What is the basis for the argument that the true believers in Juche died in the N. Korean famine?
Upvote:2
About the bicycle thing... I don't know if they are allowed or not but I'm pretty sure they do. Pics from fall 2014 (own work)
Upvote:21
That's an interesting bit of ridicule, but I think the truth goes deeper than that. The fact is that for most North Koreans, if the women quit working on the black market (aka "free market"), they and their familes would have no money and no food. This isn't a historical thing, but an everyday thing. The choice there today is to work in the black market, or to starve to death. Nobody is going to have much luck preaching ideology (of any flavor) to someone with no other way to stay alive.
There was a very interesting NPR story on women in North Korea last week. They originally had your typical male-dominated society. So back then the official government-sanctioned jobs were effectively reserved for men, with women left to scratch out a living essentially on the (free) black market.
Somewhere along the line (the famine of the 90's you mentioned figures prominently), the government-sanctioned jobs quit paying much, if at all. To keep up the semblance of an economy the government required people with jobs to keep working at them. If you are a man and quit going to your "job", you go to jail.
So the only way for a person to feed themselves and their family is by working on the free market, and since men are required to "work" their unpaid jobs only women can do that full-time. North Korea ended up with a topsy-turvy society where women are the breadwinners, hold the positions of power in their familes, and are starting to become a political force as well. Men are resented as nothing but a drag on the whole family.
She admits her friends mockingly call their husbands "puppies" or "pets" because they have to be fed, yet they do nothing. The economics are telling: Mrs. Kim earns about 3,000 won a day at the market — the equivalent of less than 50 cents — at black market rates.
That's double what her husband would earn in an entire month, were he to get paid.
...
"Whatever your wife tells you to do, you do," says Mr. Kim, despairing. "If women say it's a cow, it's a cow. If they say it's a giraffe, it's a giraffe. We are slaves, slaves of the women. Women's voices have become louder. Men have become mute."
The government, exhitibiting all its typical eptitude, has taken to things like banning women on bicycles.
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