An official atlas of North Korea

From every account I’ve read, North Koreans suffer greatly, maybe not holocaust level but we’re totally fine to allow their suffering to continue unabated. If I was a North Korean I’d hope someone was coming to help me at some stage . Weird situation .

In the late Soviet Union, there was a joke: "We should declare war on Japan and immediately surrender."

> we’re totally fine to allow their suffering to continue unabated

People aren't "fine" with it exactly, it's just that the alternative usually looks (potentially) much worse.

Regime change would mean war with North Korea, and at the very least that'd be a ton of artillery shells landing on Seoul and killing a ton of civilians at the outset of the war.

North Korea by itself would obviously be much weaker than a presumed SK+US force, but then you have to worry about China potentially getting drawn in, and now you have two nuclear superpowers fighting each other in all-out war. Nobody really wants that.

You'd sure be hoping that, while gripping your Type 58 and eyeing the border vigilantly.

"We" are absolutely not fine with the state of things there, but there is also not much to do for these poor people, aside from some non-political volunteer help. One of the reasons is the that, as I understand it, China and NK are diplomatically close, with them having a mutual defense treaty among other things. So if you meddle in NK, you also meddle with China, and "we" don't exactly meddle with China either, even in face of their most condemned actions like the treatment of Uighur, since they are a superpower.

Another thing is that NK is very highly publicized in Western media, and people seem to have a kind of fascination with it. But regarding humanitarian catastrophes, other parts of the world are very busy as well. If you look at the HRI table, there are a lot of horrible places, and "we" don't as much talk about most of these.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem?t...