Here in Brazil it’s much simpler because when you rent a place, basic services like electricity and water are transferred to you. So you get the bills, not your landlord.

And services like internet, you hire your own instead of using the ISP hired by your landlord.

I’ve never heard of Pokémon Leggenos.

Yes, they can. But they would go against UN decisions, if they do that. And yes, while I know that they’re sovereign countries and the UN can’t stop them, international diplomacy is complicated and fragile.

Not only that, but these sanctions need international coordination to be effective. If it’s just a couple countries not dealing with them, nothing will happen. They’ll just do business with someone else.

I just hope we can drop the UN altogether and create something else in its place. Something more democratic, where votes count. Having the most sanguinary war machine of a country having the right to veto peace talks is completely insane.

That was a miswording on my part. I meant it would decide that. Which means they would at least impose sanctions against Israel (like they should’ve done years ago) if they didn’t stop.

If Israel would actually stop, nobody knows. But countries would do something to discourage them.

I think that a voting system is good. The problem is the veto power.

The results of voting would decide to stop Israel from attacking Palestine, if it wasn’t for the US’ veto. Voting would also lift the stupid embargo against Cuba, if it wasn’t for the US veto. Etc.

That kind of power over the UN shouldn’t exist.

That’s why some countries are talking about creating an alternative UN. That schism can’t be good.

You work to strengthen unions and take down capitalism.

Sorry, I thought you mentioned food just as an example of stuff in general.

Food is a bit easier to trade with NK, although there’s pressure for countries to not do that.

If I’m not mistaken, they mostly bought food from China. But they stopped when the pandemic hit, as an attempt to preserve their country.

I also remember Brazil (where I live) invested a little bit in trading basic resources like food with “undesirable” countries like NK and Venezuela. But it’s very complicated because they can’t use the normal international means of bank transfer, and there were people complaining about feeding crazy countries. Of course, “crazy” means you don’t jump when imperialists say “jump”.

But anyway, not being able to easily transfer money makes it harder. And they’re far away, which makes it more expensive.

If it wasn’t for countries like China, these embargoed socialist countries would be in a much worse situation. I hope NK’s food trade with China goes back to normal, because no one deserves to starve.

I don’t think so. But maybe there are.

It’s much more complicated. There are many countries that doesn’t have an embargo against them, but still gets blocked by the US embargo. The US considers that selling them anything that had an American company involved is helping brake the embargo, and will bring consequences.

So let’s say India wants to sell them electric bikes. These bikes are made in India. With engines made in China. And wheels made in… Germany.

I never mentioned major parts coming from the US, right? But let’s say one screw in the engine was bought from the UK, and that company from the UK is owned by a company from the US. Because of that single screw, selling that bike to NK would be considered an attempt to help a country bypass the embargo. And India doesn’t want to lose all the commerce they have with the US and their direct allies.

Since the US owns companies all around the world, they use that to “force” almost all countries in the world to also not sell to NK or Cuba, even though those countries are not part of the embargo.

Edit: The UN can make a decision to end these embargoes. But the US holds a special position in the UN, with special veto powers. Brazil recently proposed to end the Cuban embargo. Most countries started voting yes. They all want to sell to Cuba. And then the US said “veto”, ending the proposition even if most countries were voting yes.

There have been talks between BRICS countries about creating an alternative UN, since the US vetoes anything that doesn’t directly benefit them.

Yes, China gets to be an exception for two big reasons. One is that they’re only partially socialist. They allow American companies to profit from their population, which pleases the US (a little). And the biggest one is that China is powerful. Power creates exceptions.

The US tries to find loopholes all the time, though. They’re always trying to harm China without creating an all-out economic war. Coming up with lies regarding Huawei as an excuse to block them, etc. But they can’t create a blockade against China, because the US would probably lose more than China. The US depends on China more than China depends on the US. Specially because China is the country holding the biggest amount of US national debt, and US dollars.

It’s not their fault. They’re covered in so much US propaganda that they’re delusional because of it. But we can always hope things will change in the future.

Yes. Because being able to publish propaganda is very different from being able to censor information that is published in another country.

The US creates an overflowing amount of propaganda and they can push that to other countries. But they can’t come in here and take books away from libraries and bookstores. That’s not how things work.

