A common smear against socialism are the myths of breadlines and empty supermarkets, something that even some ardent anti-soviet "comrades" here uphold. When you reverse google image search them, you are often able to find the original source (even it takes a while) And what gives? You will find that a picture which is used by dozens of news sites was
In this thread I will get the ball rolling and show some examples. My hope is that as the thread fills up we can use this as an exposition of systematic lying by the media to smear socialism. Reverse image search the first picture and the first google suggestion is venezuela, and you'll get a dozen or so articles about it. Most of them are of a lower resolution and that's where my search started until I found a higher resolution one, which lets you clearly see this is not Venezuela at all.
First pic: a Japanese supermarket after the tsunami Second pic: first result for "soviet supermarket", supposedly a soviet supermarket in 1986. Actually a post-soviet supermarket in 1990 Talinn. Third pic: breadline in 1917 tsarist russia. Reverse google image search will tell you it's "soviet russia"
How could anyone fall for the first image? Does that hoe look venezuelan to americans? Jesus fucking chirst. They should have said north korea if they wanted to he a bit more credible, I mean the woman is literally asian
Aiden Lee
are you insulting the asian-venezuelan population, shitlord?!
you could probably fill an entire book with that kind of stuff title it "socialist bread lines" so the dumbasses will buy it, then debunk the whole thing so they die from having a stroke
Joseph Young
lmao it really does.
Most pictures of empty shelves are from post-1985, after Gorbachev's market reforms. The pictures I can find of the USSR before all show filled, lush sections but it doesn't matter, libshits will dismiss it as "propaganda".
Oliver Diaz
What source is that first one?
Aiden Reed
My favorite:
< What, the one in Detroit?
Austin Clark
That only makes sense if you're not American. Detroit doesn't have any bread lines because there are no places to buy bread, and people don't want it anyway when they'd rather buy Mcdonalds, malt liquor or smokes. This is part of a larger problem where grocery stores will simply not operate in poor areas because """"youths"""" will habitually steal things and loiter outside, which almost always leads to fighting. This is why grocery stores near urban areas typically ban backpacks within them and require minors to be attended by an adult.
Also welfare is done through EBT cards that don't require standing in line except when people are at the post office (as the USPS does not deliver to most of Detroit anymore due to attacks on mailmen).
Same for the poorest parts of America along the Mississippi and within indian reservations, no bread lines because there simply is no place to buy bread. Tons of liquor stores though.
Camden Flores
Wouldn't liquor stoles be even more susceptible to being stolen from and having fights started in them?
Eli Powell
Average Sunday/ last day of the week in America.
Adam Lopez
*month
Hudson Wright
Find one where it is just corn everywhere.
Connor Morales
no they're all barred up so you can't get back to stuff but request it at the front and they're all armed
Wyatt Nelson
Meanwhile there was never such a gas crisis in the Comecon.
Because you couldn't afford to own a car in the first place
Carson Morales
Or that Leningrad had the worlds largest tram network in the world at the time.
Xavier Anderson
I posted this on /liberty/ and one of the replies to me was that it was photoshopped, another reply was from some guy supposedly living in a post-Soviet country who called me retarded for implying Soviet citizens usually shopped at stores like this picture rather than a local supermarket. Which is kind of missing the point entirely.
The problem with internalized anti-communist propaganda is that people demand you to prove a negative. You show them a picture of a supermarket, and "it's photoshopped", "state propaganda", and even if it is an independent amateur photographer "well he was only shown that one".
Just check out the comments under every DPRK video on YouTube. It's crazy. People will say that all the buildings are fake, or that "the food is plastic" because they saw that in The Interview. This is some moonlanding tier bullshit I've you think about it. Sure the DPRK has bad spots but fucking hell.
I don't know, most of these pictures in shops are taken during business exchanges, I would assume: paektuculturalexchange.org/ I forgot their instagram but they have plenty of pictures from malls and grocery stores on there.
What I have seen recently under a North Korea video that showed a store was that "they put sawdust in the food". Apparently the poster had a father coming from a "socialist country" and every day they would eat sawdust. Never encountered that before.
Yeah that's it. I also had this guy in mind instagram.com/erictalmadge/ who is not pro-DPRK, I think. He puts a weird filter on his pics to make them look grittier.
Benjamin Taylor
Sawdust in food is a pretty common myth about the USSR and other eastern bloc countries
this shit actually makes me mad. the fact that people will actually peddle this obvious bullshit and get others to believe it baffles me. like why the fuck would they do shit like put sawdust into food? why would they build fake supermarkets if they could just make real ones and not waste resources? what are they gaining from this? what kind of fucking hellscape do these people think the DPRK is? fake shit, mandated haircuts, unicorns, starvation, etc. etc. and people will believe it no matter what because "muh scary isolated dictatorship". why do they have this idea that the DPRK was created purely to enslave the population like this? it's so fucking comical and makes 0 sense. with the general population believing these lies how in the fuck are we supposed to get them to support a revolution? we can try debunking it but they're always gonna say shit like "fake photographs!!!11" so what's the point? there is no fucking way a revolution can take place in the west when it's full of bullshit like this.
We used to have those retards come in daily here to try to tell us their "true" stories. One of my favorites are the retards that claim their family was all KGB and that only they were rich, while the common folk died of starvation 24/7
Dominic Taylor
I do personally love it when burgers ignorantly claim that their precious market economy has never had a widespread shortage ala a planned economy. I have heard so many burgers say this, that I can only assume that it is something taught to them in what rubbish passes as history classes in freedom-land.
