Well there's probably a distinction in coercing a population to adopt an exploitative economic situation and coercing them into doing giant parades or performative displays of patriotism. Medieval England also had a huge peasant class who more or less tolerated the economic situation except in instances of things like widespread poverty, recruitment campaigns into the military, famine, or political upheaval that typically took the presentation of religious zeal.
I think what I'm imagining is that the DPRK would look more like Israel if it were what libs think it is. Frequent violent skirmishes, frequent instances of military shooting civilians, and some kind of enforced segregation or movement restriction on large sectors of the population. Or it would look like South Africa in the 1970s, or Ireland, or Pinochet's Chile. But it's not like that. There's no serious widespread civilian aggression or resistance that I know about. There are probably some underground, scattered anti-government forces, but those exist in every country. So I could only see a liberal coming to the conclusion that people in the DPRK are simply docile past the point of what's normal, if literally none of them offer the slightest bit of resistance to being forced to do a parade against their will.
Well there's probably a distinction in coercing a population to adopt an exploitative economic situation and coercing them into doing giant parades or performative displays of patriotism. Medieval England also had a huge peasant class who more or less tolerated the economic situation except in instances of things like widespread poverty, recruitment campaigns into the military, famine, or political upheaval that typically took the presentation of religious zeal.
I think what I'm imagining is that the DPRK would look more like Israel if it were what libs think it is. Frequent violent skirmishes, frequent instances of military shooting civilians, and some kind of enforced segregation or movement restriction on large sectors of the population. Or it would look like South Africa in the 1970s, or Ireland, or Pinochet's Chile. But it's not like that. There's no serious widespread civilian aggression or resistance that I know about. There are probably some underground, scattered anti-government forces, but those exist in every country. So I could only see a liberal coming to the conclusion that people in the DPRK are simply docile past the point of what's normal, if literally none of them offer the slightest bit of resistance to being forced to do a parade against their will.