I want as much as anybody to believe that the DPRK and its people deserve what is being considered for it, because it will ease my conscience a little bit that I tolerated the people who seem to want to help agentically propagate the same old half-baked self-inconsistent nation-caricatures that carry with them the implicit justifications for yet another war with a country from the warmonger's wishlist to be inflicted by a state that has the world's largest prison population (the second largest per capita), a criminal justice system where your income determines your survival and a truly appalling human rights record.

I will restate my points and elaborate upon them for clarity, because they seem to have been missed.

1. Most DPR Koreans have not defected (I count ~4 the past year)

2. Defectors are self-selected.

3. It is likely that the vast majority of attempted defections fail, resulting in repercussions from the state. Even if this were the case, we have an upper bound of 200,000. Approaching this upper bound assumes nobody is imprisoned for anything other than defection, which would be absurd.

4. It is highly unlikely that the successful defectors are representative of the general population of that country.

Many of the comments on this article seem to accept the people are brainwashed, indoctrinated, completely controlled by propaganda. It seems unlikely that the same people are also consumed by a desire to be free and to defect and living in misery as a result.

So my point is this: even if we could extract the memories and experiences directly from these defectors heads and watch them on a projector, they are likely to be so unrepresentative of the experience that you would have living there, having been brought up with the norms and customs of that country, as to be worthless.

The fact that many have been paid for their testimonies, and those testimonies have failed to be consistent with other testimonies is really a tool to help those who still see merit in statistically meaningless testimonies to recognise that they are also likely to be influenced by the monetary offers for a satisfactory testimony.

I'm not saying that atrocities are not happening. I suspect they are, as they are in many countries. But I also know that some of the more ridiculous stories that have been pumped out by propagandists are being regurgitated by reputable news sources. We've seen this before. The truth doesn't come out, it gets buried in the chaos.