Mick Hartley

Another day, another public struggle session. Yes, it’s South Korean culture once again corrupting the pure socialist youth of North Korea. From the Daily NK:

Pyongyang city police summoned downtown residents on Feb. 1 to a public struggle session in Sosong district, where authorities publicly convicted a man arrested in November for possessing and distributing South Korean videos, music, and television programs, a Daily NK source in Pyongyang said recently, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

City police launched an investigation into what authorities described as rapidly growing infiltration of reactionary thought and culture in Pyongyang in October of last year. During the probe, they arrested the man on Nov. 30. He was held and investigated for several months on charges of consuming South Korean TV programs, movies, and music via a NoteTel portable media player and of distributing such content on portable storage devices.

During the public trial, police said the man cleverly distributed USB drives and SD cards containing music files, assigning numbers to each South Korean singer’s name, and hid his illicit material at a third location to avoid detection.

Authorities were particularly critical of the man for distributing content primarily to young people, accusing him of “spiritually corrupting countless young people with horrible anti-Republic acts.” City police framed the offense not as a personal failing but as a serious crime against the socialist system, warning that individuals engaged in reactionary behavior continued to emerge despite sustained eradication efforts.

“The man at the struggle session was just skin and bones, perhaps because he’d undergone months of horrible questioning,” the source said. “He just stood there in handcuffs, his head bowed, throughout the entire session. And as soon as it ended, they put him in a vehicle again.”

It will not go well for him. It’s like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, with the poor shaven-headed victims paraded in front of the jeering crowd – except in North Korea it’s a permanent all-the-time anti-cultural revolution. The only culture allowed is Kim worship.

The source added that while several people had previously been caught violating the law on reactionary thought and culture, the resumption of harsh public struggle sessions has cast a pall over the city. “Tension hangs over Pyongyang,” the source said.