This is agile/scrum's sprint retrospectives, for every aspect of life and even more often. Seems horrible.
Totalitarianism kind of tends to take the same shape no matter the initial ideology. It's kind of like how crabs keep spontaneously re-evolving across genera.
To me it sounded like the "struggle sessions" of communist China, or "sec checks" in Scientology. St. Augustine showed us that it's much easier to keep control of a population if you can infuse them with guilt and get them to police themselves (and each other). Other cults and states just applied that principle in different ways.
> I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?
For the Workers' Party of Korea, if the country gets run into the ground doing the right thing that beats a thriving country living outside the rules of Juche.
This sounds like something taken straight from https://elan.school/. Or is it the other way around?
My parents lived through communism and even during the worst days of the system it wasn't this bad - chiefly because it was impractical to put so much effort into exerting control over the population.
You could get jailed for being at the "wrong" student gathering - just like my dad was more than once, but that was it. They would eventually release you because even the most corrupt representatives of the system had better things to do with their time.
I have to ask - what does the NK leadership hope to achieve here? Control? Over who - the dead?