North Korea is a destitute nation run by a dumb person…their opinion on anything shouldn’t count.

There is no good north korea timeline. The entire revolution that created it was for the express purpose of putting an idiot dictator in charge, one who immediately went to work on forcing the population to consider him a god king and putting his equally selfish, stupid, paranoid, and vile progeny in charge.

Unless you believe a unified korea without US intervention but still with USSR support would suddenly overthrow that repressive regime, that was never going to produce a free society.

Why would they be less authoritarian if they weren’t anti West? This sounds a lot like the argument that the only reason communist countries terrorize, murder and starve their own people is because of the evil capitalist in other countries who aren’t doing that to their people. If only we could execute all of the kulaks together there’d be no need for the NKVD, comrade!

Lest we forget, the North was propped up by the Soviets under Stalin. Do you think it is likely that they would have allowed a non-Stalinist, non-totalitarian faction to remain in charge there even if there was one with strong positions? Just look at Soviet-run purges of "improper" leftists during the Spanish Civil War.