Mick Hartley

The world is catching up on North Korea's clampdown on "anti-socialist" – ie South Korean – culture. Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times:

Video has emerged from North Korea showing handcuffed teenagers being publicly denounced for the crime of enjoying foreign films and music, in a further sign of the regime’s fear of the “malignant tumour” of imported culture.

Clips broadcast on South Korean television show teenage girls with heads bowed in some kind of tribunal. One of them, whose name and school are identified on screen, stands weeping in front of a microphone as she makes her confession, before being roughly led away by uniformed soldiers.

The film, which appears to be an official production distributed as a warning, describes her as one of “several students who watched and distributed impure publications and propaganda materials, including puppet television dramas” — a term used to refer to South Korean television.

In a second clip, a young soldier confesses to similar crimes. “Using my mobile phone, I watched 15 American movies, 17 South Korean puppet movies and 127 videos and listened to about 160 puppet songs,” he says.

The scene switches to a classroom of young soldiers as they listen to the testimony of his mother. “He was arrested [for] watching impure recordings,” she says tearfully. “I gave birth to a traitor, not a son!”

A voiceover comments: “There is a phenomenon by which impure recordings are purchased, viewed, stored and distributed using mobile phones. In the process, even text messages are exchanged in the contaminated puppet dialect. We must consider the fight against this malignant tumour as a matter of life and death.”

There are already YouTube clips of young people being sentenced to hard labour for watching South Korean dramas.

The punishment may be worse than years in a hard labour camp: it could be execution.