10 Places Humans Shouldn’t Be Able To Live (But Do)

North Korea is possibly the most isolated and secretive nation on Earth, with a horrific human rights record to boot.

The population has essentially been turned into a carefully micromanaged workforce, with the slightest sign of rebellion swiftly crushed with disproportionate force. Citizens are brainwashed into thinking that their leaders are in fact living Gods, omnipotent and omniscient. One defector even described her previously held belief that Kim Jong-il could read her mind, which meant that she would never even dare think anything bad about the regime.

Life and learning centres around the regime. Life in the city is heavily policed and regulated, life in the countryside is essentially peasantry. Everybody is expected to do manual labour, even in addition to their regular job and even the children. The minds of the citizens are so heavily controlled, and thought becomes so centralised, that some who have attempted to escape the country actually want to go back because they are unable to adjust to the outside world.

There is little infrastructure, few resources and most of the government's money is poured into its military or civic building, leaving the people to fend for themselves in a centralised state. The picture above shows the sheer lack of modern civilisation - the black space actually being the large unlit mass of N. Korea between the shining S. Korea and China.

And those are the lucky ones. Dissenters and defectors are treated viciously, public executions are regular occurrences and most are sent to be worked and tortured to death in prison camps.

From the scant insights we in the outside world have managed to gather, it seems like life in the most mysterious country on the planet, truly is a grey-washed hell on Earth.