You keep proving you don’t actually understand this subject. You misread, you overstate, you walk it back, and then pivot without addressing the core issue.

We already established you were wrong on literacy. You were comfortable declaring something “impossible” with zero methodological grounding.

Now you want to lean on Human Rights Watch and UN defector reports as if that settles it. HRW again is a privately funded New York NGO with no on-the-ground access in the DPRK. Its reporting relies overwhelmingly on defector testimony filtered through NGOs and institutions embedded in Western policy networks. It’s adversarial-source reporting shaped by a very specific geopolitical environment.

You might as well cite Radio Free Asia. Different logo, same alignment: institutions whose mandate or funding structure is tied to states openly hostile to the DPRK.

As for UN “reports,” most of them rely on the exact same defector pipelines. They are not independent mass surveys conducted inside the country. They are structured interviews with people who have already exited under specific political and economic incentives.

Let’s talk about those incentives.

Defectors to South Korea receive state resettlement packages, financial assistance, housing support, and integration programs. There is a media ecosystem in the South that rewards the most dramatic narratives with book deals, television appearances, NGO careers, and speaking circuits. South Korean intelligence agencies have historically screened and processed defectors. None of this automatically means “everyone is lying.” It does mean there are material incentives, institutional filters, and political framing at work.

When testimony is gathered outside the country, from a self-selecting group, processed through security services, NGOs, and Western institutions, and then presented as comprehensive evidence about 25 million people, that is not clean data. It is structurally biased evidence.

Meanwhile, anything produced inside the DPRK is dismissed out of hand as propaganda. So Western-aligned sources are presumed credible, socialist-state sources are presumed fraudulent. That asymmetry is doing all the heavy lifting in your argument.

“Hate the government, not the people” also sounds tidy until you realize the state in question survived total war, the destruction of nearly every major city, the killing of roughly 20% of its population, and decades of sanctions without collapsing internally. People lived in caves after U.S. bombing campaigns flattened urban infrastructure and flooded farmland by targeting dams.

Then came seventy years of sanctions, trade embargoes, financial isolation, technology bans, fuel restrictions, and constant military encirclement. This is long-term siege warfare in modern form.

You don’t get to wave that away as background context and then reduce everything to “the Kim family.”

If you strip out war, annihilation-level destruction, sanctions, isolation, and security compulsion and still insist governance style is the primary explanatory variable the only possible explanation is that you are supremely idiotic or are pushing western narratives on purpose.

The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in... unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:

Felix Abt, a Swiss businessman who lived in the DPRK, argues that defectors are inherently biased. He says that 70 percent of defectors in South Korea are unemployed, and selling sensationalist stories is a way for them to make a living.

Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you're curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.

Because of these issues, there is a long history of what we consider legitimate news sources of reporting and then walking back stories. Even the famous "120 dogs" execution ended up to have been a fabrication originating in a Chinese satirical column, reported entirely seriously and later walked back by some news outlets. The famous "unicorn lair" story ended up being a misunderstanding:

In fact, the report is a propaganda piece likely geared at shoring up the rule of Kim Jong Eun, North Korea's young and relatively new leader, said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Most likely, North Koreans don't take the report literally, Lee told LiveScience.

"It's more symbolic," Lee said, adding, "My take is North Koreans don't believe all of that, but they bring certain symbolic value to celebrating your own identify, maybe even notions of cultural exceptionalism and superiority. It boosts morale."

These aren't tabloids, these are mainstream news sources. NBC News reported the 120 dogs story. Same with USA Today. The frequently reported concept of "state-mandated haircut styles", as an example, also ended up being bogus sensationalism. People have made entire videos going over this long-running sensationalist misinformation, why it exists, and debunking some of the more absurd articles. As for Radio Free Asia, it is US-government founded and funded. There is good reason to be skeptical of reports sourced entirely from RFA about geopolitical enemies of the US Empire.

Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an "acceptable outlet" for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about "barbaric Koreans" pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a "get out of jail free" card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.

It's important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.

In fact, many citizens who flee the DPRK actually seek to return, and are denied by the ROK. Even BBC is reporting on a high-profile case where a 95 year old veteran wishes to be buried in his homeland, sparking protests by pro-reunification activists in the ROK to help him go home in his final years.

Finally, it's more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.

What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire's influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.

Nodutdol, an anti-imperialist group of Korean expats, released a toolkit on better understanding the situation in Korea. This is more like homework, though. I also recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance for learning about the DPRK's democratic structure.