How can North Korea still exist in 2026?

02The Question: How can North Korea, as the world's leading nation-state purveying crimes against humanity, still exist in 2026?

Standard answers include nuclear deterrence, Chinese patronage, a DMZ that kills, or the fact that North Korea maintains the most invasive surveillance apparatus ever operated on human beings. These knee-jerk defenses explain how the regime survives its enemies, but they do not explain how it survives the West's indifference. They fail to address how the longest-running atrocity on earth proceeds into its eighth decade without a movement, without a boycott, without a march, without an end in sight.

The severity is settled fact. In 2014, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry found crimes against humanity of a gravity "that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world" — extermination, enslavement, torture, the deliberate starvation of prisoners.⁷ North Korea's conduct evokes the crimes of the Nazi era — it is straightforward in that sense. The camps hold 80,000–120,000 innocent people by the standing estimate (a number that, if anything, runs conservative) — roughly one citizen in every 250. And the newest count is lower than historical levels, for the wrong reasons: not because fewer are taken, but because the dying outpace the arrivals. Prisoners are not allowed to have sex — never mind having a child. A falling count is simply a well-executed plan.

Let's examine one specific atrocity — out of thousands. Inside the camps there is a punishment called the sweatbox: a cell built so that a man can neither stand nor lie down, where the only possible posture is motionless kneeling. The sweatbox makes solitary confinement look like Disney World. Men are typically held a month or two; the worst sentences run three — day and night in that posture. Survivors describe men dying inside it, or crawling out and dying shortly afterward.⁸

Outside the camps, hunger is not a punishment but a norm. North Korea's own published ration target sits below the United Nations minimum for survival, and in the worst months the actual issue fell to three hundred grams of grain a day — half the minimum, a bowl and a half of rice to last the entire day. UN assessment teams — the ones the government itself invited in — counted ten million people who did not have enough to eat. What the average North Korean actually gets is unknowable, because the state controls every number that leaves the country; even the most charitable figure in existence — the UN food agency's estimate, built partly on data Pyongyang itself supplies — comes out to about 2,000 calories a day.

Meanwhile, an hour's drive south — same peninsula, same weather, same ancestors — South Koreans average 3,465. The difference is written on the body: one North Korean child in five will never reach full height; in Ryanggang Province, nearly one in three. This 'famine' is not a shortage of food. It is the calculated starvation of human beings.⁹

In 2022, in South Hwanghae Province, a twenty-two-year-old was publicly executed. He was taken out and shot in front of a crowd. His crimes: seventy South Korean songs listened to, three movies watched, seven friends he had passed them to. That same year two boys, sixteen and seventeen, were executed for the same charges. The executions are public, and the crowd is assembled, not gathered — four in five North Koreans who make it out say they have been forced to attend one. Many were children the first time: schools march their students to executions and make them watch. The forced attendance is dressed up as rooting out undesirables, but the shock is really the point. The state is not only killing the young man. It is teaching everyone still alive how quickly a life can change — and for no real reason.⁸

This essay's claim is that the regime's survival and the free world's silence are not two facts but one. North Korea persists because it solved its PR problem — by force on the inside, and by incentive on the outside. The rest of this essay is the receipts.

03Money Talks

Americans, and the West more broadly, tend to mobilize quickly when the need is triggered. From natural disasters to famines to genocides — we have the capacity and the track record of raising money fast and executing on the mission of the raise. However, our charity does not require a trigger. Many nonprofits exist as constant funnels for charitable giving. As donors, we expect those organizations to carry out missions of moral goodness. We often delegate the search for causes to them, trusting their stewardship. For example, in fiscal 2023, the two biggest human-rights organizations in America — Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA — raised a combined $157.3 million.

