Mick Hartley

It's a constant struggle, battling the spread of non-socialist behaviour, and impure recorded materials from other less enlightened countries:

The North Korean police have been deploying special teams to crackdown on illegal behavior on trains traveling between Pyongyang and other cities. In particular, the authorities believe that the trains are a conduit for videos from other countries.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in Pyongyang told Daily NK on Thursday that the country’s national police agency, the Ministry of Social Security, has been conducting raids on all trains entering Pyongyang since Apr. 15 on the grounds that trains are a hotbed for the various kinds of non-socialist behavior.

According to the source, the ministry believes that “impure recorded materials” from other countries are one of the causes of capitalist culture making inroads in the public, along with sudden changes in the ideological mindset of young people and university students. As such, the ministry has been seeking ways to eliminate those videos.

In the ministry’s view, the reason that foreign visual content continues to spread in the society rests in the government’s failure to prevent their circulation. That gave the ministry the idea of searching the trains, which are often used to transport the videos, the source said.

“The police agency sent special teams to all trains traveling on the Pyongyang-Hyesan and Pyongyang-Onsong lines that searched for any impure video recordings that they might be transporting. The agents found illegal merchandise, SD cards containing large numbers of impure video recordings, and illegal publications and printed materials being transported in the baggage and cargo compartments of several trains,” the source said….

Article 7 of the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act, which North Korea enacted in late 2020, outlines the principles for punishing offenders as follows. “When an individual commits the act of importing, viewing or circulating reactionary ideology and culture, the offender will be subjected to harsh legal sanctions up to and including execution, depending on the severity of the act, and regardless of the offender’s station in society or the reasons for their behavior.”