"Who Would Even March With Me?" — The Structural Reasons Why Resistance Is Impossible in North Korea

The Wrong Question

 

"Why don't North Koreans resist?"

 

This question has been repeated for thirty years. And for thirty years, the answers have pointed in the wrong direction. "They've been brainwashed." "They're too weak." "They genuinely support Kim Jong-un." All of these answers are wrong.

 

The question itself must change.

 

Not "why don't they resist?" — but "what does resistance require, and how has the North Korean regime systematically eliminated every one of those prerequisites?"

 

Resistance requires four conditions: the ability to find like-minded people; the ability to trust them; the ability to communicate and share information; and a cost of failure that is personally bearable.

 

The North Korean state has spent seventy years structurally, methodically, and brutally eliminating all four.

 

I. Preventing Resistance from Being Born — Three Layers of Surveillance

 

All resistance begins with the sharing of discontent. North Korea has made that sharing structurally impossible.

 

The first layer is the inminban (people's unit) system and the weekly "life review" sessions. North Koreans are required to attend these sessions through their workplace party cells or youth organizations and report both on themselves and on their colleagues. This is visible, institutionalized surveillance — but it is only the surface.

 

The second layer is far more sinister: the network of Ministry of State Security informants. The density is one informant per thirty residents. They are secretly recruited through background screening and examination. They operate under a quota system — if they fail to report suspicious activity, they themselves become suspect. They receive sealed training sessions one to three times a year.

 

The most chilling technique: when someone comes under suspicion, their closest friend is recruited as an informant and placed beside them. The person you trust most may be the one reporting on you. On university campuses, this informant density is even higher — the goal is to cut off the intellectual class before it can think.

 

In December 2012, South Korean newspapers Dong-A Ilbo and Seoul Shinmun reported, citing government sources, that Kim Jong-un had issued the following directive to his security apparatus:

 

"Detect even the sound of a needle dropping, anywhere."

 

This is not hyperbole. North Korea operates an eight-layered daily reporting system: five civilian channels (Workers' Party, State Security, Public Security, Youth League, People's Committee) and three military channels (command structure, military security bureau, political bureau). Reports flow from the smallest unit — a factory cell, a neighborhood block — upward through district, city, and province, reaching the Central Committee in Pyongyang by evening. Matters related to anti-regime activity can bypass all intermediate levels and be reported directly to the center. A small movement in a remote village can reach Kim Jong-un's desk within hours.

 

There is no gap in this net.

 

II. Preventing Resistance from Growing — Guilt by Association and Betrayal

 

Even if discontent is shared, it collapses at the stage of organization. Two mechanisms ensure this.

 

In May 1961, General Park Chung-hee launched his coup. He calculated the possibility of failure — and entrusted his family to his aide Park Tae-joon if things went wrong. Because he alone would bear the consequences of failure, he could act.

 

North Korea is different. When resistance fails, it is not only the individual who is punished. Parents, siblings, children, newborn grandchildren — three generations are sent to political prison camps without exception, erased without trace. No matter how deep the anger, no matter how great the courage, there is no human being who can condemn their entire family to that fate with a single decision.

 

Guilt by association (yeongjwaje) is not merely a punishment. It is a system designed to abort the will to resist before it can form.

 

The second mechanism is defection from within. In the majority of anti-regime activities uncovered by the security apparatus — particularly among young people and university students — the cause of failure is internal betrayal and self-surrender. As activities deepen, fear of the guilt-by-association system consumes the individual. "Better me and my family survive" becomes the logic. This is not individual weakness. It is the inevitable product of the structure.

 

III. Erasing the Memory of Resistance

 

North Korea's control does not end with suppression. It erases the very fact that resistance existed.

 

The 1995 Sixth Corps incident in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province was the most organized anti-regime attempt in North Korean history — military organization, weapons, regional base. It still failed. The military has its own internal security bureau and political department operating in parallel layers. Internal informants moved first. Hundreds were executed or sent to camps. And then North Korea permanently deleted "Sixth Corps" from its military order of battle — the unit number itself ceased to exist.

 

In 1998, at the Hwanghae Steel Plant in Sonnim, South Hwanghae Province, factory managers had been selling plant materials to buy food for starving workers. Kim Jong-il classified this as sabotage. Tanks from the 105th Armored Division surrounded the city. Eleven managers were publicly executed in the square before their workers. The anger that followed nearly organized — then fell silent in front of the tanks. In any other dictatorship, this would have become a flashpoint. In North Korea, it was cut off at the threshold of organization.

 

In the late 1980s, a large-scale collective resistance broke out in a prison camp in northern North Korea, escalating to gunfire. The authorities sent in aircraft and reduced the facility to rubble. Not a single official record exists.

 

Individuals are erased the same way. Revolutionary heroes who sided with the wrong faction during Kim Jong-il's succession — Choe Yong-geon, Kim Dong-gyu — were deleted from the official record of anti-Japanese resistance. Films featuring purged actors disappeared from circulation entirely.

 

Resistance that is not known cannot seed the next resistance. Without memory, there is no inheritance.

 

IV. What I Witnessed

 

In 1984, after graduating from university and being assigned to a "Three Revolutions" work team, I watched my thinking change within six months. I came to understand that Kim Jong-il's politics were wrong. I approached the university classmate I trusted most and tested the water.

 

"Don't you think we should be thinking differently about things?"

 

His eyes flickered. He recoiled. The conversation ended there. In North Korea, the seed of resistance is extinguished before it germinates. Not because there are no people who think critically — but because even when you find one, the door does not open.

 

In 1988, six university students at Hamhung Chemical Engineering University formed a secret reading circle. As the group deepened its discussions, one member could not bear the fear and turned himself in. All six disappeared from the campus without a sound — no trial, no announcement. The authorities quietly circulated a rumor: "The organizer was a South Korean spy." This is the standard pattern. The state cannot admit that internal dissent exists. So it is always reframed as external infiltration. In all of Hamhung, fewer than ten people outside the families knew what had happened. I was told by one of them.

 

Before I left for Russia, three people who knew me well said: "We're worried you'll run." They could only say this as I was leaving — never inside North Korea. Just before my escape from the logging camp in Russia, a university senior whose views I had shared took my hand and said: "If you can, survive and fight for Korea's democratization." He has likely passed away by now. That is why I can speak of this at all.

 

Critical thinkers existed inside North Korea. They always did. But they existed as isolated individuals. Two could not become three. Three could not become an organization.

 

Conclusion — The Azaleas Have Bloomed Dozens of Times

 

Since the 1970s, a saying has circulated quietly among North Koreans:

 

"When war comes, there are people who need to be dealt with before the Americans."

 

The anger is there. It has always been there. It is there now. What has been taken away is the structural means to express it.

 

During the Korean War, as South Korean and American forces retreated north, they told the residents who had helped them: "We will return when the azaleas bloom." The azaleas have bloomed dozens of times. North Korea's people wait, in silence, for someone from outside to come.

 

Highly educated North Korean defectors say this in unison: internal self-generated revolution is impossible. An external shock is essential.

 

It is not because North Korean citizens are passive or brainwashed.

 

It is because the fear felt by those who would resist is structurally, systematically greater than the fear felt by those who maintain the dictatorship. That is the real reason.

 

 

Kim Seung-cheol | Defected from North Korea in 1993, arrived in South Korea in 1994. Former Research Fellow, Institute for North Korean Studies (1997–2007). Former Director, North Korea Reform Broadcasting (2008–2025). Currently operates the YouTube channel "북한맨 NKMAN."

Blog: wiarae31.blogspot.com | YouTube: NKMAN