Mick Hartley

Another day, another ideological campaign. The search for a totally compliant North Korean populace gets more and more feverish, as signs of deviance – watching a South Korean video, for instance, in preference to memorising the latest guidance from Kim Jong-un on achieving the perfect socialist society – continue to multiply.

North Korea has ordered a sweeping ideological campaign to erase South Korea from the minds of young people, directing youth organizations to conduct weekly sessions aimed at purging South Korean cultural influence from those under 30, a Daily NK source reported Tuesday.

A source in North Hamgyong province said that on March 22, authorities issued instructions to intensify efforts to sever all mental and cultural ties with South Korea in line with the regime’s declaration of South Korea as a permanently hostile state. “The government instructed that in accordance with the two-state declaration designating South Korea as an immutably hostile country, a campaign to completely wipe South Korea from people’s minds be actively pursued as a strong measure to permanently sever relations,” the source said.

Under the directive, the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, the ruling party’s mass organization for young people aged 14 to 30, was ordered to run a nationwide campaign throughout April and May using youth-tailored ideological education materials. The goal, the source said, is to bind young people to the system as a vanguard force. The campaign’s stated aim is to treat South Korea as a “ghost-like existence” and to eradicate the very idea of a South Korean identity from the consciousness of North Koreans under 30.

Specifically, the youth league was instructed to organize weekly lectures at workplaces and schools across the country with the message that “South Korean ideology and culture are a toxin that eats away at the soul.” Young people who had previously encountered South Korean dramas or music were to be encouraged to come forward voluntarily, confess their exposure, and undergo an ideological “cleansing” process.

Brainwashing, it used to be called.