TIL the German word for literacy is Alphabetisierung.

I presumed that's what "alphabetization" means, but was going to make some snide comment about it.

Yeah, and of course everything in a constitution is true...

Some things in this infographics are true-ish (like men/women equality) but most of it are not. 99,9% alphabetization is absolutely impossible even in our wildest dreams of utopia, because it would mean that there is absolutely no mentally disabled people who can't learn to read or descholarised children with learning difficulties. Besides, most of the country is a big farmland made to nourrish the capital city, with huge areas with no electricity, a data (% of houses with electricity) that this infographic strangely do not show. The rest could be seriously challenged by Human Rights Watch reports and so on.

I understand the necessity to think outside the capitalist framework and overthrow a system that creates so many inequalities and injustices (otherwise I would not be here), but I do not think it will be achieved by praising a regime who does not creates better life conditions fot its people.

Everyone living outside Pyongyang is an illiterate peasant farmer

That is certainly a claim.

The DPRK reports literacy rates near universal levels, and even hostile external estimates generally place literacy above 95%. The idea that 99% literacy is “absolutely impossible” because disabled people exist misunderstands how literacy statistics are calculated. No country measures literacy as a metaphysical absolute; they measure functional literacy across the population. Cuba reports 99%+. China reports 97–99% depending on cohort. These figures account statistically for disability and educational variation. Calling 99% “impossible” just shows you have no idea what you're talking about.

The rest could be seriously challenged by Human Rights Watch reports

Human Rights Watch is a privately funded NGO headquartered in New York, staffed heavily by individuals drawn from Western policy circles, and financed by large oligarchs foundations rooted in the same capitalist power structure that dominates global institutions. Its DPRK reporting is conducted without on-the-ground access and relies overwhelmingly on defector testimony, secondary NGOs, and media intermediaries. You might as well cite Radio Free Asia.

Treating New York–based NGOs and US-aligned media as inherently objective while dismissing DPRK state data out of hand is typical western chauvinism.

If you are going to critique a sanctioned state, at least interrogate the provenance and incentives of the institutions shaping your evidence.

"Regime" who does not creat better conditions for its people

Material conditions in the DPRK were manufactured by imperialism.

During the Korean War, Amerikkka and it’s dogs dropped over 600,000 tons of bombs and napalm killing nearly 1 in 5 of the Korean population and deliberately destroying dams, power plants, factories, hospitals, railways everything. Whole cities were erased. Survivors had to literally live in caves. But sure, tell me more about how evil and brainwashed the country is from your insulated bubble.

Then came the 70+ years of sanctions, financial blockades, trade isolation, and permanent military threats. Pure medieval siege warfare. Starve them, isolate them, threaten them nonstop then act shocked when living standards take decades to recover. Pure liberal idiocy.

So yeah when you flatten a country, kill a massive chunk of its people, cut it off from global trade, and force it to pour scarce resources into nuclear deterrence, all while surrounding it with military bases and war games, living standards don’t magically bounce back.

Blaming the Korean people and their leadership is pure western chauvinism.

Why are there no minorities in NK?

Ok, first of all : I did not make the claim that everyone outside of Pyongyang is an illiterate farmer, you are transforming what I wrote. I said that it could not be 99,9% but maybe 75%. You are just immediately assuming the worst about my intentions because you disagree with me.

Second : about that method of calculation I checked and was, indeed, wrong. Functionnal litteracy is not calculated that way and this number of 99,9% could be close to real. So for that point : my bad and apologies.

But about the rest, I am not puting the blame on North Korean people by applying western chauvinism, I put the blame on the Kim family and their way to govern. You say we cannot trust HRW, but we cannot trust this UN report made by interrogating hundreds of people who fled NK either ? Are they all liars and agents of disinformation ? There are tons of proofs of the bad treatment of NK population and the only counter-narratives defensors of NK can offer are always produced by NK, which is as biased as if it was a capitalist propaganda. I agree that bombing, sanctions and threats are making everything worse, but it explains and does not excuses. It is not a reason to repaint a country like that as ideal just because of the situation in the west.

