I'd be really interested in reading that
Video channels, playlists, etc.
DPRK Explained - A YouTube channel which explains various things about DPRK.
DefendKorea - "Sharing information from the DPRK and countering the regime-change narrative in favor of peace, reconciliation, and reunification of Korea."
푸옹 Phuong DPRK Daily - "Daily uploads of videos related to the DPRK, news, revolutionary politics, daily life, history, culture, etc. This channel is private and has no official ties to the DPRK."
SAO Documentary - A group of people on various trips to DPRK filming as they go.
DPRK 360 - Various videos of DPRK. It also has a website with blog posts and panoramic photos of DPRK.
Our Daily Life in North Korea - Videos by Jaka Parker, who I believe is a diplomat who previously lived in DPRK with his family for a while. He has other playlists too such as North Korean Store.
Podcasts
Podcast of KEEP delegation discussing former DPRK visits - Several people in the Korean diaspora who travelled to DPRK on multiple trips a few years ago talk about their experiences going there and about the misconceptions they had about DPRK and discussions they had with DPRK people. Currently they are now involved in activism to undo the US travel ban against north Korea so they can continue their delegation trips.
The modern history of Korea with Ju-Hyun Park, Part 1 - Talks about Korea’s modern history before the division. Discusses the Japanese colonial period and independence struggle, and the beginning of US occupation. Part 2 - Discusses Korea post-division, talks about the Korean war and the history of DPRK and south Korea since then.
The Friendship is Strong: Talking About North Korea - Xiangyu (anti-imperialist rapper) discusses going to DPRK and also talks about working for Young Pioneer Tours.
Blowback Podcast season 3 covers Korean war history, it's very worth learning about Korean history as a whole to really understand DPRK.
Articles, blogs, photos
Young Pioneer Tours - This website has several articles about DPRK, usually with photos too, but they're not really listed anywhere that I know of on the site. But if you use a search engine and include the site name you can probably find articles by them on various topics. Examples of some articles: Sariwon Folklore Village, Golden Triangle Bank, Guide to Wonsan, Domestic North Korean Flights, North Korean Traffic Girls, Vegan Food in North Korea, Tae’an Friendship Glass Factory, North Korean Cuisine, Kwangbok Department Store and Supermarket
Explore DPRK - A website with various info. "As an International Friendship Initiative, we strive to promote mutual understanding and cultural exchange between the people of DPRK and the rest of the world. Our website serves as a platform to share knowledge, experiences, and insights about DPRK with the global community."
DPRK 360 - "Since 2013, Aram Pan has been visiting the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and capturing many aspects of their culture and everyday life."
Avax News, photos tagged "DPRK" - Various pages of photos, when you click "details" you can see multiple photos per post. You can of course try other search terms too.
Korean-language articles (sorry that I don't know an English version of these, but machine translation can help give the main points if you are okay with that):
“Understanding North Korea” - Article series by Tongil Times, especially their 북현대사 (“North Modern History”) series is informative.
“North Korea through the constitution” - Series by Sovereignty Research Institute.
Books
Modern Korea: The Socialist North, Revolutionary Perspectives in the South, and Unification - Book by DPRK author about the revolution and socialist construction up to 1970
Modern History of Korea - A history book from DPRK
North Korean Journey: The Revolution Against Colonialism - Book by historian from the US who visited DPRK
Sanctions of Empire - A zine by Nodutdol about the sanctions placed on DPRK and other nations. (PDF)
Socialist Education in Korea: Selected Works of Kim Il-Sung (PDF) - "Socialist Education in Korea delves into the history and educational praxis of North Korea in a way that is rarely studied in the US, as this work counters many of the western media narratives against North Korea."
Videos (in English or with English subs)
Hong Kong student delegation to DPRK - Students from Hong Kong hanging out with students from north Korea
North Koreans Talk! New Years Resolutions from North Koreans (2020) - "New Years Eve in North Korea I spent asking North Koreans what their New Year's Resolutions for 2020 are."
May day celebration 2017 - Watch some foreign tour guides hang out with Koreans at a May day celebration event. (More videos from them)
“My Experience at PUST(North Korea)” - A foreign English teacher at a school in DPRK made a documentary about their experience (it was an all male students school at the time but now has male and female students. Here is a student being interviewed)
“I met North Koreans on the Trans-Siberian Railway” - South Korean randomly meets some north Koreans on a trip abroad, turn on subtitles to see their conversation in English
Eid Al-Fitr in North Korea - Video of people in a mosque in DPRK
Pyongyang Centre for the Deaf and Blind - Visit to the center, and here is an article about it.
Night walk through the Ryomyong Street in Pyongyang - "One of the most recognizable newly build apartments in the capital of DPRK."
Video of Pyongyang Public Transport (2019) - Just a video of public transport, as the title says.
Videos (in Korean)
Episode of a south Korean TV show where some people visit north Korea, "Walk Into Pyongyang" - Unfortunately there are not English subtitles, but you could try the auto-translate subs feature on YouTube. But you can see countryside and street scenes and see the tone of interactions between people even if you may not understand Korean. It shows their visit without trying to portray north Korea as scary.
