This photo, provided by KCNA, shows North Korea's military parade at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang on Friday, marking the 80th anniversary of the Workers' Party of Korea's establishment. (Yonhap)
On October 10, 2025, North Korea marked the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party with a massive military parade in Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square.
The regime unveiled its new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-20, flaunting its self-proclaimed status as a “nuclear power” and declaring symbolic solidarity among North Korea, China, and Russia. Yet behind the spectacle lies the muted cries of a people deprived of freedom and reduced to mere instruments of the regime.
The parade was not a show of national pride, but a political performance staged to legitimize tyranny. Dictatorships hide fear beneath grandeur and demand loyalty at the expense of liberty. Countless North Korean soldiers are dispatched to foreign battlefields, serving as pawns to bolster Kim Jong-un’s “revolutionary prestige.” Their deaths are glorified as “heroic sacrifice,” while the survivors are consumed as hollow symbols of patriotism. In this brutal system, human life is reduced to numbers—resources to be spent at the regime’s convenience.
After two decades on the frontlines of North Korean human rights advocacy, many defectors now confess to a sense of futility. “All our dedication to stopping the dictator’s nuclear ambitions feels meaningless,” one activist lamented. Their words reflect not only personal despair but also a moral reckoning for the global human rights movement itself.
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Can we still stop the rampage of a dictator?
Where has the voice of humanity gone?
Today’s despair among North Korean human rights advocates is not born solely from Pyongyang’s repression. The indifference of the international community has deepened their isolation. In recent years, the word “human rights” has quietly faded from the policies of both Seoul and Washington. Under the banners of “dialogue” and “peace,” the world has, paradoxically, enabled and normalized the regime’s abuses.
North Korean human rights should never be treated as a bargaining chip in diplomacy. It is, at its core, a matter of universal human dignity. Yet in the calculus of realpolitik, truth and lives continue to be traded away. The barrier activists now face is no longer made of barbed wire, but of diplomatic silence.
And still, amid despair, seeds of hope are taking root.
Inside North Korea, especially among the younger generation, subtle yet powerful currents of change are stirring. Exposure to South Korean dramas, K-pop, and outside information has revealed to them the existence of another world. The youth are awakening from indoctrination, transforming from a generation of obedience into one of imagination -capable of envisioning freedom.
Even among North Korean laborers dispatched to China and Russia, a quiet realization is emerging: “The government does not exist for the people.”
It is from such awakenings that the first winds of liberation may one day rise.
- Seyul Jang, CEO of the Gyere-eol Nation Unified FR