An excellent piece of oratory, which has little to do with North Korea or the other North Korea (a.k.a. Albania) specifically. Some highlights from the transcript :
The world is treated as a duality, and small changes, no matter how slight, are more often than not used as segues to the worst possible examples. Venezuela is what happens when you socialize medicine, not Canada. Nazi Germany is what happens when you control your borders, not Switzerland.
Switzerland's a member of the Schengen area and a bizarre example to use here, but the point is valid.
To the ideologically focused, every slope is slippery. Every grey area is just another shade of black or white. And because of that lack of nuance, things that genuinely are the extremes of fascism and communism are treated with the same outrage as things that aren’t.
Communism, totalitarianism, dictatorships, fascism, they all come with positives. If they didn’t, they’d never make it to power. The question is what’s traded in return. If we really want to learn from their mistakes, we absolutely need to look at how they got there. It’s disingenuous to only discuss failed societies from a post-collapse perspective.
The base necessities can only take you so far. And to explain, I’d like to use an example given to me by an Albanian man I talked with while making this episode. He believes the state is like a house, and the most important part of sustaining that house is a strong foundation. The four main pillars of the nation are health, shelter, food, and security. If all four are taken care of, people tend to be able to put up with any leader, in any system. But eventually, something needs to be built on top of that foundation, and that’s where things get complicated.
Because the beauty of building a foundation is that everyone is able to imagine a different house on top. Hope has a way of blinding us. We humans are more than willing to harm ourselves so long as it means we can continue believing.
When chaos reigns, dictators thrive. And it doesn’t matter if you’re left or right. The truth is non-partisan. When we refuse to repair the pillars of our society, our society falls. Extremism doesn't have one face. Hoxha’s Albania, Kim’s North Korea, Putin’s Russia, Duterte’s Philippines, Erdogan’s Turkey, and Trump’s America all wear similar masks. It doesn’t matter if we start on the left and right, we all fall towards the same place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUTs9-vsO6k
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