“Wipe out the Korean Wave”: Prison Sentences and Family Banishments follow Kim Jong-un’s Direct Orders to Eliminate S. Korean Cultural Influence (2)

◆Public trials and expulsion from the city

“We will organize a massive public campaign and trial against the trash who are copying and imitating the words of the puppets, and we will impose strong legal sanctions while expelling their families from the city and making the masses aware as well as imposing corresponding administrative and legal punishments on the responsible officials.”

If the children of city residents are found to be influenced by the “Korean Wave,” their families will be exiled to farming villages and rural areas making them jointly responsible, a measure which will cause great fear among North Koreans.

The lowest class of people in North Korea are cooperative farmers. They are poor, under constant threat of hunger, and unable to make any progress. Once they are placed in a farming village, it is difficult for their children and grandchildren to escape their status as farm workers for generations to come.

These "Korean Wave clean-up operations" have been put into practice. In order to prevent watching Korean dramas, the government mandated the installation of a "barrier" program on computers that blocks the playing of images that have not been approved by the government. Last year, a young man from Musan who watched foreign dramas committed suicide during his detention because he could not endure the harshness of the investigation. This is far from the only instance of such horror, with our reporting partners detailing many such examples during the “Korean Wave clean-up.”
(To be continued.)

Editor’s notes on North Korean reporters
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