in WW2.
Realistically, had the US gone nuclear, they likely would have won. Chinese leadership had fumbled multiple times at that point.
That said, Eisenhower knew making nuclear exchanges a new norm was incredibly reckless and to be avoided.
My mother plus her brothers and sisters were all born in the 50's in the postwar poverty in Korea. She told me she'd get new shoes once a year if she was lucky, never had any toys as a kid, and the only books she ever had were textbooks for school. This was considered middle class.
The South Korean economic story is an under-appreciated marvel of the 20th century.
A country with virtually no exploitable natural resources started the 1960s with levels of economic development below those of West Africa and within 50 years had levels that met (or often exceeded) those of the US and Western Europe. The nation that was born with totally shattered infrastructure produced the best builders in the world. Tremendous respect to the Korean people.
If I had a nickel for every country in Easy Asia that had the U.S. involved in a massively destructive war on its soil that decimated its infrastructure but which eventually recovered and had an economic resurgence that led to massive growth and development and eventually led it to possibly eclipse the U.S. in several significant standards of living, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
For all its faults, the US is very good at massively helping rebuilding efforts of both friends and enemies. It props up your friends against your enemies and can turn enemies into friends. It really just makes sense.
Not only economically, but South Korea sent troops that fought in Korean War to fight in the Vietnam War. The US govt was willing to give Korean govt subsidies for each soldier sent to Vietnam War. Korea later used this money for their economic development.
Exactly! The south Koreans weren't even "democratic" or "capitalists" back then.
They were a military junta and committed genocidal lvl massacre of civilians in both the north and south. They were an Allie of convince. NOT conviction.
> People forget that in the aftermath of the Korean War, North Korea was actually the more advanced and prosperous of the two states. The South's recovery gradually turned into explosive economic growth in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s but things were a lot closer in the 60s and 70s.
This is very common when comparing/contrasting communist and capitalist systems.
Communist systems generally came about in underdeveloped states that were primed for an economic explosion when the state subsumed all economic activity and just started investing. Same with NK. And they explode with heavy machinery factory after heavy machinery factory coming online. Imagine if the US tommorow just said “we will produce x amount of steel by this date.” You’d see an explosion in economic investment and job growth.
The issues are years down the line. Command economies are great when you just need to build steel factories. They flat don’t work when your consumer base has matured and needs consumer goods beyond plates of steel.
NK got very rich very fast extracting raw minerals/materials and producing heavy industry. It then malingered for decades because it can’t do anything else. South Korea in the meantime made a refrigerator you can get the weather on. They make superconductors. They make TVs and TV *shows*. They have services you want to use and make consumer products people in Canada want to buy.
And that’s one reason why one succeeded into the 21st century and one didn’t.
> they knew that the DPRK could likely respond by obliterating Seoul in a matter of hours
And, FYI, they can still do that, and that's why we still don't take any serious action against NK.
I think NK would achieve it’s objectives but it would bizarrely amount to a NK Pyrrhic victory and the destruction of Seoul may functionally amount to obliteration, but also quite sloppy and haphazard.
> they knew that the DPRK could likely respond by obliterating Seoul in a matter of hours
Capture* within 72 hours. DPRK artillery doesn't reach Seoul. This is a common misconception.
We would hold a ceremony each year on the anniversary while I was stationed in Japan where we would read each name and toll a bell. It was a very somber ceremony and a sober reminder that what we did wasn't safe even in "peacetime".
This is totally left field, but my dad’s older brother, whom he and all his siblings looked up to, was communications/cryptologist officer of some sort on this plane. It was devastating to their family but just know that it truly means a lot to the family of lost service members that their loved ones are remembered in memorials like what you participated in. I’m going to tell the about the commemoration in Japan.
Interesting side notes to this event/crew:
1) Several of them were doing the same thing (listening in on comms) on the USS Liberty when it was hit by Israeli jets and torpedo boats during the 6-Day War. Their presence was so secretive, they were airlifted off before the wounded.
2) Not sure if the article mentioned this but the USS Pueblo had been captured in the last year before and the US was reluctant to acknowledge another incident involving the loss of US military hardware/lives to North Korea again.
Supposedly, the unit was regularly flying off the coast in international waters, to listen in on communications and didn’t have fighter escort because they thought they were at a safe distance.
3) For years the families didn’t know if any of the crew had survived and were potentially taken prisoner like the Pueblo crew.
Edit: Additional notes from my dad -
4) Personal and other items recovered from the debris field, including a white suitcase with my uncle’s name on it, were stored in a hangar in Pensacola, Florida and have never been released to the families.
5) A Navy inquiry found that monitoring stations that would have seen and warned of the initial fighter scrambling earlier, were unmanned at the time. The personnel that should have been there were discovered to be doing things like running personal errands.
6) At least twice before the downing, my uncle told the family that NK Migs had given chase the planes he was on.
7) The Navy’s yet to fully acknowledge the series of protocol failures that contributed to this incident.
8) He and other family members were aware of the memorial ceremony in Japan and still plan on visiting for it one day.
While this event is true, it is one significant event is a whole slew of events. This did not happen in a vacuum.
For starters the US recognizes the internationally accepted sovereign maritime boundary of 12 miles out to sea. North Korea claims much more than that, and this plane was almost 100 miles away from North Korea. (In an economic zone the country has claim over resources, but not outright control of transit and passage.)
Take a look at this timeline and the things that happened within a couple of years before and after this
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_border\_incidents\_involving\_North\_and\_South\_Korea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_involving_North_and_South_Korea)
Also, note that April 15th is Kim Il Sung's birthday, which is a revered holiday in North Korea, in fact this shootdown marked 1 year since his birthday became a holiday in North Korea.
