10,000 North Korean Students Reportedly Turn Themselves in to Authorities for Watching South Korean Dramas & Movies

Arise, Comrades of the Revolution and Servants of Marshal Kim Jong-un! The latest patriotic cause has emerged: to gloriously turn yourself in to Our Merciful Motherland for committing the most heinous counter-revolutionary crime of watching South Korean drama!

10,000 North Korean Students Reportedly Turn Themselves in to Authorities for Watching South Korean Dramas & Movies

About 10,000 North Korean students have heeded this call and turned themselves in to the authorities for consuming South Korean media in secret, South Korean media Kukmin Ilbo reports. 

This phenomenon came after it became clear that watching shows from south of the border can be punishable by death, or up to 15 years of hard labour in prison camps. The repentant comrades hence were hoping for a lighter punishment by admitting to their crimes.

About 5,000 DVD players were also surrendered.

(Well, if North Korea claims it is the sole legitimate government of the entire Korea, South Korea is technically North Korea, so why is watching North Korean media illegal…?)

Anyway, North Korea admonished earlier last year that South Korean media was “deceptive, fabricated, absurd, and impure”, possibly referring to South Korean productions that featured the totalitarian hermit state like “Crash Landing on You”.

I don’t know about you, but I think North Korea should be flattered instead that South Koreans think their soldiers are as hot as Hyun Bin.

North Korea vs. Foreign Media

Further in the past in 2014, the North Korean government also issued threats against the United States if it had the audacity and misjudgment to defame the Glorious Motherland by releasing the film “The Interview”. 

The Sony film was an unflattering portrayal of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and his regime (how dare they!) and concluded with his assassination by an American comedy show host. Sony was hacked in 2014 for producing the film, in a cyberattack traced back to North Korea. 

How ignorant. We all know that General Secretary Kim is immortal.

The North Korean government is particularly sensitive towards the infiltration of foreign materials into the country’s heavily censored media landscape, because the regime has weaved a fairy tale of North Korean prosperity so far from the truth that any foreign media can contradict its narrative.

Children are taught, for example, that North Korea is the most prosperous country in the world owing to its successful implementation of its Juche ideology. China has “lost its way” by “abandoning communism”, while South Koreans are in constant, starving hardship due to their hostile occupation by the United States. 

I guess South Korea really is North Korea after all.

Any South Korean media with even a passing depiction of what the country is really like then becomes a counterfactual that causes viewers to question the regime’s narrative, exposing them to the risk of disillusionment and disloyalty. 

Especially when you only get meat for your rations on Kim Il-sung’s birthday but see South Korean actresses chew on fried chicken everyday. How subversive.

Feature Image: IMDb