And the money does real work. Human Rights Watch runs investigations in close to a hundred countries — from Gaza to Ukraine to Darfur — and Amnesty USA put roughly seventy cents of every 2023 dollar into program work, including $11.4 million passed up to Amnesty's international research arm. These are serious institutions doing what their donors hired them to do. That is the point. Even by the most generous even-split math, spreading $157.3 million across a hundred-country portfolio gives North Korea about a million and a half dollars — and closed countries do not draw even splits. They draw what access allows. Neither organization has ever been allowed inside North Korea. Human Rights Watch's most recent major report on the country came in 2020; Amnesty's presence on the file is one researcher covering all of East Asia. Nobody stole anything. The funnel simply allocates the way every machine in this essay allocates — toward the visible.¹⁴

Every American organization dedicated to North Korea, all of them added together, raised $5.3 million. Thirty dollars to one.¹⁴ And it gets smaller. After his escape, Kang founded an organization in Seoul that documents the camps and helps defectors survive the transition out. Its American fundraising affiliate raised $75,016 in 2023. In 2020, it raised $2,512 — for the entire year. The author of the book that told the free world what the camps are could not raise the price of a used car here.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, American giving found the cause within days: new relief funds grew a hundredfold, some a thousandfold, inside a single fiscal year.¹⁵ The camps' worst-documented years produced no such year. They have never produced one. The marching tells the same story, at a harder zero: in the datasets that count American demonstrations, the years 2020 through 2025 contain exactly one recorded event connected to North Korean human rights. One.¹⁴ And for four of those years, the government position built for exactly this problem went unfilled. Congress created a Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights at the State Department in 2004. The chair sat empty from January 2017 to October 2023, and it sits empty now. Add it up, and the office has been vacant for roughly two of every five years it has existed.

North Korea earns enormous coverage as a missile arc and a punchline, and almost none as twenty-six million mostly innocent people. The West makes a small attempt to at least go through the motions of caring — the UN has passed its resolution twenty-one years running — but beneath the words on paper, where money and marching and grief live, the record is depressing.

One year shows the whole pattern. I keep coming back to 2014.

Remember when Dennis Rodman flew to Pyongyang with a squad of retired NBA players to play an exhibition game for Kim Jong-un's thirty-first birthday? Fourteen thousand people filled the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium. Rodman gave a speech, bowed toward the box where Kim was sitting, and led the crowd in "Happy Birthday." The day before, on CNN, he had suggested that Kenneth Bae — an American then serving fifteen years at hard labor — had probably done something to deserve it. He called Kim his best friend and the trip basketball diplomacy. And our cameras followed him. Across fifteen years of American television, the jokes about North Korea — Rodman's trips, The Interview, the "bizarre" segments — add up to 3,011 clips. Everything those same networks filed under North Korea and human rights adds up to 3,593. The comedy runs nearly even with the camps.¹³

Six weeks later, on February 17, a retired Australian judge named Michael Kirby stood in front of the press in Geneva holding four hundred pages. He said that after the Second World War the world had consoled itself with if only we had known, and that no one would be able to say it this time. He held up the report: "we do know."⁷

Then came the end of the year. In late November, Sony Pictures — the Hollywood studio — was hacked. Its unreleased films and its executives' private emails were dumped onto the internet, and the hackers, who the FBI concluded were working for North Korea, threatened violence against any theater that showed The Interview, a comedy in which Seth Rogen and James Franco assassinate Kim Jong-un. Sony pulled the movie. For weeks it was the biggest story in the country — big enough that it was the first question at President Obama's year-end press conference, where he said Sony had "made a mistake" by giving in.

Put that year into numbers. The Internet Archive records American cable news around the clock, and its transcripts are searchable. February 2014 — the month the United Nations accused North Korea of crimes against humanity — contains about 1,000 mentions of the country. December 2014 — the month a comedy got hacked — contains almost 9,000. On CNN that year, the Sony story alone took roughly twelve percent of all North Korea airtime. Everything filed under human rights took about two. A hacked comedy outdrew a crime against humanity — same networks, same year.¹³

04The Machine

The next question is why we watched what we watched.

Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire for nineteen years, and at night, on campaign at the frontier, he kept a private notebook never meant for readers. We call it the Meditations. In its tenth book he describes a diseased eye: one that demands only green things — an eye that chooses to see what it wants rather than what it is. A healthy eye, he writes, accepts whatever there is to see. I made the case for that diagnosis in Eyes Wide Shut.¹ North Korea is what the diagnosis looks like at the scale of a civilization.