Also, during the 1960s and 1970s things in Korea were a lot more kinetic than they are now. We have missile launches and bomb tests and exercises and propaganda leaflets and now literal crap flying across the DMZ. Only in a great while are there actual large scale events like navy battles, and artillery shellings. Back in those days there were regular firefights across the DMZ, and North Korea had sent a hit squad into South Korea to try to assassinate the president, it ended in a firefight in Seoul not far from the Blue House (president's house at the time). The previous year in 1968 North Korea captured a US Navy ship.
Crazy crazy
to be fair the United States recognition of international sea borders was its own interpretation and not an international standard back then. UNCLOS which ratified this as a international standard only really became a thing in the 80's.
so it's not really a boo hoo america was innocent situation, america used its own standard and North korea had its own as well (and they absolutely would have known this). it's important to note the United States is one of the primary executors who helped establish and push the more universal rules of the sea that we use today in unclos.
most people don't really expect sea laws to be so new, it's easy to think they've been around for ever, but that just isn't the case.
Nixon really had all the smoke for North Vietnam and absolutely none of it for North Korea. North Korea would only get a nuclear weapon in 2006, 37 years after this incident.
It's crazy how the Gulf of Tonkin incident started US involvement in the Vietnam War and this did absolutely nothing. It and history in general feels so damn arbitrary.
[Wikipedia ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_EC-121_shootdown_incident)has it listed as a North Korean victory. I'm dead.
Wait until you learn that the gulf of tonkin incident was mostly a manufactured [lie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) and we shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.
People like to paint the Iraq War like it was the biggest war dupe America has ever pulled off.
In that case at least Sadaam had historically developed WMDs and used them multiple times. Iraq had to abandon them in the 90s because of foreign strikes by Israel and Iran coupled with US sanctions and pressure.
You can argue the case that most of the US's 2003 fears were of hidden WMDs caches (which Iraq did historically have) and the ability to quickly resume production, although we know that the Bush administration used this basis to outright lie about reality.
Vietnam though?
We got involved at France's request out of fear of the spread of communism. Against a leader who had worked in the West, including America and had a deep sense of respect for the American Founding Fathers.
58,000 US soldiers dead for that "objective."
And also in other nations. Laos became the most bombed country in history while being a neutral nation. There are likely hundreds of thousands to millions of unexploded bombs still in the country today.
Funny how that didn’t even get a mention. Just the much smaller number of invaders’ lives that is a small fraction of the total death count of the war.
Americans only consider their own people and people like them to be worthy of empathy. There was a comedian (forget who) who once said "America will invade your country, kill your people, then make movies about how it made their soldiers feel bad".
Well American lives are more valuable than Asian lives, even when Americans are flown from the other side of the world to occupy their country.
I just imagine what I would do if some Chinese soldiers were walking around my town screaming mandarin and pointing rifles at me.
And lets not forget the Maine and the casus belli formed around its sinking, which led to the Spanish-American war, and the American colonising of Puerto Rico, Guam & Phillipines (2 of which are still its possessions)
Unrelated, but are you familiar with this bit of history? It's pretty interesting. I saw a documentary on PBS about it several years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
Kim Jong Un climbed the highest mountain in North Korea…just so he could personally throw the missile…left handed…15 years before being born.
Supreme Leader be Supreme.
In all likelihood, this was probably calculated as an acceptable loss since the Nixon WH’s goal from day 1 was to normalize relations with China. Any escalation on the Korean Peninsula would kill that goal almost immediately
My best friend's dad was manning the DMZ during Vietnam and said they were actively being shot at by North Koreans, and it was nearly full on combat. He came home with PTSD and only recently received his disability payment for the prostate cancer he earned from handling Agent Orange.
He considers himself lucky as his best friend John Bobo was killed in action and awarded the Medal of Honor.
Not really. Given the aircraft involved was built off of a C-121 Constellation (a transport aircraft), you'll have 7-10 crew dedicated specifically to flying the plane (pilots, copilots, navigators, and the like), then the remaining 20 split between the various radar and signals processing capabilities, plus translators if you're trying to interpret live radio transmissions.
The president of the USA, while drunk, ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea over the incident. The generals decided to wait until the president was sober.
My cousin was on that flight. Unfortunately, even though we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, he and his crew are not considered Vietnam Vets and are not included in the memorial.
Realistically, if the US had retaliated by shooting down North Korean aircraft or bombing some airfields, they knew that the DPRK could likely respond by obliterating Seoul in a matter of hours - with American forces just acting as a sacrificial roadblock. With so many US troops already committed to Vietnam and further engagement in Asia likely to be deeply unpopular at home, the only real card the USA could play to stop a wholesale invasion of RoK would be a nuclear strike - something incredibly risky. People forget that in the aftermath of the Korean War, North Korea was actually the more advanced and prosperous of the two states. The South's recovery gradually turned into explosive economic growth in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s but things were a lot closer in the 60s and 70s.
With how piss poor & corrupt the RoK were before the economic boom, there were South Koreans actually defecting *North* because the Soviet Union was giving a LOT of financial support to North Korea. But once the USSR collapsed and the stimulus stopped pouring through in the 90s, that's when NK was hit with massive famine, and their economy has been in absolute shambles since.
It's crazy how much Soviet support propped up some of these countries. I was in Cuba a decade ago and toured the nation museum. On one display there was a timeline of Cuban history calling out big milestones, talking about some of the big events and changes in Cuban history. It stopped in 1990 because after that Cuba went into a recession that it basically never recovered from (of course the embargo is a huge factor here, but the effects were minimized before the collapse of the USSR)
If you think that’s crazy, look into how much money the US was officially and via back channels poring into almost every “economic miracle” Asian country. Especially Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Soviet DFIs don’t hold a candle to the volume of American DFI lol
SK was also the government-of-the-month continually allying with the chaebols(like zaibatsu; corporate clans) to get them out of some economic, civil, or political hot mess and led to the six massive conglomerates that control the majority of the SK economy. "Death, taxes, and Samsung" is a phrase for a reason, they just don't add LG, hyundai, SK group, Kumho, or Hanjin.
Yeah, people don't realize Samsung alone is worth what, like 20% of the entire Korean GDP? By comparison Walmart is worth something like 5% of the US's GDP.
