You have to wonder if the people living in North Korea would have been better off if the communists had taken the entire peninsula. Was North Korea devolving into the dystopian hermit kingdom it currently is inevitable without a hostile South Korea right at its border? (this is not a rhetorical question, I'm hardly an expert on Korea)
Yes, the Orwellianism was from day one. Nonetheless, the North had the better standard of living of the sides until about the 1970s, mostly because it had the convenience of neighboring the two largest communist powers on earth.
South Korea was a horrible dictatorship until around 1990.
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