The belief that all people are equal and want peace is comforting. But comfort does not make it true.

The 20th century offered a brutal lesson: whole nations can be reshaped by totalitarian rule until their populations lose the moral instincts of free societies. And unless force intervenes, they do not return to normal on their own.

We see this in the starkest form in North Korea. One bloodline, one culture, and one language split in two by ideology. The result? One half of Korea became a global democracy; the other became a dynastic death cult. Over decades, North Koreans have been deprived not just of material comforts, but of history, truth, even selfhood.

They have not simply been ruled by terror. They have been reprogrammed.

This is not unique to North Korea. It is the trajectory of any regime that fuses violence, ideology, and control. It is Russia, where generations have been raised to see imperialism as pride, lies as patriotism, and trauma as normal. It is Iran, where children are taught to chant death slogans before they can read. It was the Soviet Union, where memory was rewritten, neighbors denounced, and conscience dissolved.

It is, as Viktor Frankl observed, what happens in every prolonged captivity: people adapt to survive, but that adaptation strips them of choice.

The Great Western Delusion

Western liberalism teaches that given the chance, all people will choose democracy. That they will rise up, vote out tyrants, reclaim their dignity.

But this is a dangerous illusion. Because in regimes like North Korea, Iran, or Putin's Russia, the people are not simply repressed.

They are transformed.

Transformed into instruments of state ideology. Into tools of surveillance. Into citizens who salute their captors.

Hold a perfectly fair election in North Korea, and Kim Jong Un would still win. Not because people love him, but because after decades of fear, starvation, and indoctrination, there is no longer a "self" strong enough to vote differently.

The Moral Answer

Some regimes don’t evolve. They don’t reform. They don’t collapse under their own weight.

They must be broken.

We did not reason with Nazi Germany. We bombed it. We occupied it. We forced it to confront its own crimes. And then, only then, could Germans begin to rebuild.

That is not cruelty. That is mercy with teeth.

When we fail to act, the prison grows stronger. The children of today become the guards of tomorrow. The evil metastasizes.

The truth is simple: freedom must be fought for — and sometimes, imposed.

A Word to the West

You may not want war. You may not want confrontation. You may not want to hear that some nations are lost.

But if you deny the need for outside force to crack these regimes open, what you are really accepting is a future where millions live and die in mental and moral captivity.

We once knew this. We used to act on it. We still must.

Because people can survive in darkness. But they cannot save themselves from it.

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Sergei Stepancev is the pen name of a writer and an insider in Russian business and political networks. He writes about authoritarianism, psychological warfare, and the moral crisis of the West.