Not quite answering your question, but I highly recommend reading Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demrick. It's a really interesting book about daily north Korean life based on accounts of defectors. It does a really good job at humanizing North Koreans and understanding how the country works for day to day life.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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iirc one of the issues is that even if things go perfectly on a military front no one is quite sure how to handle and de-program/rehabilitate 25.5 million people a large quantity of which likely lack any skills that would be useful in western economies.
a large quantity of which likely lack any skills that would be useful in western economies.
What an alarming thing to say...
I'm not saying its a good reason, just a reason. We could easily afford it if we took some of that magic money that goes into military funding blackholes or magical infastructure projects that never get built yet somehow break records on cost. Sadly the decision is being made by people with no sense of empathy or value for human life.
We all see and hear what goes on over there.
Do we? We only get a little bit of news from there, and I wouldn't be sure how reliable it is.
Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people.
Help how? Go to war and slaughter most of their population? They are already heavily mobilized, and no doubt they'd conscript a lot more in case of a conflict. Not to mention they have nukes.
Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization?
Who is 'we'? No offence, but this sounds like some oblivious American patriot asking why America hasn't saved the world yet.
Is just not lucrative to step in?
Most countries don't have their own nukes, so they will never even consider getting into a conflict with a country that does have them. Most countries don't have even a fraction of the resources needed for any sort of operation.
Plus, North Korea has powerful allies (like China) and is technically a member of the UN, so you can't just disregard everything and conquer it.
One thing I have not seen brought up yet is that Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea. Even if North Korea didn't have nukes they could bombard the city with conventional arms or even chemical weapons and kill hundreds of thousands in the first day or two.
The short answer is that they have nukes.
china is the only reason why NK doesnt collapse right away, the ccp uses NK as a buffer against SK and the west. NK is a true vassal state of china, and ccp has recently begun making headways into russias natural resources.
We see and hear what the US state dept wants us to hear. And nothing more.
As to the core of your question. The answer is nukes. Nukes are the only way to fend off the imperial aggression of the United States and its imperialist partners.
Can't do anything as long as China wants the situation to stay like this.
Why should we, as the collective west, spend soldiers lifes and money on "liberating" a population that hates us? Oh, and please mind: "Liberating" a country normally also includes killing a shitton of civilians in this process.
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