[Docuseries] A north-south Korea joint production about north and south Korean cities, "두 도시 이야기" (Tale of Two Cities) - A post I made with links to episodes of this docuseries. I also summarized an episode here: [Video] "What does Childrens' Day look like in north Korea?"
South Korean family on a road trip meets some North Koreans working in Russia - Just a friendly conversation between north and south Koreans randomly meeting in Russia (the north Koreans spotted the south Koreans pulled over at a gas station, and pulled over to greet them and had a chat, mentioned that they work in Russia but return to DPRK yearly)
I suggest studying some Korean history and reading the works of DPRK's leaders and other DPRK authors directly and over time you can form your own evaluation of what they believe and why they have implemented particular policies at various times. I don't have time to write more on it at the moment but you can find some of Kim Jong Il's views on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, socialist construction, and Juche here.
As a former senior economist of the IMF once said:
Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples. Mr. Camdessus, the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name and in the names of your predecessors, and under your official seal.
You know, when all the evidence is in, there are two types of questions that you and me and others like us will have to answer. The first is this: - will the world be content merely to brand our institution as among the most insidious enemies of humankind? Will our fellow men condemn us thus and let the matter rest? Or will the heirs of those whom we have dismembered in our own peculiar Holocaust clamor for another Nuremberg?
(Davison Budhoo's IMF resignation letter. PDF, archive.org)
more quotes
As from today I refuse to accept the Fund-imposed censorship on our activities in the Third World. I have also stopped obeying your directive that reports and memoranda and other printed matter that document these activities be regarded as unexceptionally confidential and "hush-hush".
In guilt and self-realization of my own worthlessness as a human being, what I would like to do most of all is to so propel myself that I can get the man-in-the- street of North and South and East and West and First and Second and Third and Fourth and All Other Worlds to take an interest in what is happening to his single planet, his single habitat, because our institution was allowed to evolve in a particular way in late twentieth- century international society, and allowed to become the supra- national authority that controls the day-to- day lives of hundreds of millions of people everywhere. More specifically, I would like to enlighten public opinion about our role and our operations in our member countries of the Third World.
I can get people to begin to comprehend the universality and the depth of our perversion - I would have achieved something rare and precious for the starving and dispossessed two-thirds of mankind from whose ranks I come, and for whose cause I must now fight.
Our policy package for Trinidad and Tobago-i.e. the conditionality that we are demanding for any Fund program [...] can be shown, even in a half-objective analysis, to be self-defeating and unworkable. That policy package can never serve, under any set of circumstances, the cause of financial balance and economic growth. Rather, what, in effect, we are asking the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to do is to self-destruct itself and unleash unstoppable economic and social chaos.
We manipulated, blatantly and systematically, certain key statistical indices so as to put ourselves in a position where we could make very false pronouncements about economic and financial performance of that country. In doing so, we created a situation whereby the country was repeatedly denied access to international commercial and official sources of financing that otherwise would have been readily available. Our deliberate blocking of an economic lifeline to the country through subterfuge served to accentuate tremendously the internal and external financial imbalances within the economy
As the country continues to resist our Deadliest Medicine that would put it in a position to enter into a formal stand-by arrangement with us, we continue to resort to statistical malpractices and unabashed misinformation so as to bring it to heel. Among several misdeeds, we have influenced the World Bank, apparently against the better judgement of its own mission staff, to come out in support of our trumped-up policies and stances for the country
What we have done and are doing in Trinidad and Tobago is being repeated in scores of countries around the world, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. Sometimes we operate with greater restraint, sometimes with less, but the process and the result are always the same: a standard, pompous recital of doctrinaire Fund "advice" given uncompromisingly and often contemptuously and in utter disregard to local conditions and concerns and susceptibilities. It is the norm now rather than the exception, that when our "one-for-all and all-for-one" Fund cap doesn't fit the head for which it is intended, we cut and shave and mangle the head so as to give the semblance of a fit. Maybe we bust up the head too much in Trinidad and Tobago, but have no illusions that the way we operate through- out the world - the narrow and irrelevant epistemology underlying our work, the airs and affectations and blases and illusions of superiority of our staff vis-Á-vis government officials and politicians in the developing world, our outrageous salaries and perks and diplomatic immunities and multiple "entitlements", the ill-gotten, inadvertent power that we revel in wielding over prostrate governments and peoples- can only serve to accentuate world tensions, expand even further the already bulging ranks of the poverty-striken and destitute of the South, and stunt, worldwide, the human soul, and the human capacity for caring and upholding norms of justice and fairplay.
As far as I understand, it's subsidies in this case. US will subsidize elements of the Korean corporation's production as long as they build factories in the US but the benefits will be taken away if they have over the specified amount of production going on in China. And the amount they specify for that basically amounts to not allowing them to make any more factories in China and not letting their existing ones be highly productive.
