Editor's Note: This is part of a symposium asking what happens if Kim Jong-un died. To read the other parts of the series click here.

Joseph Stalin’s communism, the Nazi’s extreme form of totalitarianism, or the totalitarianism aspects of the killing fields seem to have ended, but totalitarianism remains a prominent part of the North Korean people’s lives. 

This is because totalitarianism is not a system but rather a movement conveyed by propaganda. 

As soon as a dictatorship is welcomed, those who represent the interests of a particular class or group, oppress the people with a strong dictatorship, seize the power with dictatorship totalitarianism and as a result the people lose their freedom.

North Korea’s totalitarian rule is a very different rule from other kinds of dictatorships that history has experienced so far. 

The most repressive totalitarianism known to mankind is Stalin's dictatorship of Bolshevism and Hitler’s Nazi regime, which systematically slaughtered six million Jews to ultimately solve “Jewish problems.”

The Stalinist Bolshevik regime suppressed people thoroughly by oppressing them as a political means to firmly solidify the Soviet state system and operate the forced labor camp, Gulag. 

According to Soviet records, about one million people died from 1934 to 1953, but it is estimated that six to fifteen million people actually died.

With the fall of the two regimes, the totalitarian system should have also disappeared, but, still, it remained. 

North Korea is the only remaining totalitarian dictatorship on Earth that completely controls the public and private lives of citizens through a totalitarian dictatorship.

Kim Il-sung, who entered the Joseon Dynasty with the Soviet power in 1945, began a Stalinist dictatorship. In 1956, he erased the Stalinist totalitarianism and started the Kim Il-sungsik dictatorship.   

Kim Il-sung is the father of Juche. Juche verges on being the opposite of Marxism and its ideology is the system of slavery.   

Kim’s totalitarian “democratic centralist” people became his machine for enforcing collectivism.  

Kim Il-sung instilled the entire society into a society with Kim Il-sung’s ideology and instilled excessive political ambitions and actions into society so that people have faith in his ideology, as in the Soviet Gulag. 

People lived and worked under harsh conditions with a high death rate and spent their free time memorizing Kim Il-sung. 

On July 8, 1994, when Kim Il-sung died, North Koreans were saddened by the death of “the God” and many thought the country of North Korea would collapse in a few years. 

However, Kim Jong-il’s brutal totalitarian dictatorship continued, and thousands of people starved, froze to death, and even crossed the third country to end up dying in an unknown place.

Meanwhile, Dictator Kim is making nukes and missiles, committing cyber-terrorism and making chemical weapons that threaten the world, regardless of people’s deaths. 

In the present, the world is paying attention to what will happen to North Korea as Kim Jong-un’s health theory begins, but North Korea is a terrorist nation that has existed on the planet, maintaining seventy years of dictatorship through totalitarian propaganda. 

The totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea does not disappear with the death of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, or Kim Jong-un, just like totalitarianism or the fall of Nazi Germany. 

History remembers Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime, and Rwandan terrorism, while still forgetting the brutal totalitarian genocide of North Korea in the twenty-first century. 

The death of Kim Jong-un should abandon the expectation that North Korea’s dictatorship will collapse in a day; the collapse of North Korea can only be achieved by North Koreans. 

Enlightening North Koreans who live under the same sky but look at different skies after being brainwashed through the country’s education system for over seventy years is the most beneficial and quick way to ensure the safety of the world and the collapse of the North Korean regime. 

The Invisible, the people who are not socially aware and who do not belong to those who are on Earth, were in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The stories we tell, the actions we are doing, are invisible to them. 

Since they were born in North Korea, into a country with no religion, color, or language, they became people who were no longer interested in anyone other than their warmongering and murderous leaders.

Remembering North Koreans and liberating the country’s slaves is the answer to the collapse of its regime, and it is also a way to root out the only totalitarian dictatorship left on the planet. 

Jihyun Park is a North Korean defector and Human Rights Activist. She won NatWest’s Chairman’s Award AWA 2018. Park is also the Outreach Director at Connect North Korea, a reporter with Radio Free Asia, the Co-Director of Stepping Stones.

Image: Reuters