I’m…very critical of the DPRK personally. I think Juche as an ideology, while it has some interesting points, is pretty idealist and departs far too far from Marxist principles. And yes, the Kim personality cult rubs me the wrong way. That said the American Civic Cult gives me the same vibes. As does the Australian Anzac Cult, Britains hard on for Churchill and Nelson and the Royals etc etc

The DPRK has many flaws; it’s over militarised. Its inner cadre is insular and often slow to adapt. Its relations with China could be a lot better if they’d roll back on the Juche just a bit. There’s a nasty stink of Neo-Confucianism all over some of its political organs (but then, we might say that western communist parties often adopt some of the negative aspects of Christian ideology like millenarianism and purity cults.)

But it’s not the starving absolute monarchy often depicted in western media (though like Cuba it did have a fairly severe famine in the 1990s, after the SU fell and before it could re-normalise Chinese relations (the DPRK was on the soviet side of the split, if you recall). Kim is mostly a figurehead, he has power as does his family, but less than Stalin or Mao did, and those too were not the dictators people make them out to be, frequently losing votes and having preferred policies blocked by the rest of the party. The Kim family live privileged lives, sometimes spoiled lives, but no more than the US president. They don’t actually own all those palaces, and if they step too far out of line the Party won’t hesitate to take them away and find a third cousin to pick up the torch of Kim il Sung’s legacy.

As for the inner party, yeah, it sucks and I’d prefer Sankara’s approach of making their upper officials drive second hand 30 year old rust buckets and live in studio apartments. But then you have headlines in the west “North Korea so poor, their ambassador can’t afford a car or proper clothes.” The unfortunate fact is that appearances need to be kept up, and also, upper officials in any nation tend to work 80+ hours a week under high stress conditions where loss of acuity is not an option. I know we laugh at Biden and Sunak, but they (or at least their handlers) are actually terrifyingly smart people who can work crunch for years at a time without flinching. They need the comfortable offices, drivers, and business-class flights to do their jobs effectively.

Yes, it has a lower standard of living, but like Cuba, it can’t trade with anyone (and no, trade with China isn’t easy when a company that trades with the DPRK cannot, at any point in any operation, use a single Western financial institution, business, or NGO in any transaction (even those with non DPRK companies) without getting hit by the sanction hammer.) People there live ok lives, they eat regularly, they buy consumer goods, they go to their jobs, which sometimes suck. There’s a robust health and welfare network, there’s pretty good education, and while the military take up too much GDP, there is opportunity for economic expansion and it has in fact been catching up. It is fairly easy to get involved with local political committees and the average citizen has more control over local and even national policy than in western nations.

There’s an old joke. In the USA you can choose your party, but not the policy. In China, you can choose the policy, but not the party. The same goes for the DPRK. By the time an issue reaches a caucus, it’s been passed back and forth through representatives a thousand times, and every sector of society has had its say. The parliament is a rubber stamp because all the arguing happens at a lower level where people have more direct involvement. It’s still not perfect, or even good, but I don’t think it’s worse than a Parliamentary republic, and better than a Presidential one.

Defectors are unreliable because they’re often paid better the more outlandish their stories are, which is where we get people like Park talking about the one train that Korea has that they have to get out and pull in the winter and if you fall down in the cold they shoot you with an anti aircraft gun and send your family to the mines to pay the cost of the bullet. Many defect because they were smugglers or black marketeers who found themselves on the run, which is how they had the connections to cross the border in the first place. Others are disaffected military personnel, or cadre that lost a political infight and may have pointed critique that is at least worth trying to pick through. Some just watch too many bootleg shows, and those ask for repatriation more often than you might think.

I’ve actually had the pleasure of knowing a couple of North Koreans as casual aquaintances, and they’re normal, if somewhat insular people, who live normal lives. They laugh, they get annoyed, they have an unfortunate addiction to Chilean Tempranillos of dubious quality…

Yes, it does come to a point where I won’t defend a nation or group, somewhere not too far beyond where the DPRK is. Unlike others here I don’t offer Russia as it stands critical support, nor do I offer it to any nation that doesn’t at least pay lip service to Socialism. Something like Pol Pot I unequivocally condemn, as masking a murderous agrarian reaction in a red flag. There are (mercifully small) factions in the CPC that could move China in a direction I could not follow.

PatSocs, Nasbols, etc are also not deserving of critique. In fact my standards for non ruling parties are far higher than for ruling ones. After all, no plan survives contact with reality.