Bogdan, I am afraid you are misunderstanding me. I realise that English is not your first language, and that the Korean War is not part of your cultural as well as your familial history - as it is for me.

I did NOT say that North Korea is better than South Korea, nor did I say that I prefer the North to the South. You are misunderstanding.

I am saying that 78 years ago, Korea was a very different place.

I am saying that with the defeat of the Japanese, the Koreans wanted to go back to having their own country.

I am saying that the national hero, Kim Il-Sung, who had liberated Korea from the Japanese, was the natural selection for leading the new Korean state.

I am saying that Kim made the "fatal error" of allying with the USSR and preferring a socialist form of society.

You see, Korea had always had a very corrupt and unequal socioeconomic structure, under which the vast majority of the peasant farmers were kept in poverty by having to "sharecrop" and provide most of their harvests and wealth in the form of taxes and fees to the small but wealthy group of landowners who controlled the land and everything on it.

The invading Japanese had maintained this system, as it provided most efficiently the rice and materials that they needed for their war effort.

Kim wanted to institute "land reform" and allow the farmers to own the land that they farmed. This was unacceptable to the wealthy landowners, and of course it was unacceptable to the USA.

And so the US bombed the North literally into the Stone Age.

"Air Force general Curtis LeMay, head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, estimated that the American campaign killed 20 per cent of the population".

What arose out of the rubble and wreckage is of course a draconian, totalitarian, authoritarian state based on cultish (ridiculous) hero worship and the most crass demonisation of the Americans and westerners in general.

According to the Irish Times:

"Out of the wreckage of that conflict – unresolved to this day – founder Kim Il-sung built his isolated state, squeezed to the north by an old enemy, China, and a new one, the American-backed South. Instead of nursery rhymes, schoolchildren were taught songs about the "American imperialist bastards" and their "lackeys" in Seoul and Tokyo."

That is what happens when America "redecorates" your country for you.