

This isn’t the first time Kim has cracked down on so-called anti-socialist tendencies. “He must reassert his ideological control on the young if he doesn’t want to lose the foundation for the future of his family’s dynastic rule.” “Young North Koreans think they owe nothing to Kim Jong Un,” said Jung Gwang-il, a North Korean defector who smuggles K-pop into his former motherland. A South Korean study of 116 recent defectors found that nearly half had “frequently” enjoyed southern content while residing in the DPRK, the New York Times reported. However, it might be too late the curb the trend. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is ramping up his war on K-pop music performed by bands such as Blackpink (inset). In order to eradicate the “perverse” phenomenon, state officials have been ordered to search computers, text messages and notebooks for South Korean vernacular, while people caught mimicking the “puppet accent” could be banished from cities, per the top-secret papers. Lately, Korean slang has started to infiltrate everyday conversation, with North Korean women increasingly calling their boyfriends “oppa” - a term for “honey” popularized by South Korean dramas - rather than the state-mandated “comrade.” It’s not just listening to K-pop that’s the problem. By watching bootlegged Korean content, they learned that while they were starving to death, their southern brethren were trying to shed pounds through dieting. North Korean millennials who grew up during the 1990s famine are especially disillusioned with the state, which had long pushed the notion that South Korea was a beggar-infested hellhole. Kim Jong-un bans mullets, skinny jeans in North Korea Meanwhile, in February, Kim - whose family has ruled the country for three generations - ordered the nation’s provinces, cities and counties to clamp down on increasing capitalist influence.

However, the “ Hermit Kingdom” honcho has ramped up the the anti-capitalist rhetoric in recent months as he sees his nation become increasingly susceptible to the cultural stylings from the south, the Daily Mail reported. South Korean entertainment has long been smuggled across the DPRK border, initially in cassette form and eventually as flash drives from China. Grammy-nominated K-pop group BTS performs onstage for the 2020 American Music Awards on Novemin South Korea. This past May, a citizen was killed via firing squad for hawking bootleg South Korean music and other entertainment. If that wasn’t harsh enough, K-pop smugglers could even face execution while those caught singing, speaking or writing in a “South Korean style” could be sentenced to two years at a work camp, per the smuggled documents. The previous maximum punishment for fans of popular acts such as BTS was five years. In an apparent bid to launch his own brand of cancel culture, Kim introduced new laws in December stipulating that anyone caught watching or possessing South Korean content could be sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor.
NORTH KOREA KIM JONG UN MOVIE
The newly slimmed-down DPRK despot had dubbed the southern cultural imports a “vicious cancer” corrupting North Korean youths’ “attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviors” à la the dancing in the ’80s movie “Footloose” - but with a much darker bent. These were then made public by South Korean legislators. The secretive anti-K-pop campaign came to light through internal documents smuggled out of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) by the Seoul-based news source Daily NK, the New York Times first reported Friday. Kim Jong Un is cracking down on DPRK-pop fans.Īmid increasing cultural influence from South Korea, the 37-year-old North Korean leader is imposing harsher penalties on citizens caught listening to “perverse” K-pop music. Kim Jong Un all smiles watching extreme martial arts performance ‘We are not discussing war’: North Korea launches ballistic missiles into waters off Japanįootage shows Kim Jong Un enjoying bizarre display of force by shirtless soldiers US calls on North Korea to stop missile tests, resume nuclear talks
