Mick Hartley

Watching South Korean videos, no less. It’s “an existential threat to the state”. The latest from the Daily NK:

Dozens of young coal miners at a state-run mining complex in South Pyongan province were arrested in February after a joint inspection found they had been watching and sharing South Korean videos. Public denunciation sessions held April 13 and 14 exposed the extent of the violations, which authorities framed as an existential threat to the state.

A Daily NK source in South Pyongan province said inspectors from the Ministry of Social Security and the State Information Bureau (North Korea’s domestic intelligence agency, formerly known as the Ministry of State Security, renamed at the Ninth WPK Congress) conducted the joint crackdown beginning in early February at mines under the Pukchang Youth Coal Mine General Enterprise, a major coal production complex. The inspectors confiscated smartphones and SD cards from workers without warning and discovered that miners at the Namdok, Inho, and Hoean youth coal mines had been accessing and circulating South Korean content.

The videos watched and shared included not only South Korean films, television dramas, and entertainment programs but also footage of North Korean defectors describing their lives after resettlement in South Korea, as well as South Korean travel vlogs.

To avoid detection, the miners had organized clandestine viewing sessions in basement storage areas of their dormitories. Authorities found that the gatherings had fostered what they described as a longing for freedom, and that some miners had begun imitating South Korean speech patterns, fashion, and behavior, signs officials characterized as ideological deviation.…

The source said dozens of young miners were arrested on charges of violating the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law, a sweeping 2020 statute that criminalizes the consumption and distribution of foreign content and carries penalties up to death for the most serious offenders. The denunciation sessions held over two days categorized the conduct as acts threatening the existence of the state and maximizing hostility toward the system.

Punishments are to be graduated according to the severity of each miner’s involvement. Those who only watched the content or were first-time offenders face reassignment to what the source described as “death-trap mines,” facilities with significantly worse conditions and higher accident rates. Those who actively distributed the content or had prior violations face unconditional transfer to a re-education camp.

From which they very likely will never emerge.

It’s cultural contagion that terrifies Pyongyang. No nuclear umbrella can protect them from that. It’s a shame that the South Korean government is now in one of its accommodationist phases, and has stopped any balloon/propaganda incursions. It would seem at the moment, surely, to be a good time to send over more USB sticks loaded with drama and music and, well, culture generally, from a vibrant living society that speaks the same language and shared, until recently, the same history.

Then again, that’s easy for me to say sitting in London, and not just a few miles from a belligerent neighbour threatening nuclear armaggedon on Seoul.