I unfortunately need to go to bed now, and in all honesty this is not a topic I'm personally very knowledgeable about, but here is an extensive thread with links to many resources on the subject. Hopefully other users will be able to provide you with a more succinct and direct response fairly soon.

Hello! Here is a Google drive with all of Season 3 of a podcast called Blowback, a history podcast. This particular season has to do with the history of Korea, the Korean war, the formation of North and South Korea, and is a very entertaining listen.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WSE-G3x7QBc9ZFmh20AFGn5Nq7oBsJYN

Thank you for being curious!! The other two seasons of Blowback are certified bangers as well, those being about Iraq and Cuba. Enjoy!

Others have already given very good responses, but I'd also like to point out all the ridiculous articles Western media has done on North Korea, such as ”The state told everyone Kim Jong-il scored 18 hole-in-ones the first time he played golf!”, ”Everyone in North Korea has to get Kim Jong-un's haircut! Or maybe nobody's allowed to or they'll be jailed, idk?”, or people supposedly being executed for frivolous reasons.

These are usually being based on nothing but lies from ”anonymous sources” (or sometimes just nothing at all), often attributed to Radio Free Asia, a CIA propaganda front. Frankly, the way the DPRK is portrayed in Western media is also racist, being depicted as basically a bunch of simpletons who hivemindedly worship their Great Leader or war hungry psychopaths (pretty rich coming from the US).

Other users have linked to good resources, but one thing I'd like to comment on is that people should be wary of overusing thought-terminating epithets. Communists also have this problem to some extent when they flippantly throw out the "fascist" label, but coming into the wider fediverse after the redditpocalypse, I've seen too many "discussions" that are essentially "authoritarian totalitarian fascist genocidal dictatorship upvotes to the left pls" which is an extremely reddit type of discourse that serves to shut down discussion before it even begins (they're bad bad bad bad nothing to talk about).

I'm not accusing you of this because you've made a good faith effort to seek out constructive engagement. In most other cases though, I wish more people would investigate these claims like how you're doing instead of salad tossing adjectives and relying purely on intuition and cultural conditioning.

Based on the admin's outrage, we're probably going to get removedd by the end of the day. You can make a thread on c/askchapo on our instance to get plenty of information on these topic.

I have my own thoughts but I just woke up and people are already so mad about hexbear users posting on a discussion at the front of active that I'm hesitant to put a wall of text here.