Since the comparison between North Korea and other dictatorships keeps arising, I feel compelled to note that North Korea is truly an edge case.
Nothing in Western democracies, Middle Eastern theocracies, or even African dictatorships comes close to the horror that is North Korea. They torture people for entertainment, without even a pretext. They kidnap children to serve as sex slaves for their leadership. They starve families to the point that parents beat their own children over single grains of rice.
North Korea is such an extreme outlier that no other extant nation compares.
This is intolerable. To have a thug like regime such as North Korea impose their will on rest of the world on what they can or can't see is infuriating.
North Korea is very much a totalitarian regime in every sense of the word. Everything flows from the state. Food. News. Entertainment. Education. Jobs. Everything. And it has been totalitarian for around 2/3rds of a century. It's very difficult to fight against something so ingrained and omni-present.
From without it's also difficult to imagine toppling the North Korean regime. To do so would almost inevitably result in quite literally hundreds of thousands of dead South Korean civilians in a matter of hours (through artillery). And perhaps just as many dead South Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, or American civilians dead through a nuclear attack. That sort of cold calculus makes it very hard to make the decision to end the DPRK regime.
I want to agree, but a big counterpoint right now is North-Korea, which has been under a totalitarian government for over 50 years now; the majority of the population is completely isolated and (if it's the right term) brainwashed. Sure, there's an underground where technology and media are passed around, but as far as I'm aware, there's no signs of collapse.
I mean I don't believe it's particularly stable, in that if the great leader is deposed there will be a power vacuum. I was kinda expecting that when Kim Jong-il died though.
Do you not understand North Korea at all? It's a tyranny subject to the whims of its ruler. The famines, the violence, the terrorism, the oppression, all of that flows from that tyranny. Haircuts are just one more example of it.
That's how totalitarian regimes work. The word "total" in there, that means the government has total control over whatever they want, including the most mundane and personal aspect of anyone's private lives.
The only state that I can think of that is remotely comparable to North Korea is pre-1992 Albania [1] - isolated and repressive, with a kind of leader-worship cult going on. After that all fell apart in the mid-nineties things didn't work out too well economically and socially, though I'm not sure that was due to mass psychological problems in the population. Survivors of cults such as Scientology that encourage isolation and obedience to a leader figure might also provide some pointers.
The problem is that it is hard to be sure about the state of mind of the general population. They could be mostly completely brainwashed and controlled; or going along with the charade out of necessity while behind the scenes there is widespread shared disgust at the leadership; or they could be living terrified, isolated lives unable to speak about their private thoughts to anyone, even their families, out of fear of police informers. People do attempt to escape the country, though, so there is some dissent.
Overall I'd say NK is unique, and when it disintegrates the social effects probably won't be like anything we've seen before.
I don't think most people realize that the North Korean regime is nearly as bad as the Nazi and Soviet Stalinist regimes. The only difference is that the impact of that regime has been comparatively limited outside of the country. Which in many ways is very sad for the unfortunates trapped inside, since it seems to mean that the world pays very much less attention to their plight.
North Korea is effectively an abusive cult in the form of an entire nation.
It's amazing that such a thing can exist, and when I really think about it the existence of something like North Korea raises disturbing questions about the nature of human consciousness.
How can we claim to have free will or to even have consciousness at all if something like North Korea can actually exist?
Here is an even bleaker concern: Looking at North Korea, I've been wondering if with modern technology totalitarian regimes are a one-way street. With the amount of surveillance in place in NK, I am unable to see how any form of resistance could be mounted. NK is behind in tech. How much harder to topple can a system like NK be with the latest tech. China seems to be moving in that direction. Surveillance coupled with modern propaganda methods for full indoctrination.
I also perceive a larger weakness for liberal democracies towards propaganda and in particular the flooding the zone with shit approach. These two things together have me very, very worried. If there is a force moving you towards a state that's very hard if not impossible to leave, it stands to expect that eventually everything will end up in that state. In this case that would be authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
North Korea isn't as isolationist as people think. It has both imports and exports. I recall reading that it has a chain of eateries in china that send back revenues to it. What it keeps out is culture.
Totalitarianism is easier then you think. You need a powerful state security apparatus, and then you make people it's victims, and it's instruments. So neighbors inform on neighbors, children on parents. You purge any people who publicly disagree with the state in the name of security, and even if people privately disagree, they won't do anything.
Sounds like fascism to me. More like what N. Korea does, you'd think that S. Korea would be averse to adding more fascism to their lives rather than less.
This is a point that probably isn't made clearer by analogy since 1970s North Korea was well ahead of 1938 Nazi Germany in totalitarianism (and camps).
Interesting - I am curious if that's common in North Korea. I can imagine there are a lot of under the radar rumblings about how things are supposed to be as opposed to how they are. Thus I could assuming that most obedience is fear based as opposed to actual loyalty.
Are you saying that North Korea is an example of what happens when individualism runs amok?
On the contrary, North Korea seems like a collectivist's paradise. Total state control with omnipresent regulation. I wonder what the punishment for trading cryptocurrencies looks like there.
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