Fake. The food is plastic, the people are actors, the store is just an elaborate set. Just listen to this defector, he says half the people there are gulag inmates and the other half are secret police and the real purpose of that building is to House Kim Jong-un’s personal rape dungeon/shrine to Satan.
To be fair there are actual asians in Latin America, Peru in particular
Christopher Morales
It's an interesting argument, because when you check out Munsu Water Park it's pretty fucking packed. So are the fun fairs. According to this theory, the "North Korean elite" consists of tens of thousands of people, not really making it an elite anymore, wouldn't you say?
Colton Collins
Well North Korea has like 25 million people. The "Pyongyang is mostly a city for the elite" (specifically, political/military elite) is the best argument I've seen against the country. The way to respond might be to demonstrate that even the poorest areas are either better off than comparable areas in capitalist nations or at least not worse.
Blake Clark
Well that in case you can look at pictures from Wonsan or Kaesong, or pictures from the countryside. There is a Twitter account of this Vietnamese girl that lives there and posts pics of the countryside and other stuff that you do not usually see in North Korean media (can't find it right now), and we can tell that it is not as nice as Pyongyang, it certainly isn't riddled with abject poverty and horrible living standards. It really "isn't the best argument" in my opinion, because most people who make this argument havn't seen pictures from non-Pyongyang DPRK or have only seen very selective photos that are paraded arround in the West as "the North Korea Kim doesn't want you see", etc. - it's like people making photos of trailer parks and then say "that's how people live in the US" (although I do not mean to imply that a middle class American is not better off than an average North Korean).
Nolan Stewart
Yeah it's easy to stage photos of places being awful to live in. I can grab a camera and go to the closest gypsy part of town and take a few pictures of their cardboard/tin houses and claim this is what the whole country is.
Thomas Martinez
If you find her Twitter please post it here, I'm watching this thread and that's a resource I could find useful.
Jacob Richardson
Simple: there has yet to be such a thing as a (non-primitive, post-agrarian) society without neither State, capital, private property, money, the commodity form and defined social relations to production, i.e. socialism.
Now stop clinging on to destitute historical and will-be historical examples of Taylorism draped in red flags and read Marx or something.
if we want to actually tackle these we have to admit their truth in FAILED leftist regimes like VZ and the USSR. The only things using false pics like this are clickbait banner ads and shit. no one cares about niggers
Jaxon Anderson
I TRIED SO HARD AND GET SO FAR
Nolan Wood
A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America
Pointing out propaganda from shameless propaganda sources is a waste of time, do you have pics of any articles from big """reputable""" sources doing this?
Mason Allen
Zig Forumsack couldn't help himself
Only correcting reputable sources gets you nowhere. Combating misinformation campaigns is the best way to get people to believe in leftism.
Joseph Torres
Must have been bedtime.
Thought it might be UK in the 40s/50s, but it says 1983. Fucking Thatcher
Julian King
what's with these tire piles in desolated areas
Joseph Fisher
You do realize that people get their information from these outlets? Everything that has been posted in this thread is going to be brought up by uninformed libs whenever the subject arises. If got a coin for everytime this 1990 Talinn gorcery store got presented to me I'd be rich. At least you can point out that they are frauds and make them look like idiots. "Reputable" sources don't do this (they nonetheless try hard to make socialism look bad), but nobody reads their articles in the feuilleton about a gay performance artist in 80s Vladivostok or whatever.
I've always asked myself that. What's up with all these tires?
Dominic Perry
Juche =/= communism , they disavowed that themselves and they have taken down all the pictures of Marx and replaced any trace of Marx's ideals with a cult of personality. the DPRK is a monarchy , it is not communist any more.
But back to the main point of addressing the content of the picture.
Having nice stuff for the people who hold the keys to power is pretty essential and high ranking officials need to be rewarded to remain loyal to the regime. So having nice supermarkets and amusement parks and ski resorts is an absolute necessity. (he may be a dictator that is misusing the word socialism, but he knows enough to keep his core supporters loyal)
Chase Hall
There's literally an entire thread on this board RIGHT NOW that has debunked the shit out of this how many fucking times are you faggots going to say it
David Baker
I also think the DPRK's socialist credentials are shaky but you are beyond retarded if you believe the supermarkets are just there for the party elite.
There were lines in the USSR. Sometimes because of a limited supply in rural areas and you had to wake up in early morning to buy your weekly slab of meat that you chose out of two, sometimes because the butcher was on break and everything was abundant. Sometimes people would drive to central cities like Moscow to buy products.
I don't see a reason to deny there were lines (and by that I mean the sort you wouldn't find in western countries or capitalist economies). You're better off painting to a realistic picture than trying to say every pic is false.
What is this from, is it satire? I literally have no idea how you could actually believe this considering that the DPRK is just the remnant of the provisional government the US dismantled in the south.
Oliver Ortiz
For not letting cars (like police cars) in, I guess. Places like that are the natural environment of junkies, cheap whores and drug dealers, which begs another question. What can we do to help these kind of people in a hypothetical socialist society?
Copy the drug approach of places like the netherlands and portugal, and with guaranteed work and good income women would not need to prostitute themselves.
Easton Taylor
Surely your imagination can stretch further than the glorious Volksrepubliek Nederland? Our drug policy with weed is basically that we tolerate it but it's one of those cases of contradictory legislature typical of capitalism. Sale, ownership and use is legal but actual production is not. You have a legalized market that still requires black production.
