I went to a talk by a couple of defectors, one of which was an embassy employee and they explained that they were always tasked with earning money through means like selling illegal alcohol etc. sanctions obviously make legal trade impossible with many countries.
From what I understood there is a huge flow of drugs like meth from NK into China. They are basically just a mafia state who will do anything for money.
Yes, but.. it doesn't seem completely a complete non-sequitur.
Thoughts about whataboutism: When you say "Y is basically just a mafia state who will do anything for money", there seems an unspoken premise "My country X is not like that/is better than that." And to someone to whom X is not better than Y in that respect, the initial claim sounds like "Y is evil because they have two legs", when X has two legs also. It sounds ignorantly hypocritical. How else to point out "Uh, but you also have two legs, although you're acting like you don't."? The problem wasn't that the first claim wasn't true, but that it was spoken in a hypocritical way, saying one party is bad for a reason which applies equally to the other party. And to someone to whom both parties seem to have the bad condition, before they can hear or really respond to the "Y is bad" claim, you really have to deal with—justify—your own unspoken premise of "My own country X doesn't do the bad thing."
Just saying "But X also does the same bad thing!" gets accused of whataboutism, as here. "Parent said nothing about X". True, not explicitly, but X appeared in the unspoken premises. Which loom large if you think one or more of them false.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I guess maybe saying "I think you have an unspoken premise, which seems false to me, that your country X doesn't do the bad thing you are accusing Y of" at least has a milder tone.
It’s likely true that defectors (by reason they defected) have legitimate stories to tell and they are both paid & given a platform to tell their stories by governments. Giving someone a megaphone doesn’t make their story less true does it?
When you can make a living telling stories about how awful the country you defected from is, it probably makes sense to embellish at least a few of them. It's not like anyone's going to be able to tell the awful and true ones apart from the awful and untrue ones.
I once listened to an interview with the head of the Seoul office of the U.N. Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, and if I remember correctly she said that they had to be careful to base their work on reports from defectors because they were aware that some reports might be exaggerated or made up.
"Youtube" itself is not a source of information. It is a site where people post videos. Journalists post videos on Youtube through BBC, Economist, Washington Post, Nightline/PBS, etc...
Does their posting content on Youtube make them less credible?
Judge the originator of the content, not who hosts it.
Might as well go "Ah yes, the internet. A trusted source of information."
Probably not the current SK government. The current president is liberal side - less pro-American and more pro-peace-talk. (Conservatives would even accuse him of being pro-China, though, to be honest, that's ridiculous.)
However, SK is a free capitalist country, and NK defectors need to eat, so some of them find gainful jobs telling conservative pundits what they want to hear.
Of course there's no doubt that NK is a horrible, horrible place, but still, sometimes you have to take some of these viewpoints with a grain of salt.
I think you are kind of overlooking that the situation is a bit more complicated than just some of the defectors telling conservative pundits what they want to hear. It seems to me from a little digging that detainment of former citizens of the North by the NIS is indeed a coercive process that happens long before the defector even has opportunity to speak to the pundits. How can this be simplified so much?
Regardless of whether the accusations about defectors being coerced to make North Korea sound worse are true, honestly this just sounds like an obvious consequence.
If you isolate a country economically by cutting off all legal ways for it to trade with the international community, it will have to rely on illegal ways.
Generalized trade sanctions have time and again proven to be ineffective because they are so indiscriminate. They're meant to work as a deterrent, not a punishment. But the deterrent works with the threat of disrupting the economy, which only works short-term as the existing supply chains come to a halt and businesses panic. If you sit the sanctions out long enough, the economy will have already collapsed and will rebuild itself under the new restrictions. Once the economy has adapted, the sanctions are no longer a deterrent, they're just how things are, and the promise of conditionally lifting the sanctions feels like a trap because it would require changes to the economy that would again make it vulnerable to those sanctions if they were reinstated.
