Mick Hartley

Builders in North Korea were subjected to a public struggle session for failing to follow Kim Jong Un’s order that people “speak, dance and sing according to our socialist ideological orientation”. From the Daily NK:

North Korean authorities recently conducted a public struggle session for labor brigades working on a massive home-building project in Pyongyang because the songs and dances they performed for themselves were deemed “non-socialist,” Daily NK has learned. 

“The public struggle session was conducted for two hours — from 8 AM to 10 AM — in mid-December against work brigades mobilized by ministries and central government agencies to build 50,000 new homes in Pyongyang,” a source in Pyongyang told Daily NK on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “The Unified Command on Non-Socialist and Anti-Socialist Behavior led the session.”

According to the source, a comprehensive report filed by security officers attached to the labor brigades sparked the Unified Command’s out-of-the-blue struggle session. The report was based on the officers’ one-month survey of the brigade personnel’s work “tendencies.”

The Unified Command began the struggle session by emphasizing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s order that people “speak, dance and sing according to our socialist ideological orientation,” explaining to the audience the Workers’ Party’s instructions to this effect.

During the struggle session, Unified Command officials said: “We have confirmed that the ministry and central government cadres and workers and Socialist Patriotic Youth League organizations participating in the construction of 50,000 homes in Pyongyang sang strange songs and danced strange dances when they gathered during breaks to eat, drink and relax.”

During the session, the Unified Command dragged on stage six young people the security officers’ report pointed out as having “sang strange songs and danced non-socialist dances.”

The officials said the six had committed the crime of “engaging in capitalist culture rather than our unique form of socialist culture during leisure sessions with other labor brigades and in their daily lives.”

“Neither the bottom dance they performed in front of people, nor the filthy songs they sang to unknown music with corrupt lyrics instead of loyal songs full of patriotism, nor the language in which they rattled on among themselves were in line with our culture,” officials with the Unified Command said during the struggle session….

Unified Command officials also criticized officials mobilized to the labor brigades and older brigade members for laughing, chatting, and sympathizing with younger brigade members rather than taking them to task for their corrupt bourgeois lifestyles, calling such actions “beyond common sense.”

“This public struggle session was organized to signal the alarm against non-socialist behavior and, by publicly shaming [the six] by way of example, establish proper ethical standards befitting socialist citizens and Pyongyang residents, and as those who have participated in a construction project in the capital of the revolution.”

The six young people who were publicly criticized were then punished with unpaid labor and assigned the most demanding work at the construction site for three months.

What would count as a socialist dance anyway? And could you do one on a building site? Answers on a post card….