Hell, most people don't realise Samsung makes self-propelled artillery.
Don't give Walmart any new ideas
Speak for yourself, boutique self propelled artillery prices have gotten out of hand.
Costco mortars in 144 CT packs for the area denial conscious 2A enthusiast.
I just buy them wholesale, tie white ribbons on them, and sell them at a steep markup for weddings.
Great Value RPGs
I'm not opposed to a self propelled meatball sub arriving at my house
To be fair, anyone who makes tractors or excavators at some level makes tanks and/or tank parts. Like jeeps and cars, they use a lot of the same parts.
Also look into why almost every Russian/Soviet tank or vehicle factory has the title "Tractor Factory" or "Railcar Plant"
Soviet tractors are the most heavily armored tractors in the world!
They also make fully automated friend or foe identifying machine gun sentry platforms. [**for the past 20 years**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkAmpMy8liQ&t=4s)
Well, that and basically anything with a computer chip in it.
Hope they're more reliable than their washer / dryers
And they are an insurance provider… seriously it seems like Amazon saw Samsungs list of holdings and got ideas
Walmart is worth 547.52 billion and USA GDP is 25.44 trillion. 547.52/25, 440 is 2.1%. It was actually more than I thought. Samsung is worth 398.35 billion and Korea GDP is projected to have 1.761 trillion GDP. 398.35/1, 761 is 22.6%. If we combined Apple and Google we would have a market cap of 5.68 trillion. 5,680/25, 440 is 22.3%.
You can't really compare market cap and GDP. GDP is the total sales of all products and services of a country for an entire year. It's basically how much money a country makes in a year. Market Cap is the total value of a company as a whole, and is not a yearly thing. A more comparable metric would be revenue and GDP
Government literally changed tax laws to ensure they got their cut from Samsung.
Walmart is worth 547.52 billion and USA GDP is 25.44 trillion. 547.52/25, 440 is 2.1%. It was actually more than I thought. Samsung is worth 398.35 billion and Korea GDP is projected to have 1.761 trillion GDP. 398.35/1, 761 is 22.6%.
Also west Germany. Even today there are big differences between Soviet controlled Germany and the rest
Cuba had to radically change their whole agricultural sector when all imports of fertilizer and machinery ended on a dime in 1991, but they *did* change up their ag, and now they should be a model for climate-sustainable agriculture everywhere in the world. In 2001 the US took farm supplies off their embargo, but imports/use of fertilizer hasn't increased since then. More local control over the land and agro-ecological practices have made Cuban farms more productive per acre than the big corporate farms in the rest of Latin America, and farmer median income is at or above the nationwide median income. It's honestly an incredible success at a nationwide scale, when the same ideas haven't expanded beyond small boutique farms in the US. I'm starting a MA in this field and I'd love to just spend a year in Cuba studying how they made this transition and how the whole system works.
I think few of the Canadian agriculture schools have relationships with the university in Havana. If you can track down anyone at the university of Guelph they may be able to help you get access to data. (I'm assuming you're in the states and can't get permission to go study)
McGill (Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences) had Cuban agriculture field course for awhile (it was popular with Americans as it was the only way for them to legally visit Cuba at the time) but it looks like they don't have it anymore
hey do you have a source on that? that sounds super interesting
[Cuban Agriculture: A Green and Red Revolution](https://www.choicesmagazine.org/2003-4/2003-4-01.pdf) [Organic or starve: can Cuba's new farming model provide food security? (The Guardian)](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/28/organic-or-starve-can-cubas-new-farming-model-provide-food-security) [Cuba’s Urban Farming Revolution: How to Create Self-Sufficient Cities](https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farming-revolution-how-to-create-self-sufficient-cities) [The road to restoration: Cuba’s modern farming revolution (UN Environment Program)](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/road-restoration-cubas-modern-farming-revolution) It's still a work in progress, a lot of work remains to undo a lot of past damage (both economic and environmental), like everywhere. But again, they're making this transition on a bigger scale than any other country I'm aware of, and that's really interesting to study - both successes and the problems that come up. I should also mention that widespread urban farming is another part of it. It's common for people to have urban vegetable gardens or keep chickens/goats in cities. This was borne out of sheer necessity, but I think people in rich countries could benefit from growing some food themselves, rather than buying everything off a shelf with no knowledge of how it got there. I mean, I just saw a tiktok claiming clips of unripe fruit were fake factory-made fruit. It's not healthy to be that disconnected from the reality of your own food.
Not that I’m saying that you’re saying this should happen, but there is a reason we don’t generally allow livestock in cities. Livestock + close proximity to lots of people = many public health issues including disease and pandemics in the past. Vegetables and fruit, yes i agree more people should be growing as much as they can wherever they are, but it gets more complicated when we start bringing livestock in to the equation.
> I just saw a tiktok claiming clips of unripe fruit were fake factory-made fruit. I swear that people just say the stupidest/most inflammatory things possible just so it can get views. It's like those facebook ads where they say, "Only 1% of people can solve this!" but it's something super simple so it makes people feel smart.
? “Farm yields are pathetically low, despite Cuba having possibly the richest soil of any tropical country in the world, said Pedro Sanchez, an agronomist at the University of Florida who was raised on a farm in Cuba and returns regularly. “They’re raising one tonne per acre of corn. It’s ridiculous,” he said.” And these articles are all *before* that move to organic farming and the “agricultural revolution”, what’s the situation now, after it’s implementation?
It's crazy how some countries can survive being targeted by the US' wrath while others wither and die. Cuba has always fascinated me. I'm not educated enough to say if they deserved the treatment or not - on a "tiny opinion" scale, it does seem like nowadays it's more nobody wants to touch it as it's so politically damaging, rather than a real urge to keep them embargoed - but I love how they took basically being locked off from one of their closest possible trading partners, who happens to be the biggest economy in the world, and didn't completely crumble. I "understand" that a capitalist system like the US will never let a communist state prosper, especially one so close to its borders, you can never let your competing system look anything but weak. It's just..eh. Just a shame is all.
