They can't understand why any American in his right mind who's not escaping a jail term or something, would voluntarily want to come to [South] Korea… - Brian Reynolds Myers

Everybody really is the "other" for North Koreans.

To misperceive the DPRK as a communist state – either of the Stalinist or indigenized kind – is therefore to misunderstand and miscalculate its behavior. I often encounter resistance to this point when lecturing to American audiences. Conservatives do not want communism let off the hook for creating this state, and liberals do not want Washington let off the hook for bullying it. Politically correct college students object to the attribution of racism to non-whites. State Department officials, for their part, know that the perception of North Korea as a country much like our Eastern European adversaries in the late Cold War will better sustain public faith in a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis.

[I]f Kim Il Sung had won the war, Korea today would not look like North Korea. I think it would still be a much less free and prosperous place than the South is now, but it would resemble China and Vietnam more than the North now does. Its system has been shaped by the need to distinguish itself, to seal itself off from the rival state, and to pursue nuclear armament.