North Korea With Better Branding

In the United States—and particularly in the West—we live in a world where marketing has become indistinguishable from manipulation. From products to politics, the line between authenticity and performance is blurred. The digital age has amplified this to an extreme: everything is curated, sponsored, or designed to sell, even if what’s being sold is hollow.

Video games provide one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon. Every year, major studios release games surrounded by enormous hype—cinematic trailers, influencer campaigns, and glowing reviews. Influencers on Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok are paid to “play” these games, pretending to enjoy them, acting excited for the camera, and creating an illusion of fun and quality. Meanwhile, rating giants like IGN or platforms such as Steam are quick to post inflated reviews, often before the game is even fully tested by real players. Then, inevitably, the truth emerges: the game is buggy, unfinished, or just plain bad—a cash grab disguised as a cultural event.

In much the same way, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries have mastered their own version of this illusion. What is marketed as a system of healing has quietly evolved into a system of dependency. The public is taught to “trust the science,” yet the science that reaches us is often shaped by profit, not health. From antidepressants to cholesterol pills, the goal is rarely to cure but to maintain—to keep patients subscribed, compliant, and reliant on a steady flow of medication. Preventative medicine, holistic care, and genuine cures are overshadowed by a business model that thrives on chronic illness. Just as the entertainment industry sells excitement and escape, Big Pharma sells comfort and control—both profiting from a cycle that never truly ends.

This isn’t just bad marketing—it’s a symptom of a larger cultural issue. The same tactics used to sell us broken video games are used to sell us lifestyles, ideologies, and even realities. The marketing machine in the U.S. thrives on illusion, on keeping consumers in a constant state of anticipation and belief. It’s eerily similar to the kind of propaganda we hear about from authoritarian regimes—such as North Korea—where actors are employed to create a false sense of prosperity, excitement, and national success. The difference is that in the West, this isn’t government propaganda; it’s corporate propaganda, and it’s every bit as powerful.

The Illusion of Consensus

Marketing doesn’t stop at products—it extends to ideas. In elite academia, mainstream consensus is often presented as immutable truth, marketed to the public through prestige and institutional authority. Universities act as intellectual gatekeepers, deciding which theories are acceptable and which are “fringe.” From the early 20th century onward, scientific revolutions like Einstein’s theories of relativity were not merely accepted because of their explanatory power, but because they were endorsed and promoted by elite academic institutions and the media that surrounded them. Whether or not one agrees with these theories, the key point is how their acceptance was shaped by branding—by prestige, reputation, and the power of the academic establishment to market an idea as unquestionable fact.

But beyond the classroom and peer-reviewed journals lies a deeper layer of concealment. Modern academia is entangled with government and corporate interests through what’s known as dual-use research—studies that can serve both civilian and military purposes. Under the guise of “national security” or “public safety,” enormous areas of scientific exploration are quietly classified or restricted, locking away innovations and discoveries as corporate trade secrets. Professors, independent researchers, and graduate students who push against these boundaries often find themselves censored, defunded, or professionally exiled. The message is clear: curiosity is only tolerated when it serves institutional agendas.

The result is that the science we are shown—the sanitized, press-released, and grant-approved version—is often a diluted shadow of the real frontier. What reaches the public is not the raw pursuit of knowledge but a curated narrative of progress, prepackaged for consumption. Real science—the kind that questions power, challenges consensus, or reveals uncomfortable truths—is quietly buried under bureaucracy, classified funding, and academic branding. What we call “truth” is increasingly just the remnant of real science—a civilian-safe version, altered, simplified, and marketed to mislead rather than to enlighten.

Demonizing Others to Hide America’s Reflection

At the same time, the U.S. sustains its moral image by pointing outward—using foreign examples as mirrors that deflect attention from its own flaws. North Korea, for instance, is frequently portrayed as the ultimate dystopia, the cautionary tale of propaganda and repression. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that America has built a more sophisticated version of the same machinery: a glossy, monetized system of control where illusion is voluntary and dissent is drowned out by noise. The difference is not moral but material—one has wealth, and the other does not. The narrative of “other nations’ evil” serves as a convenient distraction from the marketing of American false freedom.

This dynamic is especially visible in the way Western media frames conflicts such as the recent war between Hamas and Israel. The brutality of Hamas’s actions is condemned, yet the far greater scale of destruction unleashed by Israel—with full U.S. backing—rarely receives the same moral scrutiny. Civilian neighborhoods are reduced to rubble, entire families erased, and it is still presented as “self-defense” rather than terror. The tactics may differ in technology and precision, but the outcome is the same: the systematic killing of civilians rationalized through propaganda. In truth, what is demonized in others is often mirrored in our own conduct—only polished by money, advanced weaponry, and a media apparatus skilled at making atrocity look like order.

The same pattern appears in America’s rhetoric toward China. Western narratives often focus on China’s authoritarian control, mass surveillance, and alleged organ harvesting from prisoners—yet they ignore the cruelty and exploitation embedded within America’s own prison system. The U.S. holds one of the largest incarcerated populations in the world, with conditions often described as dehumanizing: overcrowding, forced labor, medical neglect, and systemic abuse. Many inmates die from preventable causes, or are used as cheap labor for private corporations—a modern form of slavery disguised as justice. In one of the darkest realities of the system, unconscious inmates without family or legal advocates are often at risk of having their organs taken without proper consent or oversight—the very practice the United States so loudly condemns China for. While America condemns the moral failures of others, it hides its own carceral machinery, one that profits from suffering and turns punishment into an industry.

The Myth of Moral Superiority

Throughout history, every empire has justified its brutality as a defense of its ideals, and America is no exception. From wartime executions to modern interventions, the nation’s use of violence has often been sanitized by language—“security,” “democracy,” “stability.” Acts that would be condemned elsewhere are rebranded as necessary or heroic when carried out by U.S. forces. The broader pattern is one of moral camouflage: violence and coercion hidden behind marketing, diplomacy, and spectacle. The American empire thrives not because it is righteous, but because it has perfected the art of appearing so.

One striking example of this hypocrisy can be seen in the case of Heinz Petry, a 16-year-old German youth executed by an American firing squad during World War II. Petry was accused of espionage and barbarically murdered—a teenager shot by those who claimed to fight for freedom and justice. His death reveals how easily the moral high ground erodes when filtered through the lens of power. When other nations execute young prisoners, the act is decried as barbaric; when the United States does it, it disappears into the footnotes of history.

Beyond individual cases, America’s wars have repeatedly targeted civilians while maintaining a narrative of moral righteousness. During World War II, U.S. bombing campaigns leveled entire cities across Germany and Japan, targeting and killing countless civilians in massive firebombing raids. Later, the United States escalated further with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed tens of thousands of noncombatants and left generations suffering from radiation. The pattern continued in Vietnam, where saturation bombing and chemical weapons like napalm and Agent Orange devastated civilian populations, and again in Iraq, where “shock and awe” air campaigns reduced neighborhoods to rubble in the name of liberation. Each time, the destruction was justified as necessary, even virtuous—the cost of freedom, the price of peace—while the human toll was quietly buried beneath patriotic rhetoric and historical amnesia.

If propaganda is the weapon of the poor authoritarian, then marketing is the weapon of the rich one. And in that sense, the United States is not the antithesis of regimes like North Korea—it is their evolution. The same tactics of control and illusion remain; only the packaging has changed.