Unfortunately I don't know enough about that to speak on it
Knowing how the wheel of history spins now has given us the ability to predict it and therefore the power to take our destiny into our own hands and shape history after our desire.
I'm not an expert and still in the process of learning about this, but I would say your understanding of it here more or less lines up with my understanding from what I have read so far.
As I understand, Juche dismisses the idealist world outlook as groundless and also rejects mechanical materialism, and holds that the dialectical materialist view is the scientific view of the world. However, it is considered that merely holding a dialectical materialist view does not automatically cause people to start using it as a tool to change the world to humanity's benefit, which is the question that the Juche idea is mainly concerned with: defining and promoting humanity's role in changing the world, and increasing peoples' consciousness of this role. As I understand it, Juche promotes the concept that humans (as a collective whole) not only can but should center themselves in changing the world to benefit them, within the real scientific limits of the world, i.e. with the knowledge of the laws of nature and society which operate independent of human's will. This is seen as a necessary attitude in humanity's emancipation from oppression, as simply having a dialectical materialist view does not necessarily cause people to start acting on humanity's behalf even if it does give them an accurate scientific view of reality's motion.
Texts about Juche seem to primarily focus on asserting that it is correct for humans to center their own needs in how they shape the world, and also focus on discussing humanity's historical pursuit for independence and methods of preserving that independence when it is achieved through progressive revolutions, with the primary focus now being the struggle to end imperialism and capitalism and to defend and evolve socialism, in order to remove exploitation from society and continue on humanity's path to pursuing independence from all restrictions, both natural and social, overcoming them with a methodical and scientific understanding combined with an attitude of intentionally centering human needs and desires in the way humanity consciously shapes the world.
If someone sees something wrong with my understanding, please let me know. I am still in the process of learning about this.
Geopolitical Economy Report
I'm impressed you remained so calm.
Discussions like this are extremely frustrating. Atrocity propaganda can be created with virtually no effort, and it proliferates easily once set in to motion. Countering it with facts requires you to have seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of history and politics on hand at all times.
A (slightly edited) quote on war-time lies: "Man's habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish."
Anyway, here's a quote from a guy who worked for the CIA for 25 years. I hope it can help you if you get into another conversation like this.
I want to reveal to those who still believe in the myths of the CIA what it is and what it actually does. My explanation will not include the usual pap fed to us by Agency spokesmen. My view backed by 25 years of experience is, quite simply, that the CIA is the covert action arm of the Presidency. [...] The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the President, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering "communist” weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the "intelligence" it feeds to policymakers. Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of whole cloth "intelligence" to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers then leak this "intelligence" to the media to deceive us all and gain our support. (Ralph W. McGehee, "Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA", p. 15)
Aa shorter quote of his with the same essence: "The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. [...] Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies." (Deadly Deceits, p. 192).
You may also find this useful: Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere - he talks about how the CIA gives false stories to reporters, some reporters know this and purposely publish false stories planted by the CIA and some don't know that they are planting CIA stories.
In my war, the Angola war, that I helped to manage, 1/3 of my staff was propaganda. [...] I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia Times, and then pulled them out and sent them to journalists on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be what he would've gotten from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now, our contact man in Europe was. And we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities [...] We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans, it was pure raw false propaganda to to create a an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and so forth, totally false propaganda.
More from him:
Another thing [the CIA does] is to disseminate propaganda to influence people's minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into the gathering of information. You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories. [...] You buy his confidence and set him up. We've seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them, every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent, so that you can control what they do so you don't have to set them up. Sort of, you know, by putting one over on them so you can say, "Here, plant this one next Tuesday." [...] The Church Committee brought it out in 1975, and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.
Good luck talking with people in the future about things like this. Often, there is not much hope in a conversation like this with a person who is not poised to listen. But on the off chance you have some favorable conversation conditions sometime, I hope these quotes can help.
Here's a documentary about it that leaves out most of the blood and gore that you could easily find if you looked: Donbass (2016). You will see a bit of people being burned to death in this documentary and some other injuries but not to the extent you could find in other videos of the time.
Here's a scene of the burning of the trade union building in 2014. Russian speakers were protesting regarding the repeal of a law which protected Russian as a minority language (or as the Ukrainian former soldier in the video states, they were "contesting a ban on the Russian language in Ukraine.") The protestors hid in the trade union building when Ukrainian right wing nationalists showed up. Eventually, the Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the building and many of the protesters burned to death, with those who jumped out of the windows getting beaten to death by the Ukrainian nationalists. (See also: "Burnt Alive in Odessa").
If you can stomach seeing bodies blown up in the streets, limbs removed, dead babies, and footage of people dying, there are other documentaries around which show it. It's not hard to find footage like this from 2014 onwards. E.g., Result of a 2014 shelling by Ukrainian military (CW: Numerous dead bodies); More aftermath of a shelling (CW: Extremely graphic, numerous mutilated bodies, and footage of a person dying).
You can make up your own mind about the conflict's particulars as you learn about it, but it's a mistake to ignore events happening before 2022 or treat them as insignificant.