Their strategy is to drown the truth. And they’re really good at it.

The US is not the entire world.

There are many books and documentaries with a less biased view of North Korea.

But the US is by far the biggest propaganda machine the world has ever seen. And when you hear something so many times without having access to different viewpoints, you might think it’s true and that “the entire world” agrees with it.

You’re reading too much north american propaganda.

Next you’ll tell me that Cubans eat kids and Chinese have secret holes all the way to the US to spy on people.

Yes, very few were Koreans going to China when he recorded the video. I just meant to show that they CAN go to China.

Korea is not a free country

No country is 100% free. They’re at war. Brazil is not. Not only that, but they’ve been infiltrated by CIA agents posing as tourists multiple times. So now they banned pictures of their military.

But if you watch other videos from that playlist, you’ll see they did record military a few times.

There’s many videos, interviews, and books for you to read

I did. A lot. Like, A LOT.

Unfortunately, some of the weirdest stories come from CIA-created propaganda.

But NK did have a very bad period, which is when most refugees left North Korea. They were invaded and had their infrastructure destroyed so bad that they had to go back to using animal traction instead of motorized vehicles.

That lack of infrastructure, together with the US preventing them from buying things from most other countries, meant lots of people were hungry and scared. They left Korea thinking that it was the worst place in the world. And for a few years, it probably was.

Do you remember when a couple weeks of truck drivers on strike creating a blockade sent Brazil into chaos? Now imagine a blockade that lasts for decades. Now imagine that when someone destroyed your country so hard that you don’t even have reliable roads or factories.

I would leave the country for much less.

But they reverted that with a lot of hard work. North Korea today is not the same NK that these immigrants left behind a few decades ago. I’m not saying its perfect, I’m saying it’s not the hell that the US tries to make it look like. And it would probably be a very very good country to live in, if they could buy food and technology from outside.

Hi. This is his video taking the regular train between NK and China. He made a playlist with his videos in NK.

https://youtu.be/H9U78uolV80?si=C6HNaKU8KCFQOCRN

I don’t know if there’s a way to generate translations from Portuguese to English, though.

Also, I don’t know what are China’s rules on immigration. They already have 500 trillion people, so they probably don’t make it easy to immigrate.

But no one in China will stop you from going from China to other countries. There are North Koreans that moved here to Brazil. And you can probably find them in other countries as well.

I would guess that the biggest barrier preventing anyone from migrating is that it’s hard as hell. Not the process itself, but leaving everything behind and moving far away, speaking another language.

And they would have to leave behind a country where they have free housing, absolutely zero taxes, good education, safety, and most important: guaranteed employment. So even though the US-imposed blockade makes their lives much harder, many people consider it to be better than moving to China and working 6 days a week in a low income job. Or working a low income job in any other nearby country.

Being socialist.

The US can’t let socialist countries thrive. Or people would realize that a better system is possible. It would destroy the current narrative that “capitalism might be bad, but it’s the only possible system”.

Most things that people use to criticize countries like Cuba or NK aren’t their fault or even their choice.

When people talk about socialist countries, they don’t mention its positives like good education, affordable housing, safety, employment rates, etc.

They say things like “Cuba has old cars and slow internet” or “In North Korea most people can’t have cars and even lack vitamin C”. But all of that is because of the blockade, not because socialism causes that.

And if you dare to be socialist, the US will do everything it can to sabotage the country, no matter how many people will suffer because of that.

There’s been decades of US propaganda against any socialist country. It makes people delusional.

It gets even stronger in countries that have been occupied by the US military, like South Korea. When you’re born to that, you start seeing that as normal. You start to think it’s okay that most of the sovereignty of your country has been taken away. Most people in SK have never lived in a sovereign country that can make its own decisions.

They normalize that. And they start to sound delusional to others. But it’s not their fault.

North Koreans can cross the border. The US have been feeding you too much propaganda.

When my cousin was there, he took a train from North Korea to China, along with several other Koreans. It’s a regular train between the two countries. I can link to his YouTube video (it’s in Portuguese, can at least you can see the train even if you don’t understand what he’s saying).

The only border they can’t cross is to South Korea. But that’s because they’re at war, not because of fear they won’t come back.