There is also a plainer answer to why the world looks where it looks, and it has been on record since 1965. That year two Norwegian researchers, Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge, asked a basic question: what gets a foreign crisis into the newspaper? They studied how four papers had covered three world crises and drew up a checklist of the traits a story needs to make the news — whether the event is sudden, whether it is simple to understand, whether a powerful country is involved, whether there is a famous name attached, whether it can be told through one person. Twelve traits in all. The whole list contains one telling absence: nowhere does it ask how many people are suffering. The researchers assumed it did not need to — surely, they figured, an atrocity big enough forces its way in on its own.¹⁰

It does not. In 2011 a researcher named Virgil Hawkins tested that assumption against the actual record and stated the result without hedging: most of the world's conflicts go largely unreported, and the deadliest are among the ignored. A decade earlier, H. Denis Wu had compared coverage across thirty-eight countries to find what actually predicts how much a nation gets written about. The two strongest predictors: how much trade it does, and whether the wire services keep a news bureau there. Not deaths. Not prisoners. Commerce, and the physical presence of reporters.¹¹

Set those two findings beside North Korea and the mystery dissolves. There is almost no trade and there is no bureau. The state sealed itself against precisely the two conditions that generate coverage — and when the 1965 checklist was updated for the modern newsroom, the new entries were video, shareability, and drama.¹⁰ A country that permits no cameras fails the new test even more completely than the old one. And when footage does get out, it meets the rest of the machine: in 2023 a documentary called Beyond Utopia, built around real smuggled footage of a family's escape, won the audience award at Sundance and made the Oscar shortlist. Its total take in American theaters was $11,716. Not eleven million — eleven thousand.¹⁷

None of this requires a villain. An editor applying every professional standard correctly will still, on these criteria, rank a hacked movie studio above a hundred thousand people in camps. That is the argument I have made at length in The house always wins.² The house does not cheat. The house does not have to.

An obvious objection is that people pay attention where they have some power to change things, and no one has power over Pyongyang. It sounds right because it is true, but it is not the truth.

Xinjiang is where that objection should have held. Starting around 2017, China detained upwards of a million Uyghurs — a Muslim minority in its far western region — in what it called re-education camps. There, we had every lever the objection says we need. Washington formally declared it a genocide in 2021. Congress passed a law banning imports made with Uyghur forced labor. The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing drew a diplomatic boycott. Western companies' supply chains ran straight through the region, answerable to Western courts. Every one of those instruments remains in force today. And attention drained away anyway — by 2024 the world was writing about the Uyghurs less than it had before any of it began.¹⁴

Darfur is where it breaks — the case that should have failed every test. It is a region of western Sudan where, beginning in 2003, government-backed militias burned villages and killed roughly three hundred thousand people. America bore no blame for it, traded nothing with it, and held no lever over it — no factories to boycott, no shares to sell. It became the largest anti-atrocity movement in modern American life anyway, because institutions that already had members took it on. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared its first-ever genocide emergency. American Jewish World Service organized. So did the National Association of Evangelicals and the Catholic bishops. Students wore the green wristbands; fifty thousand people rallied on the National Mall in 2006 with George Clooney and a young senator named Barack Obama on the stage.¹⁴ None of that required leverage. It required organizations willing to say: hold my beer.

No institution has made that decision about North Korea. Pieces exist — the Holocaust Museum has published serious reports on the camps; churches pray; small groups persist on almost nothing — but no organization with millions of members has ever adopted the cause as its own, and there is no divestment campaign because there is nothing to divest from. The machine's requirements were simply never met. I refuse to accept that because something has always been a certain way, or is hard to change, it is unworthy of being pursued with full force.

05The Second Injustice

Rome, 44 BC. Julius Caesar has just been assassinated and the republic is coming apart. Marcus Tullius Cicero — the most famous lawyer and statesman Rome ever produced — is writing what he suspects will be his last book — a long letter to his son on the subject of duty: On Duties. Within a year, soldiers of the men he opposed will hunt him down and kill him.

