Mick Hartley

North Korea's obsessive purification drive continues:

As the North Korean government seeks to tighten ideological control over the “next generation” of children and young people this year, it is taking steps to implement the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act in Kaesong, a city geographically close to South Korea.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Friday that the North Korean authorities have sent 30 graduates of teaching colleges outside Kaesong to the city under the pretext of implementing the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act. The sending of the teachers is part of an initiative to change the Kaesong accent, whose intonation is similar to that of South Koreans.

“The Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea has been informed that since everyone in Kaesong, including children and adults, has an accent similar to that of South Korea, even the teachers, most of whom are local people, are finding it difficult to comply with the guidelines of the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act. As a result, the government has assigned 30 female graduates of a teacher training college in Nampo, South Pyongan Province, to Kaesong,” the source said.

Although the similarities between the two accents are due to geography, the North Korean authorities believe that allowing this accent to be passed on to the next generation would violate the spirit of the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, the source said.

The authorities also plan to send teachers from the Pyongyang area to Kaesong to teach the standard Pyongyang dialect to students in kindergartens and elementary schools in Kaesong.

In short, the North Korean government wants to eliminate South Korean speech patterns in Kaesong by teaching young children the standard Pyongyang dialect.

Not just the content, then – the ban on South Korean culture, on pain of death, in the name of ideological discipline – but speech too, the actual medium of communication. All must be purified, for the party.

Maybe time to remember Christopher Hitchens again:

The North Korean state was founded in 1950/51. That's the year 1984 was published for the first time. You think, could it be that someone handed a Korean translation to Kim il Sung and said, "Do you think we could make this fly?".

North Korea has, astonishingly, survived now for over 70 years while all the time, without deviation and despite constant rumours of thawing out and easing up, continuing to perfect its Orwellian vision.