You keep proving you don’t actually understand this subject. You misread, you overstate, you walk it back, and then pivot without addressing the core issue.

We already established you were wrong on literacy. You were comfortable declaring something “impossible” with zero methodological grounding.

Now you want to lean on Human Rights Watch and UN defector reports as if that settles it. HRW again is a privately funded New York NGO with no on-the-ground access in the DPRK. Its reporting relies overwhelmingly on defector testimony filtered through NGOs and institutions embedded in Western policy networks. It’s adversarial-source reporting shaped by a very specific geopolitical environment.

You might as well cite Radio Free Asia. Different logo, same alignment: institutions whose mandate or funding structure is tied to states openly hostile to the DPRK.

As for UN “reports,” most of them rely on the exact same defector pipelines. They are not independent mass surveys conducted inside the country. They are structured interviews with people who have already exited under specific political and economic incentives.

Let’s talk about those incentives.

Defectors to South Korea receive state resettlement packages, financial assistance, housing support, and integration programs. There is a media ecosystem in the South that rewards the most dramatic narratives with book deals, television appearances, NGO careers, and speaking circuits. South Korean intelligence agencies have historically screened and processed defectors. None of this automatically means “everyone is lying.” It does mean there are material incentives, institutional filters, and political framing at work.

When testimony is gathered outside the country, from a self-selecting group, processed through security services, NGOs, and Western institutions, and then presented as comprehensive evidence about 25 million people, that is not clean data. It is structurally biased evidence.

Meanwhile, anything produced inside the DPRK is dismissed out of hand as propaganda. So Western-aligned sources are presumed credible, socialist-state sources are presumed fraudulent. That asymmetry is doing all the heavy lifting in your argument.

“Hate the government, not the people” also sounds tidy until you realize the state in question survived total war, the destruction of nearly every major city, the killing of roughly 20% of its population, and decades of sanctions without collapsing internally. People lived in caves after U.S. bombing campaigns flattened urban infrastructure and flooded farmland by targeting dams.

Then came seventy years of sanctions, trade embargoes, financial isolation, technology bans, fuel restrictions, and constant military encirclement. This is long-term siege warfare in modern form.

You don’t get to wave that away as background context and then reduce everything to “the Kim family.”

If you strip out war, annihilation-level destruction, sanctions, isolation, and security compulsion and still insist governance style is the primary explanatory variable the only possible explanation is that you are supremely idiotic or are pushing western narratives on purpose.

Ok, so western press exagerates or tell straight up lies on details and defectors could not be trusted everytime, but they tell coherent stories. Besides, there is a difference between wanting to be buried in your homeland and wanting to return live there. The situation might be not as bleak as commonly told in the West and I will check some of the links you provided when I'll have time, but I still think we have enough proofs to see that NK is not a great country to live and that its government is at fault. I am not an expert on this, but I have a simple question. You wrote :

As the US Empire’s influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information

So why is it so difficult for foreign journalists to comme to NK ? If NK's situation is as good as you suggest, why not showing it ? Just for the sake of shuting the mouth of western criticism ? Why the few ones who could go there are restricted to Pyongyang ? What could possibly justify to hide the truth about the country if this truth is actually good, or even not as bad as told ? You say foreign exchanges are possibles with Russia, China or Cuba, three country that share views, to put it like that, with NK about the handling of press and information. I do not think this is reliable. In absence of more trustworthy sources, I consider that the coherent reports told by people who actually went there and were of different horizons (defectors, some journalists of different countries) could be at least partially trusted. It would be extremly unlikely that NK turns out to be a socialist paradise that was hidden from us. I do not know if you consider Reporters Without Borders as another capitalist spawn because it has its headquarters in a western country (France), but its survey of press freedom in NK is explicit. So again, why not showing to us westerners how much we are wrong ?

I wish I was North Korean