Why does communism need support from capitalism to succeed. Also, why are you using example of Cuba. Shouldn't USSR and China be the more representative example. Cuba is definitely not a success story either.
Cuba's food production has steadily declined since 1980 and has fallen by 35% in just the last 5 years. Earlier this year they reached out to the UN food aid program for assistance. There was a big decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a bit of a rebound afterwards.
I would take those reports with a heavy dose of salt. I can't speak for the entire island, but my family in Camaguey, Pinar del Rio, Oriente, and Havana all agree that stuff is very exaggerated or straight up fabricated by the government. Things are really bad right now and no one has enough food. In the past you could get by if family on the outside was sending you money. Now even with money, there just isn't enough produce/bread/milk/meat to buy.
Not to mention that "productiveness" is just one factor... You can technically increase this, sure, but would it still be economical in the end? Balancing out all factors is key.
Hmmm ... [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845): "Cuba asks UN for help as food shortages worsen" February 2024 [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-turns-world-food-programme-milk-supply-crisis-deepens-2024-03-04/): "Cuba turns to World Food Programme for milk supply as crisis deepens" March 2024 [DW](https://www.dw.com/en/cuba-seeks-un-food-aid-as-economic-crisis-deepens/a-68443716): "Cuba seeks UN food aid as economic crisis deepens" March 2024 [Miami Herald](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article286593100.html): "Cuba asks U.N. agency for milk amid food and oil shortages" March 2024 [The Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/01/opinion/cuba-crisis-hunger-economy/): "In Cuba, hunger and open desperation" April 2024 I could go on and on. Keep in mind that the food and medicine aren't included in the embargo. Also, Cuba receives the majority of its food aid from the UN World Food Programme, which over 50% of the funding comes from the U.S. alone while Cuba's "allies", China's and Russia's, contributions total less than 1% making the U.S. is the top food supplier of Cuba and it's fifth largest trading partner.
Yeah, they don't produce enough food domestically, they didn't before 1991, and they didn't before the 1959 revolution. It's an uphill battle, just like any other poor country that had a dictator 60 years ago. If you look a little farther down, I posted links about their long-term trend written across 20 years, rather than a bunch of newspaper articles written about events in spring 2024 alone.
A dictator 60 years ago? They still have one and had one that entire time. They just changed hats and color scheme.
It wasn't just Soviet support, it was a membership in an economic bloc with the Soviet Union at its core. When the Soviet Union liquidated itself for western investors that vanished. Energy resources especially became hard to come by as you now needed dollars to buy oil where the Soviets were giving you a sweet deal.
It’s weird how many people forgot that COMECON was a thing
Who do you think was responsible for the growth in South Korea? Hint: the opposing side of the USSR in the cold war
The embargo is the biggest factor.
Yeah, I visited Cuba as well. The period of the 1990s were really really dark times. Turns out socialist economies do not fucking work.
Cuba's economy is relatively high when compared to its capitalist Caribbean neighbors though. Like you can say "America is capitalist and it's more prosperous than Cuba" but 99% of the world's countries are capitalist and many of them are poorer than Cuba is.
And it’s under an embargo massively preventing trade with 90% of the world. The state department of the most powerful country to exist on earth is specifically trying to “make the economy bleed” to force or inspire regime change. And yet they are still much better off in some key metrics compared to all their Caribbean neighbors.
And funny enough, no regime change has actually happened ever under sanctions
But they have led to immense, immense human suffering in many places such as North Korea, Iraq, Venezuela etc
I see this claim a lot but it doesn’t seem to hold water. The eu is cubas largest trading partner and its largest foreign investor. Also most of the largest country’s all have business ties with Cuba (Russian, china, India, Japan, Brazil, Germany, etc). The embargo claims don’t really seem to hold up.
Cuba is also significantly larger than every other Caribbean neighbor. Almost all of them are tiny populations and resource poor and have nothing but tourism to base an economy on. Jamaica and the Dominican Republic outdo Cuba even despite being significantly smaller. My point is, comparing Cuba to small island nations with little to no economic opportunity is not the great point in your argument you think it is.
They're also describing Cuba and North Korea being propped up by the Soviet Union. That's not the action of a socialist nation that's social imperialism. Worker controlled communes dont have satelite states, 90s Cuba and North Korea collapsing is evidence that the Maoist argument about Khrushchev being a revisionist traitor to the revolution is the correct line.
Which is ironic because he oversaw a period of growth and prosperity in contrast to some of the other more "pure" communist countries. The simple reality was that opposing him was a simple political convenience after his secret speech.
Every developing country in the 20th century has developed with infusions of money from the already-developed world (which generally *got* rich by looting other countries). I'm not saying direct aid always works the most efficiently in practice, but an industrialized nation helping the workers of another nation industrialize and build up their own economy isn't inherently anti-socialist or something. Hell, I mean, one of the defining features of communism as an ideology is its international character - that people believe their empathy and assistance for one another shouldn't stop at national borders.
Helping another nation develop doesn't lead to that nation's economy collapsing when your economy collapses. The issue here isn't about aide its about "trade partners" which is just a fancy way of saying that Cuba became a sugar cash crop nation for the Soviets instead of for the US. Did they get a much better deal through the Soviets? Absolutely. But they're not on the road to self-sufficiency and transforming their country beyond capitalism through socialist principles by deepening their one-sided, export based production.
DR is higher than Cuba. Jamaica and Cuba were on par through 2010 or so and Jamaica is 1/5 the size. Once Castro died and they started liberalizing the economy is when Cuba has actually had economic growth. What other countries in the Caribbean even have a population to compare to? Socialism is a fucking disaster and has been proven repeatedly. No country has been able to last long term with an authoritarian government which is required under socialism vs. a liberal capitalist economy.
