1.North Korea is not Egypt or Iraq right before another revolution, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not a poor desperate third-world unstable middle east country, on the contrary, it is a highly-developed right-wing ultra-conservative egalitarian state with a super stable single-party system.
If you go to India, you will see tons of very poor people of lower class under the Indian caste system. If you visit downtown Shanghai, you will see lots of beggars sitting right before the front door of major super-malls every morning to beg for food and money. However, in North Korea, there are political prisoners but no beggars. People there are poorer than you, they have no access to the internet and no smart phones, BUT they are really not people living a life of absolute poverty: under the egalitarian planned economy, they enjoy a fair amount of food ration, free housing, free education, free health care, free holidays, even free condoms. Of course, every thing (
INCLUDING condoms ) is of low-quality, but thing is, they are free. Don't forget the unemployment rate in Spain is 27%, that figure is 0% in North Korea.2.North Korea WILL NOT COLLAPSE in the face of sanction whatsoever.
Believe or not, the Soviet Union collapsed not because of American sanction and boycott, it collapsed due to two major reasons:
First, its own ideological crisis, when the Marxist-Leninist Utopia the Soviet Union claimed to be to its people turns out to be a dystopia, the Marxist-Leninist state will loose legitimacy and collapse whatsoever.
Second, too much involvement into the global free market. The Soviet Union remained the No. 1 oil export country in the 1980s, it maintains a certain level of standard of living for its people by selling oil into the global free market then use that oil money to pay their military bill and buy food and consumer products then distribute the goods via the domestic central planning system to its people. But when the global oil price collapses near the year 1989 the Soviet Union has no means to make ends meet let alone distributing enough consumer products, and people will protest and seek change when their living standards is falling.
North Korea is very different:
The ideology that sustains that state is not leftist Marxist-Leninism or Maoism, it is an ultra-conservative ideology, called the Juche Idea. the Juche Idea has a major advantage over Marxist ideology, it did not promise anything Utopian in the future therefore when that Utopia did not come nobody will experience any ideological crisis.
Also, unlike the soviet union, the economy of North Korea is a very self-sufficient one, it has no much oil to sell. If you visit North Korea, you will see that lots of cars there even don’t need gasoline, they burn coal to run. And in a 100% central planning economy, there is no such thing called Great Depression.
In the end, sanction will only make a highly self-sufficient economy more self-sufficient than ever.If you are in the daydreaming process of a North Korea collapse, think of Cuba.
Like North Korea or not, what can you do about it?
BTW, here is the sort of singer my friend met in a bar exclusive for turists in Pyongyang, Gee! If Paul McCartney had met that North Korean gal he will write a Back In The DPRK!!!!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o63mGktKJJU
