When satellites pass over the Korean peninsula at night, South Korea is lit up. Modernity. North Korea is not. It is dark, like the Dark Ages would be seen from space. North Korea is called the Hermit Kingdom because it is an isolationist nation. Its people have little to no contact with the outside world. The media they consume is pure propaganda – ranging from the deranged and false to absurd and laughable. North Koreans subsist on a low-calorie diet, with a majority of the population living on the edge of starvation. Since the armistice in 1953, multiple generations have been starved, with a majority of North Koreans suffering from stunted growth.  

The communist government has fed lies to several successive generations where an overwhelming percentage of its population has no other baseline than bare subsistence, both intellectually and physically. And constant propaganda.  

The “Democratic Peoples Republic” has created a fiction that its people simply accept.  

When South Korea was awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics, North Korea demanded to be a “partner.” North Korea built a “Ski Resort” — a winter Potemkin Village. An apologist said of the “Resort:  

“With projects like Masikryong, Kim Jong Un wants to make it clear that he cares not just about the country surviving and fighting the Americans, but also about people having fun,” said Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and co-editor of the North Korean Economy Watch blog, using the Korean name of the resort. 

North Korea’s UN Ambassador said of the resort:  

[It] was designed for “our children” and that Pyongyang aimed to provide “excellent facilities and conditions” for North Koreans to enjoy skiing and other winter sports. 

That was, of course, a lie. Lester Holt dutifully reported from the site, apparently oblivious that “skiers” were dressed in brand new matching/identical outfits, and none of them seemed to know anything about skiing.  

It was all a lie. Propaganda.   

Since the end of the Korean War hostilities, very few North Korean soldiers have fought on foreign soil. Until now. North Korea and Russia signed an agreement of sorts that allowed several North Korean brigades to fight in the Ukraine war.  

On November 4, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that up to 10,000 North Korean soldiers were in Russia’s Kursk region and were preparing to join Moscow’s fight against Ukraine in the coming days. If they engage in combat, it would be North Korea’s first participation in a large-scale conflict since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. 

North Korea ratified a major defense treaty with Russia focusing on mutual military aid, the North’s state media reported on Tuesday this week. It is considered both countries’ biggest defense deal since the end of the Cold War. 

The current casualty rate for those on the Russian side is reportedly about 10,000 a week. If North Koreans are fighting and dying on the front lines, the troops in country might not survive a week. Nonetheless, it’s likely that, if there are any survivors, they may be integrated into Russian units to die or be sent to a Gulag. But not home. 

It would be dangerous for the North Korean regime to allow them back to infect others with knowledge of what they have seen. We might instead see a return to the kind of purges that were carried out against the Red Army in 1945 when they returned from Europe. Large parts were encircled and sent to the gulags." 

The logic seems brutal but obvious. Returning soldiers would see “the good life.” Culture that they have been told does not exist. Perhaps they might be exposed to Ukrainians or Russians who disabuse them of communist lies. That cannot be tolerated by the Hermit King.  

What we are left to wonder: Would the gulag be better than going back to North Korea? Maybe