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As a fellow African you'll know from France's (and Belgium's) involvement in the continent what exactly democratic and peaceable world powers do with weaker powers.
* Altought there is no scholarly consensus on either side nor ironclad evidence, there is a lot of circumstancial evidence, from reporters claiming to have seen odd ordinance dropped onto cities which would then have unexplained outbreaks, to American POWs admitting they were involved and refusing to recant even when they were in the US, until they were coerced to recant or be charged with treason - in the end it's sufficiently likely this happened for many historians to agree, and to me it does seem likely as well.
Most of modern NK’s philosophical underpinnings are based on Juche, a syncretic philosophy of traditional East Asian thought and that of the Kim dynasty. References to Marx, Stalin, Lenin, etc, have been excised from this doctrine. NK is a very hierarchical society, reflecting traditional Korean social order.
And, to the point you made, NK is the way it is because of the inextricable psychic damage of the Korean war. Neither the South-allied or North-allied forces acted honorably and it shows in the distrust to this day. NK’s Juche-thought reflects a certain degree of psychological damage, like that of a child who never had any adult to trust and grows to trust no one and rely on no one.
All this to say, I think reducing this to communism == bad is an incredibly reductive leap. North Korea did not begin as a communist project, it began as an anti-imperialist one (against Japan). It’s evolution has been a result of the intense paranoia associated with a massive, incredibly destructive war (imagine if a third of the towns in your country disappeared in a decade). This was a war of few prisoners between fellow countrymen. Imagine had the South pushed the yankees back and then militarized their entire border.
I, of course, would rather live in the West than NK. It’s just far more complicated than a rote line.