You must not of seen the "display" of thousands of NKoreans chanting in unison and snapping their heads all together during the Madeline Notalsobright visit - scary - and "that's control"
I missed that. Of course, Castro can stage a pretty good "spontaneous" rally of the people, yet I know that many if not most Cubans harbor a deep cynicism about Castro and communism. I wonder if it might not be the same in North Korea.
I've heard all kinds of stories from the South Koreans media and U.S. interrogators that debrief defectors from the North (I've worked with many of them myself). One story that I always remeber is that of an infiltrator who was being prepared to be sent South. During the course of the mission planning, he and his fellow students were given a class on South Korea and the rest of the world, what to expect, how to react, etc. The man, puzzled, naiively asked, 'I don't understand. If the South is rich, prosperous, and not poised to invade, then why have we been taught this all our lives?'
He spent the next six months in a reeducation camp, being tortured and harassed, until they felt he had been sufficiently redeemed. He survived the journey South, and later surrendered to the local authorities.
When asked about why he gave himself up, he told the debriefers that once he heard the truth, and more importantly, once he understood the truth (from their reaction to his question), prison didn't matter, the danger of his infiltration didn't matter, nothing at all did, but getting away.