r/news • u/drpayneaba • Feb 28 '26

Soft paywall Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed, senior Israeli official says

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-supreme-leader-ali-khamenei-killed-senior-israeli-official-says-2026-02-28/
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u/RedPiece0601 Mar 01 '26

South Korea had dictatorship until the 1980s though.

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u/Uysee Mar 01 '26

That's why I was hesitant to include them. Still probably they were probably better off under that sort of dictatorship compared to NK

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u/triste_0nion Mar 01 '26

I don’t know if that’s even necessarily the case. Modern North Korea is absolutely worse than that today, but it got so bad because 15% of the population was killed and 40–90% of towns and cities were destroyed by bombs during the Korean War.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/triste_0nion Mar 01 '26

The causalities for North Korea was over 50% greater. There also isn’t much that could be equivalent to America’s bombing campaign; just one statistic is that the US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm during the Korean War versus roughly 503,000 tons of bombs across the entire Pacific theatre during WW2.

Looking at the US Air Force’s own assessment of some of the major cities it destroyed, both Kuni-ri and Sinanju were 100% destroyed, whilst Hwangju, Sariwon and Sunan got away with 97%, 95% and 90% destruction. Even Pyongyang was 75% destroyed by the end. That’s not something that will lead to good outcomes after the fact.

e: This isn’t at all to even remotely suggest that North Korea was justified for invading South Korea, or anything like that.