I think the intervening years have proven that what the DPRK did explicitly, all the western proprietary OS vendors have also done, implicitly.
[0] (not in a hugely conspiratorial way, just the bureaucracy, bureaucrats, lobbying that don't change between transitions are are sort of running the place)
> whereas we mask it with a thin layer of democracy
I understand China has a yearly meeting where a few thousand regionally elected delegates get together and vote on various national proposals for the year to come...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People%27s_Congress
http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Special_12_2/index.ht...
Clearly all governmental systems are designed to broadly maintain a status quo, and there aren’t really any truly democratic governments, but societies like the United States are still significantly democratic in their bones because, even with centuries of trying, power is nowhere near as centralized as in totalitarian regimes. Local and state governments have the greatest influence over the day to day of ordinary people and ordinary people are much more capable of influencing them.
My grandma's house is older than the centuries the US has existed.
> Local and state governments have the greatest influence over the day to day of ordinary people and ordinary people are much more capable of influencing them
Is this actually true? Are ordinary people more capable of influence than lobbying groups?
for what's passing as democracy in the RF, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39305877
Pretty much every country does that; or at least every kinda-functional country. But they do it differently (their local version) which might not be quite obvious to you externally if you don't understand the culture.