Socialism doesn’t require authoritarianism… you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about lol
Which socialist countries aren't authoritarian?
Socialism =/= communism
Socialism = socialism. Cuba starting in 1959 under Castro became socialist.
Total lack of comprehension on your part if your takeaway from the condition of Cuba in the 90s is a blanket statement that socialist economies “do not fucking work”.
Oh I'm sorry. What would be a good example of a socialist economy and country working?
You do realize that Cuba still functions and notably during the COVID’s height they were exporting doctors
So the bar To a successful country is "still functions" ? Why do you think Cuban refugees risk their lives to move to the US?
Hard for a socialist economy of a Caribbean island nation to work when their closest neighbor, with the world’s largest economy, has a trade embargo on them… people like to leave that part out when they say Cuba or Venezuela are horrible because of “socialism”
Cuba is a paradise compared to Venezuela today. The US embargo is stupid and a huge missed opportunity for American businesses looking for a much less expensive but still educated workforce with a decent social safety net. Venezuela on the other hand went from near Western Europe-levels of prosperity and development in the 70s and 80s to arguably the most complete economic collapse in modern history. Chavez and Maduro managed to combine nearly unequaled levels of corruption with staggering incompetence. The country with the largest oil reserves on the planet can't feed its people - or even get them gas for their cars.
Did they, though? Their current problems are because they banked everything on oil money, and the price of oil tanked. When oil was expensive, they used that money to set up schools, medical clinics and cheap general stores in pretty much every village, which hugely improved the general welfare and was extremely popular. That tells me that all those people *didn't* have access to education and healthcare before. It's a real shame that they didn't also invest in a more diversified economy, and now that oil income is in the toilet those clinics are understaffed and stores are out of stock. But I still don't think that's worse than before, when all that oil money was going to a handful of rich people in the capitol.
Chavez earned the loyalty of the urban poor by providing many of the social services you've described but he not only was spending money that he didn't have, he was purging the state oil company of any personnel he perceived to be disloyal to his "Bolivarian" movement. When you're already spending more than you bring in - and then remove the only people who know how to run the oil rigs, you're going to send your economy into a death spiral. There was obscene corruption and inequality in the 80s and 90s but they still adhered to the most important rule of being an oil-reliant economy: keep exporting oil.
To be fair the complete collapse happens under Manduro. How much of that can be ascribed to Chavez is debatable.
Totally agree - things only really fell off a cliff in the past 10 years. I would also argue that Chavez's gutting of PDVSA and replacing the engineers, technicians, and managers with political loyalists may have made the economic collapse inevitable. A petro-state without the ability to export petro is going to have a tough time.
Chavez paid for his massive social programs (which worked btw) with oil money. Oil prices collapsed, Venezuelan oil is more expensive to refine because of its high sulfur content, + US and that’s what destroyed Venezuela’s economy.
So you're saying in order to work, socialism needs to have the help from a capitalist country?
It's really fucking expensive to transition to an industrial economy. The biggest industrial economies 100 years ago did it by looting the rest at gunpoint. Now, it's in the whole world's best interest for those rich countries to help the developing ones make that transition. This applies to capitalist developing countries just as much. Also worth saying that many developing countries have been growing much faster than the US or Britain did when they industrialized. And some seem stuck. There are a whole range of economic policies on a smooth spectrum from capitalism to communism (read: there is no binary between the two), and countries all along this spectrum have both succeeded and struggled.
How did Singapore do it? South Korea? Chile? Hong Kong? Ireland, Switzerland?
Singapore and Hong Kong were extremely valuable British cities for 100 years, remain extremely strategic shipping locations, and stayed out of Malaysia and China in part so that they could be rich cities unburdened by a rural population. South Korea got lots of direct investment from the US, but was poorer than the North for decades before rapidly developing in the 80s/90s by selling manufactured exports to the US (a strategy that Taiwan, Japan and China also used very successfully). Export-oriented development is another way to get money from rich countries into your poor country. Ireland won independence from Britain after the industrial revolution, and today is somewhat of a tax haven for multinational corporations within the EU. Switzerland makes very good chocolate, of course.
Got it. So all those countries grew wealthy via free trade and capitalism. Thanks for confirming.
Hope you’re not planning on taking any of the social security we’ve all been putting in for then. Also Medicaid. Hell just die instead of retiring so we don’t have to foot your bill. Thanks.
But now he’s friends with Putin so let the Russian money flow again!
Yeah, about the Russian money...
Something something planes meeting on an airport runway
Right but with that, hookers and coke aren't going to pay for themselves right? What do you think Trump Force One runs on?
Literally millions of rubles are flowing right now...
So that's like what, a Big Mac with fries?
And a bottle of vodka.
It's easy to acquire. Just shoot a missile at a building and you've got yourself some rubble.
As opposed to the US's stimulus & subsidies which did not stop in SK.
A huge bit of the Cold War basically being that the USSR, a nation that had lost 1/6th of their population to the Holocaust/WWII and damn near all of its infrastructure in the West, was trying to prop up nations destroyed by war, whereas the US was absolutely on the road to become the global hegemon by WWII's end and was handing out massive economic aid to prevent the Nazis or Communists from appearing again. It's really not a contest.
America has never seen a very destructive war on their own territory, the civil war didn’t destroy the infrastructure of the north. Meanwhile Russia has a long history of very bloody wars and destruction. Russia still had a feudal society with literal peasants by the time the Russian revolution happened. Russia has always been a backwards country when compared to America and Europe, economic systems withstanding
it's wild to look at people in like 1950 calling the USSR an unstoppable enemy of the US when their last 30 years had been feudal peasant economy -> costly revolution + foreign invasion -> worldwide great depression -> bloodiest theater in the bloodiest war in human history
As you noted, the Red Army endured absolutely staggering casualties and pushed back 80% of the Axis land forces - despite much of their most developed territory being under foreign occupation. They didn't do it without substantial assistance from the Western Allies but it was a feat of arms that was impossible to ignore. Because they then didn't do a massive demobilization afterwards, the Red Army was the dominant non-nuclear military force in the world in 1950. The fear wasn't solely a direct attack on the US but the threat of a conventional invasion of Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia - thus completely surrounding the US with an impregnable bloc of unfriendly powers.
