GarbageShoot

Apparently it was "common knowledge" for decades in Japan and occupied Korea that Kim Il-Sung was actually some other dude impersonating a veteran guerilla with that name. Unhinged conspiracy theories are the stock-in-trade of western-aligned coverage of the DPRK.

Edit: By the way, if you look this up, you'll still see popular media lending a lot of credence to this claim, because no lie is too pathetic to be asserted about the DPRK today.

He looks so funny there. Very "large adult son".

sometimes questionable moderation

That's one way of putting it. Another way is "ramrodding the narratives of anglo chauvinists that are to the right of even the neoliberal historical consensus".

So it's like the Hannibal Lecter series but without the weird sex stuff?

Much better, he robbed banks

There are some really interesting interviews with Stalin, some examples:

With Emil Ludwig, my favorite

With Roy Howard

And of course with HG Wells

When assessing someone, it's good to let them speak for themselves, even if your attitude towards what they say is nonetheless one of complete skepticism. Of course, Stalin wrote a few books and some of them are very accessible, so that's another option.

Then the question comes back to what they were actually charged with.

What were those family members charged with? I know that the Nazi camps (presumably even including Auschwitz) were used in the immediate aftermath of the war as housing for the people they had imprisoned while resettlement was being sorted out, but I've never heard of people going from a death camp to a Siberian prison (partly because that's a bit of a trip, all the way from Central Europe to Northeast Asia). Could it have been, for instance, that they were resettled in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Siberia, committed some mundane crimes over there (nothing against them for this, people with severe PTSD usually struggle to reintegrate with society) and then got sent to a local prison? Without further information, it's very difficult to figure out what might have happened, especially for someone like me who is not too knowledgeable (and unfortunately I don't think my local library has relevant information).

So for you someone's life is worth a "bag of food"

That's a question I'd direct to your ancestors if they were hoarding food during a famine to price-gouge the poorer peasantry.

Of course, that's just one possibility, but we know people were killed for that reason and we don't have even the slightest evidence people were killed by the CC for "being Jewish" during that period, so if you can't produce any better historical evidence, the default is probably that they were twisting the knife on famine victims and don't need tears shed for them.

Well, one of the differences is that it's good to have positive examples to point to as socialists, Cuba can only carry so much weight and the DPRK is a bit of a hurdle. Just as we can all agree it would broadly be misbegotten to point to Denmark as a case of "socialism works", there is the question of if it would likewise be an error to point to China this way.

This is really super incredibly simple to define.

The question is whether the people have remained in power or if, for example, Deng used his credibility and connections to instigate a counterrevolution like, in many respects, Khrushchev could be said to have done. The fact that there was a revolution does not, itself, insulate a country from such criticism when a lot has happened since that time and they seem to give about as much credit to a right-deviationist as they do to the country's founder.