North Korea...suicidal, or attention whore?

[Cato]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H. L. Mencken

I think they learned it from Bush and the republicunts. Without the perception, real or imagined, of some massive external threat would the North Korean populace put up with their living conditions?

Sounds eerily similar to sequestration; the exception of course is that sequestration relies on an internal threat.