The USSR was famously the only country not affected by the great depression.
~~Assuming you didn't mean for that~~ *~~not~~* ~~to be in there, of course the depression affected other countries as well. But the US already had an industrial economy by then, as did Britain and France and others. I'm just saying it was one thing after another for a country that was trying to build itself up from nothing.~~ Or if I have it backwards, and the USSR *was* uniquely unaffected because their economy wasn't doing much international trade, that's kind of a catch-22. Like it only happened that way because their economy was decades behind everyone else
You do know that the USSR industrialized during its first five year plan starting in 1928, right? So by the start of the depression (1929) they were about a year into their effort to uplift their economy from the medieval era. They weren't decades behind, they were over a hundred years behind. By the end of the depression (1939) the Soviet economy had managed to catch up to be a couple decades behind the other advanced economies. Pretty amazing if you think about it.
Having a country torn up by war can have effects that echo for generations. Some historians believe that the current corrosive politics of the American south can be traced back to Reconstruction being too conciliatory and ending too early.
That’s pretty much what happened to South Korea though. Insane stimulus has helped it become what it is today.
I dunno, it's anecdotal (do not trust a random guy on the Internet saying a guy said anything) but a close friend of mine from SE Asia visited the country, was given a looser leash than Western folks do. If the economy is still in shambles, they're doing a decent job of hiding it the past handful of years.
Sadly one of the reasons they are doing a better job feeding their people is because there are a lot fewer of them. We'll probably never know the true numbers for the 90s - 2000s famine but it is believed that 5-10% of the population starved to death.
My grandfather was an officer in the Merchant Marines and has traveled all over the world. His descriptions of Korea in the mid to late 50s were on par with his descriptions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He described massive levels of poverty, starvation, and people living in makeshift shelters, even in winter.
The 50's are... Complex. As per Curtis LeMay, 20 percent of the population of the DPRK/North Korea was annihilated and strategic bombers were literally told to stand down because there just **were no buildings over one story worth bombing anymore.**
Another interesting story from my grandfather was about people rebuilding in Japan post ww2. Before cargo containers, they would have tons of dunnage sawn from old growth in the Pacific Northwest to make scaffolding to get goods out of the hold. Typically, my grandfather said they would make delivery, then dump the dunnage overboard on the return trip in international waters, then pick up new dunnage at Port back in the US. In Japan the yard workers negotiated to take the dunnage for rebuilding efforts. It's interesting to think about, but at one point, there were houses being built in Japan from old grown in the PNW. Who knows if any of those houses still stand. History is wild.
I need more worldly grandpa stories
His outdoor stories are always interesting to reflect back on. Being a merchant marine, he went to school at Kings Point NY. He rowed crew on the Hudson River. Back then if you so much as fell in the water it was a mandatory multiple day stay at the hospital. Another boat story that always brought a smile was delivering cattle from Argentina. These obviously aren't the real numbers, but they'd load 50 cows and then deliver 50 to 100 cows from the same shipment. Pregnant cows got you two for the price of 1 delivered. A less happy boat story was finding dead stowaways from the south American trips. They would sneak aboard and hide among the produce, but some would get but by banana spiders and other critters and unfortunately passed.
The PNW still exports a fuckload of lumber to Japan. They're not stupid enough to turn their country into a checkerboard disappointment of clearcuts and monoculture, but we're perfectly happy to ruin ours, so they buy foreign instead.
> and monoculture, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/17/science/japan-s-cedar-forests-are-man-made-disaster.html except they are, the Japanese Lumber industry is just stagnant, its a big contribution to why pollen allergies are so bad.
I could believe it. Such nice lumber destroyed. Listening to my grandpa talk about how much was wasted was wild. He reflect back on it often
They *completely* obliterated 18 of 22 major cities during the korean war.
People have no idea the amount of people who would die in Seoul. Last I looked it was around a million from the all the artillery and alot of it can't be counter batteried because it rolls back into a mountain.
And that’s even taking into consideration that a somewhat significant amount of DPRK artillery and rounds are substandard. Even with gun/shell failures they still have enough lined up to cause truly horrific loss of life in Seoul
MacArthur had an answer for that.
MacArthur had a lot of answers for things, but in the end he was an ineffective, shitty, blow-hard of a general, with more bluster than actual skill. His ego got a lot of men killed. If it weren't for politics, he would have been shit-canned in WW2.
Interestingly enough, he still had enough sense to advise Kennedy and Johnson not to get heavily involved in Vietnam.
Nukes on the Chinese army helping north korea...
Realistically, had the US gone nuclear, they likely would have won. Chinese leadership had fumbled multiple times at that point. That said, Eisenhower knew making nuclear exchanges a new norm was incredibly reckless and to be avoided.
NK 152mm artillery can’t reach Seul. Seul is around 50km from the border, 152 maxes out under 30km for conventional shells.
The 1988 Seoul Olympics was kind of the coming of age for RoK.
That and the fact the dictatorship was abolished, people often forget south Korea was WAYYYYYY worse than the north before the 1980s
And the US were behind the installment of the powers that be in SK, causs those dudes would play ball with USA.
the military dictatorship sounded just as bad as the military dictatorship on the other side.
My mother plus her brothers and sisters were all born in the 50's in the postwar poverty in Korea. She told me she'd get new shoes once a year if she was lucky, never had any toys as a kid, and the only books she ever had were textbooks for school. This was considered middle class.
The South Korean economic story is an under-appreciated marvel of the 20th century. A country with virtually no exploitable natural resources started the 1960s with levels of economic development below those of West Africa and within 50 years had levels that met (or often exceeded) those of the US and Western Europe. The nation that was born with totally shattered infrastructure produced the best builders in the world. Tremendous respect to the Korean people.
