North Korea is a particularly tough topic to have objectivity on. On one hand, their isolation in itself means they’re not a typical country by any interpretation, and not gonna lie I’d be surprised if even their supporters claimed it was perfectly normal. On the other hand, its portrayal in the media is highly propagandized, to the point where some defectors (e.g. Yeonmi Park) have made ridiculous claims like that citizens sometimes push a passenger train to work in power outages, and reputable news outlets simultaneously report that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy and that having that haircut is also illegal, or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they’re alive. It’s hard to have a meaningful discussion when this is the information we’re given to work with! While NK is often open for work and tourism (albeit stricter tourism than in most countries) and those tourists often enough share videos or write articles, they’re enough to get a peak inside and learn that ok, it’s not a literal cartoon place, they have a water park and rail with a nicer metro than my city and people’s lives are much closer to normal than what we often hear, but there’s only so much we can really learn from these foreigners’ experiences.

Some of the big points that often get overlooked are:

• Their mindset, especially the skepticism and national security extremism didn’t come from nowhere. A major cause of their lack of development are that the UN Command bombing ‘destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, including an estimated 85% of its buildings.’ [wiki] and the US and later UN sanctioned them [wiki].
• The pervasive propaganda is VERY blunt by our standards. That said, their nationalism and idolization of political leaders is certainly not unique, even if the pictures and statues of their ‘glorious leaders’ everywhere are freakin’ weird. For a comparison to a more familiar country: the US pledge of allegiance, idolization of the Founding Fathers and pervasive flag display are also unusual manifestations of ingrained nationalism, even if to a lesser degree than NKs patriotism.
• South Korea is also pretty far from normal. Their First Republic stage included their leader getting exempted from 8-year term limits and executing the opposition leader while arresting other members, and has repeatedly become a dictatorship up to the present Sixth Republic, where the current president just got impeached for establishing a dictatorship, making them the third SK president to be impeached so far (the second-previous president was being directed by a cult leader’s daughter along with the ‘Eight Goddesses’ group of billionaires who were basically writing legislation themselves.)

But, at the end of the day, with all that context, I would never call North Korea normal or typical, just nowhere near as bizarre as the mass media portrayal from even reputable outlets. And I suppose that’s why some (imo silly) people will overcompensate and try to say that they’re just the same as other countries.

What are you talking about? They usually counter with a whole monograph, with links to receipts, like you got just now.

A bit dishonest to point to the drops in life expectancy and the general 1940s and 1950s period without mentioning World War II, where the Nazis waged a war of extermination and genocide on those they considered genetically inferior, don’t you think? Same with comparing a highly developed country that saw no land fighting in World War II to the country devastated the most by it that was a feudal backwater only a couple decades prior when it comes to infant mortality. The bit on literacy is also misleading, the vast majority of all SSRs pre-Socialism were illiterate.

Outside of curiously leaving out World War 2 and the massive devastation it brought (80% of combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front), as well as comparing directly to the United States that never saw the same destruction and started the century several laps ahead, your only real criticism was a lack of consumer goods. This is true, light industry was lacking and being closed off from the Global Economy was indeed a contributing factor to its dissolution, but you could have pointed to that honestly.

No, most Marxists don’t want to go back in time to the first Socialist state, they would rather learn from what worked and what didn’t and be part of building a Communist future.

im not a native speaker but wouldnt the word for this in this context be “ourselves”?