In it he wrote that there are "two kinds of injustice — the one, on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being inflicted."⁵ The first injustice belongs to Pyongyang no doubt, and it has owned it for nearly eighty years. The second belongs to everyone else, but especially the West. Cicero does not treat the bystander gently: the man who fails to prevent a wrong he could oppose, he writes, is as guilty as if he had deserted his parents, his friends, or his country. Brutal.

The detail Cicero enlists leaves modern readers little room to dismiss this as outdated grandeur. To those who 'mind their own affairs' and 'believe they harm no one,' he answers: "they are traitors to social life, for they contribute to it none of their interest, none of their effort, none of their means."⁵ A civilization of individually blameless people, minding their own attention, contributing none of it. I do not think his point is contempt. Cicero indicts us all. I believe future generations will look back on this moment as proof his indictment still holds.

Kyoto, Japan, the late 1950s. Kang's grandmother is wealthy, respected, and free — a comfortable life in one of the most open cities in Asia, and a devoted communist in her politics. As uncomfortable or heartless as this may seem, it is fair and just to examine her decisions and what became of them.

Kang's grandmother placed her family inside a recruitment drive run by Chongryon — the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, Pyongyang's arm among ethnic Koreans there — which advertised a "paradise on earth" across the water, where housing, food, and clothing were guaranteed. Between 1959 and 1984 that campaign moved 93,340 people from Japan to North Korea, roughly seventy thousand of them in the first three years, while the promise was still fresh. Almost none came back.¹² She believed it as naively as her comrades did. Her eye demanded to see only green (or perhaps I should say communist red), and the machine of her day supplied it. It demanded that money and profit be evil, and that commitment to the cause fighting them be just — no matter the cost. Her poor judgment walked three generations into Yodok — though she herself was free.

Rome, 163 BC — more than a century before Cicero. A comedy is on stage. One character asks another why he involves himself in a neighbor's troubles, and the answer comes back: I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me. Augustine records that the theater broke into applause. Cicero loved the line enough to quote it in the same book. The man who wrote it, Terence, had been brought to Rome from North Africa as a slave, and freed. He knew what it was to be counted outside the human circle.⁶

That line is why this essay is not written as an accusation. Kang's grandmother was not a monster; she was deceived, and the machinery that deceived her never went away — it changed owners. The same eye operates in everyone who has scrolled past this subject, mine included: I arrived by accident, through a book, decades late. But an eye is not a fixed organ. People have learned to see what they once looked through. It has happened before.

06The Exception

There is proof that the American eye works on North Korea when it chooses to. His name was Otto Warmbier.

Warmbier was a twenty-one-year-old University of Virginia student who joined a budget tour of Pyongyang over New Year's, 2016. On his way out of the country he was arrested and accused of taking a propaganda poster off a hotel wall. North Korea put him on television — sobbing, begging, confessing — and sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor. Sometime in the weeks that followed he suffered a catastrophic brain injury the regime has never explained. Seventeen months later it shipped him home to Ohio in a coma. He died six days after landing, at twenty-two, with his parents beside him.

America saw him. All of us did. His single biggest day of coverage — June 20, 2017 — produced about 400 television mentions. Compare it with everything that connected North Korea to human rights across all of 2014 — the year of the UN's finding: 210. One American's death, in one day, nearly doubled a year of the camps. And the attention produced action. Two and a half years after he died, Congress passed sanctions carrying his name — the Otto Warmbier BRINK Act — aimed at the foreign banks that move the regime's money. His parents have spent every year since making sure no one forgets.¹⁶

None of that is the problem. Otto Warmbier deserved every minute of it — the grief, the coverage, the law. The problem is what it proves. Nothing about North Korea prevents American attention. Nothing about the cruelty is too remote to feel or too complicated to act on. When the victim was one of ours, the eye focused, the cameras held, and Congress moved. The other twenty-six million victims differ from him in exactly one way that matters to the machine: none of them is American.