If I had a nickel for every country in Easy Asia that had the U.S. involved in a massively destructive war on its soil that decimated its infrastructure but which eventually recovered and had an economic resurgence that led to massive growth and development and eventually led it to possibly eclipse the U.S. in several significant standards of living, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
For all its faults, the US is very good at massively helping rebuilding efforts of both friends and enemies. It props up your friends against your enemies and can turn enemies into friends. It really just makes sense.
Not only economically, but South Korea sent troops that fought in Korean War to fight in the Vietnam War. The US govt was willing to give Korean govt subsidies for each soldier sent to Vietnam War. Korea later used this money for their economic development.
Exactly! The south Koreans weren't even "democratic" or "capitalists" back then. They were a military junta and committed genocidal lvl massacre of civilians in both the north and south. They were an Allie of convince. NOT conviction.
> People forget that in the aftermath of the Korean War, North Korea was actually the more advanced and prosperous of the two states. The South's recovery gradually turned into explosive economic growth in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s but things were a lot closer in the 60s and 70s. This is very common when comparing/contrasting communist and capitalist systems. Communist systems generally came about in underdeveloped states that were primed for an economic explosion when the state subsumed all economic activity and just started investing. Same with NK. And they explode with heavy machinery factory after heavy machinery factory coming online. Imagine if the US tommorow just said “we will produce x amount of steel by this date.” You’d see an explosion in economic investment and job growth. The issues are years down the line. Command economies are great when you just need to build steel factories. They flat don’t work when your consumer base has matured and needs consumer goods beyond plates of steel. NK got very rich very fast extracting raw minerals/materials and producing heavy industry. It then malingered for decades because it can’t do anything else. South Korea in the meantime made a refrigerator you can get the weather on. They make superconductors. They make TVs and TV *shows*. They have services you want to use and make consumer products people in Canada want to buy. And that’s one reason why one succeeded into the 21st century and one didn’t.
> they knew that the DPRK could likely respond by obliterating Seoul in a matter of hours And, FYI, they can still do that, and that's why we still don't take any serious action against NK.
I think NK would achieve it’s objectives but it would bizarrely amount to a NK Pyrrhic victory and the destruction of Seoul may functionally amount to obliteration, but also quite sloppy and haphazard.
Naah bro, everyone gets a freebie, if nkorea do that shit again the whole us airforce will make the country into a smoking crater Just joking
> they knew that the DPRK could likely respond by obliterating Seoul in a matter of hours Capture* within 72 hours. DPRK artillery doesn't reach Seoul. This is a common misconception.
We almost went to war with NK multiple times in the late 60s.
We would hold a ceremony each year on the anniversary while I was stationed in Japan where we would read each name and toll a bell. It was a very somber ceremony and a sober reminder that what we did wasn't safe even in "peacetime".
This is totally left field, but my dad’s older brother, whom he and all his siblings looked up to, was communications/cryptologist officer of some sort on this plane. It was devastating to their family but just know that it truly means a lot to the family of lost service members that their loved ones are remembered in memorials like what you participated in. I’m going to tell the about the commemoration in Japan. Interesting side notes to this event/crew: 1) Several of them were doing the same thing (listening in on comms) on the USS Liberty when it was hit by Israeli jets and torpedo boats during the 6-Day War. Their presence was so secretive, they were airlifted off before the wounded. 2) Not sure if the article mentioned this but the USS Pueblo had been captured in the last year before and the US was reluctant to acknowledge another incident involving the loss of US military hardware/lives to North Korea again. Supposedly, the unit was regularly flying off the coast in international waters, to listen in on communications and didn’t have fighter escort because they thought they were at a safe distance. 3) For years the families didn’t know if any of the crew had survived and were potentially taken prisoner like the Pueblo crew. Edit: Additional notes from my dad - 4) Personal and other items recovered from the debris field, including a white suitcase with my uncle’s name on it, were stored in a hangar in Pensacola, Florida and have never been released to the families. 5) A Navy inquiry found that monitoring stations that would have seen and warned of the initial fighter scrambling earlier, were unmanned at the time. The personnel that should have been there were discovered to be doing things like running personal errands. 6) At least twice before the downing, my uncle told the family that NK Migs had given chase the planes he was on. 7) The Navy’s yet to fully acknowledge the series of protocol failures that contributed to this incident. 8) He and other family members were aware of the memorial ceremony in Japan and still plan on visiting for it one day.
Thank you for your uncle’s service.
While this event is true, it is one significant event is a whole slew of events. This did not happen in a vacuum. For starters the US recognizes the internationally accepted sovereign maritime boundary of 12 miles out to sea. North Korea claims much more than that, and this plane was almost 100 miles away from North Korea. (In an economic zone the country has claim over resources, but not outright control of transit and passage.) Take a look at this timeline and the things that happened within a couple of years before and after this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_border\_incidents\_involving\_North\_and\_South\_Korea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_involving_North_and_South_Korea) Also, note that April 15th is Kim Il Sung's birthday, which is a revered holiday in North Korea, in fact this shootdown marked 1 year since his birthday became a holiday in North Korea. Also, during the 1960s and 1970s things in Korea were a lot more kinetic than they are now. We have missile launches and bomb tests and exercises and propaganda leaflets and now literal crap flying across the DMZ. Only in a great while are there actual large scale events like navy battles, and artillery shellings. Back in those days there were regular firefights across the DMZ, and North Korea had sent a hit squad into South Korea to try to assassinate the president, it ended in a firefight in Seoul not far from the Blue House (president's house at the time). The previous year in 1968 North Korea captured a US Navy ship. Crazy crazy
to be fair the United States recognition of international sea borders was its own interpretation and not an international standard back then. UNCLOS which ratified this as a international standard only really became a thing in the 80's. so it's not really a boo hoo america was innocent situation, america used its own standard and North korea had its own as well (and they absolutely would have known this). it's important to note the United States is one of the primary executors who helped establish and push the more universal rules of the sea that we use today in unclos. most people don't really expect sea laws to be so new, it's easy to think they've been around for ever, but that just isn't the case.
