Whatever "Cold War system" there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, des… - Brian Reynolds Myers

The South Korean flag continues to function at least in South Korea, not as a symbol of the state but as a symbol of the race.

In fact, as I said before, North Korea is a far-right ultra-nationalist state and therefore its personality cult is very different from the personality cult that you had in the Soviet Union or in China. The cult of Mao Zedong; Stalin and Mao were essentially teacher figures because the whole point of Marxism-Leninism is to instill political consciousnesses into the spontaneous masses. As you as you may know, Marx believed that revolution was pretty much preordained, that it was going to come about as a result of the contradictions in capitalism and Lenin came along and said "No, that's not really so easy. That's not how it happens because when the proletariat starts to get angry, the capitalists fob them off with raises and, and they strike and they get an increase in their wages and they call back into the capitalist trap." So the whole point of a communist party was to basically turn the childlike proletariat into thinking adults, politically conscious adults. So Stalin and Mao Zedong were both teacher figures and Stalin was of course a smiling figure but he wasn't a particularly approachable one and the focus of his personality cult were his eyes because his eyes seen as the windows to his perfect grasp of this omnipotent science of dialectical materialism.

Communism is all about breaking down nationalism, about uniting workers around the world, and North Korea has always been about the opposite, it’s been about racial purity and pride, so remember North Korea was isolated even inside the old east-block, even inside the Soviet block.