Watch this…
Radio Free Asia: "did you know in North Korea they eat babies?"
Me: "I don't believe that."
Radio Free Asia: "WHAT?!?!? How did you do that???"
See. And I'm just a dumbass who does nothing but smoke weed and watch pirated b-horror movies. Whats everyone else's fucking excuse?
People fall for this shit because they want to, not because the state department has magical brainwashing powers. Propaganda doesn't mean people don't have fucking agency.
Alright, I'll bite. What is and isn't propaganda about the DPRK?
Because, from what I can tell, you can't both be a backwater and a hellhole while having the capability to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Some of their technology is astonishingly advanced and shouldn't be possible in a country where millions are starving and everyone is uneducated.
You can't just pick one guy and have them be a nuclear scientist through sheer willpower and propaganda. You need to have a robust education system that happens to produce those kinds of people.
For what it's worth, that's been true for the US, the Soviet Union, China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and Iran. They had inequality, sure, but a good chunk of each population was very educated and very advanced.
A better read person on the topic could probably make a better effort post than me, but to give a few bullet points.
There is a bit of a weird cult of personality around the Kim family, but it is grossly exaggerated by the western press.
They do dedicate a lot of their economic capacity to military development, but that's kinda understandable what with an empire that once bombed them nearly back to the Stone Age having air bases just south of their border.
They do struggle economically, but the idea they're in a perpetual famine is bullshit and a lot of these struggles are do to US sanctions.
The really crazy stories you hear about people believing in unicorns and Kim personally feeding his concubines to dogs are almost entirely bullshit coming from weird right wing South Korean news papers that almost always get debunked within a week.