Nixon really had all the smoke for North Vietnam and absolutely none of it for North Korea. North Korea would only get a nuclear weapon in 2006, 37 years after this incident. It's crazy how the Gulf of Tonkin incident started US involvement in the Vietnam War and this did absolutely nothing. It and history in general feels so damn arbitrary. [Wikipedia ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_EC-121_shootdown_incident)has it listed as a North Korean victory. I'm dead.
He didn’t want to get in another land war with china
He also was trying to avoid conflict with Sicilians with death on the line
Haaaaahahahahahaha Hahahahaha Ha Edit: getting downvoted by people who haven’t seen the movie lol
I'm surprised at how many people haven't seen the Princess Bride these days! It's a classic!
We are old
I don’t think that word means what you think it does.
Wait until you learn that the gulf of tonkin incident was mostly a manufactured [lie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) and we shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.
People like to paint the Iraq War like it was the biggest war dupe America has ever pulled off. In that case at least Sadaam had historically developed WMDs and used them multiple times. Iraq had to abandon them in the 90s because of foreign strikes by Israel and Iran coupled with US sanctions and pressure. You can argue the case that most of the US's 2003 fears were of hidden WMDs caches (which Iraq did historically have) and the ability to quickly resume production, although we know that the Bush administration used this basis to outright lie about reality. Vietnam though? We got involved at France's request out of fear of the spread of communism. Against a leader who had worked in the West, including America and had a deep sense of respect for the American Founding Fathers. 58,000 US soldiers dead for that "objective."
And millions of Vietnamese dead.
And also in other nations. Laos became the most bombed country in history while being a neutral nation. There are likely hundreds of thousands to millions of unexploded bombs still in the country today.
Funny how that didn’t even get a mention. Just the much smaller number of invaders’ lives that is a small fraction of the total death count of the war.
Americans only consider their own people and people like them to be worthy of empathy. There was a comedian (forget who) who once said "America will invade your country, kill your people, then make movies about how it made their soldiers feel bad".
Well American lives are more valuable than Asian lives, even when Americans are flown from the other side of the world to occupy their country. I just imagine what I would do if some Chinese soldiers were walking around my town screaming mandarin and pointing rifles at me.
And lets not forget the Maine and the casus belli formed around its sinking, which led to the Spanish-American war, and the American colonising of Puerto Rico, Guam & Phillipines (2 of which are still its possessions)
That's a great example too.
China had a defense pact with North Korea. It would be the Korean War all over again and possibly WW3.
Most people don’t realize Japan bombed an American boat full of us citizens years before WW2 and did nothing because they didn’t want enter the war
Unrelated, but are you familiar with this bit of history? It's pretty interesting. I saw a documentary on PBS about it several years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
Kim Jong Un climbed the highest mountain in North Korea…just so he could personally throw the missile…left handed…15 years before being born. Supreme Leader be Supreme.
Sounds legit
Sometimes I just read the comments for the laughs, lol. There is bound to be some unexpected comments. Thanks for the laugh!
Surprise! I threw that shit before I walked in the room!
we were up to our taint in VC at that time
In all likelihood, this was probably calculated as an acceptable loss since the Nixon WH’s goal from day 1 was to normalize relations with China. Any escalation on the Korean Peninsula would kill that goal almost immediately
Ever heard of the Pueblo?
Si! Juan Pueblo, mi primo
*That you know of
Because why fight one asian land war when you can fight two instead!
"I have a message. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors."
Put a mask on
America only retaliates when it's ships are attacked.
The USS Liberty might disagree.
Don’t touch our fucking boats.
They’re nice boats!
Unless it’s Israel
The BBC documentary on Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was shocking to watch: https://youtu.be/vyiP1tUOxig?si=YD-nkfUeAQHhX5hV
... so you've heard about the USS Liberty, have you?
Which North Koreans did as well. [1 year earlier......](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Pueblo_(AGER-2)#Pueblo_incident)
In 1983 the USSR shot down a KAL flight, killing 269 people, including US Senators and congressmen. Got away with a "whoopsie".
Israel also blew up the USS Liberty in the 50's and we didn't retaliate either.
Korean Air Lines Flight 007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
There was a lot going on
They got Henry Blake too
RIP Henry Blake
Oh wow, the blowback would have been crazy. I just googled North Korea Blowback.
My best friend's dad was manning the DMZ during Vietnam and said they were actively being shot at by North Koreans, and it was nearly full on combat. He came home with PTSD and only recently received his disability payment for the prostate cancer he earned from handling Agent Orange. He considers himself lucky as his best friend John Bobo was killed in action and awarded the Medal of Honor.
Ahh now you understand escalatory actions. Which is why what we’re doing with Ukraine, Israel and the rest of the world, we’re playing with fire. 🔥
Is it just me or does it seem like 31 is a lot of people for a spy plane?
Not really. Given the aircraft involved was built off of a C-121 Constellation (a transport aircraft), you'll have 7-10 crew dedicated specifically to flying the plane (pilots, copilots, navigators, and the like), then the remaining 20 split between the various radar and signals processing capabilities, plus translators if you're trying to interpret live radio transmissions.
Because America appreciates shooting people while they are trying to learn
Wow
They also still have the only captured ship in modern history. The USS Pueblo.
I feel like the response was a bit more nuanced. That's why we have Special Forces and classified operations.
Touch the boats and see what happens...
This is my current squadron we have the rudder displayed on our quarterdeck https://imgur.com/a/qupyrwn
The president of the USA, while drunk, ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea over the incident. The generals decided to wait until the president was sober.
My cousin was on that flight. Unfortunately, even though we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, he and his crew are not considered Vietnam Vets and are not included in the memorial.
In 2024 same thing . Us isn’t as strong as it appears . They lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan
Can I use the following text for ig post