In 2020, however, Pyongyang enacted a law to make watching or distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.
A defector previously told the BBC that he was forced to watch a 22-year-old man shot to death. He said the man was accused of listening to South Korean music and had shared films from the South with his friend.
Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have been born in another country. I feel awful about what these poor people have to go through.
@underwire212 imagine that you can tune in on Spotify, YouTube or wherever you want and listen to whatever you want. Imagine that you can legally buy whatever newspaper from the local shop, or go to whatever internet website and legally read whatever news you might find there, whether it is a government website, a conspiracy website, a satirical website or whatever. Legally. That’s what democracy makes it special. This is what freedom is all about.
Here in Romania, during communism, if you were caught listening to Radio Free Europe, you would be prosecuted immediately. If you listened to AC/DC, Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin or other iconic Rock bands back in the day, you would be labeled as a potential risk for the society, possibly extremist, and followed 24/7 by the secret police. You could have a police record with this, all with this nonsense like what were you wearing, where were you going, what you were doing etc., and it would weigh down hard on your career. Your phones could be tapped, your mail could be tampered, especially if you sent it outside. The secret police was so well infiltrated in the society that anyone could report you. Anyone could be a collaborator, and you wouldn’t be aware of it. Imagine you throw a party, and you make some random jokes about the regime, or that you all listen to one of these bands. In your group of friends, it was enough for just one of them to be a collaborator. You can imagine that all of you might be fucked, the next day if you’re lucky enough, on the spot if not.
There were cases of spouses reporting to the secret police, parents, children, relatives of all sorts. Teachers could be collaborators as well. Priests were known to be collaborators of the secret police, as people would go to confess their sins, and then in turn, they would confess these sins of them to (you guessed it) the secret police. You just couldn’t trust anybody.
It’s just mind-boggling how the secret police (in Romania even aptly named Securitate meaning Security) could follow you for basically nothing. And probably the teens in the article in the OP were in a similar situation.
A friend of mine is from Romania, and I know many who lived in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). They don’t talk often about it, but when they do their stories seem absurd, hard to believe sometimes that these things happened, and each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.
@0x815 oh, wow. Yea, their stories just seem unbelievable. And also the way some people crossed the border to reach the “free world” seems unbelievable. For example, a band managed to cross the border inside Marshall speakers. Others tried to cross the Danube into Yugoslavia (which was more liberal at the time) and got shot by the Romanian border patrols. It was pretty much hell on Earth.
each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.
Absolutely. Every time I hear about governments snooping inside personal communication I think of how phones were tapped and letters were read for every known or possible dissidents back then. And when an extremist party seems to be on the verge of taking power (and we do have extremist parties as well in Romania) I just think that measures like these would be the first they would implement, along with reducing democratic rights.
this is the kind of shit all authoritans dream of: complete control over everyones lives and forcing people into their information bubble to solidify power
so watch out who you vote for or shit could go downhill fast
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Rare footage obtained by BBC Korean shows North Korea publicly sentencing two teenage boys to 12 years of hard labour for watching K-dramas.
The footage, which appears to have been filmed in 2022, shows two 16-year-old boys handcuffed in front of hundreds of students at an outdoor stadium.
Footage such as this is rare, because North Korea forbids photos, videos and other evidence of life in the country from being leaked to the outside world.
The clip has reportedly been distributed in North Korea for ideology education and to warn citizens not to watch “decadent recordings”.
“The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers,” says the voice, in an apparent reference to South Korea.
Seoul ended the policy in 2010, saying it found the aid did not reach the ordinary North Koreans it was intended for, and that it had not resulted in any “positive changes” to Pyongyang’s behaviour.
Saved 73% of original text.
Footage without sound from an organization nobody knows.
North Korea’s human rights: What’s not being talked about (2019)
The state controls everything, and actively spies on its citizens using a vast surveillance and informer network.
North Koreans get all their news, entertainment and information from state media, which unfailingly praises the leadership. According to RSF, citizens can be sent to prison for viewing, reading or listening to content provided by international media outlets.
Internet access is available for the elite few in the capital, Pyongyang, who lead relatively comfortable lives. Others may have restricted access. The country has its own very basic intranet - a closed network which certain people are allowed to use.
“North Korea has been said to be the world’s biggest open prison camp,” said Brad Adams [Asia director of Human Rights Watch]. “I don’t think that’s unfair.”
Foreign nationals in North Korea have been arrested and detained for extended periods of time - often kept as prisoners for political reasons and used as diplomatic pawns at opportune moments.
A significant majority of North Koreans undertake unpaid labour at some point in their lives, according to a HRW report. Former students who defected from North Korea told HRW that their schools forced them to work for free on farms twice a year - at ploughing and harvest time - for one month at a time.
Discrimination against women very much exists, but “there isn’t a way to measure inequality in the North like how you measure the wage gap between males and females”, says Arnold Fang [a researcher from Amnesty International]
Reports are also rampant of women facing torture, rape and other sexual abuses while held in detention facilities - and of widespread sexual abuse in the military.
I guess whoever made this footage and made it available to Western media may have risk their lives. Everything else than govrrnment propaganda is strictly prohibited in countries like North Korea.
Just one recent information:
North Korea Events of 2023 - Freedom of Expression and Information
In March and April [2023], authorities reportedly conducted public trials in Ryanggang province under the law. One trial targeted 17 young people for watching unsanctioned videos and using South Korean language. One leader of the group was sentenced to 10 years of forced labor. In another trial, 20 youth athletes were sentenced to three to five years of forced labor for using South Korean vocabulary.
This seems to be an unedited version of that video with sound. I don’t speak Korean so I can’t validate it against the article, but the bbc has a reputation for being credible so I’m inclined to believe it. https://youtu.be/GcUe4O_53_0
As for the organization, the only mentions I’ve found are almost all about this, with one mention of it being a think tank in South Korea, which is weirdly little information.
The clip has reportedly been distributed in North Korea for ideology education and to warn citizens not to watch “decadent recordings”.
The video includes a narrator who is repeating state propaganda. “The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers,” says the voice, in an apparent reference to South Korea. “They are just 16 years old, but they ruined their own future,” it adds.
The boys were also named by officers and had their addresses revealed.
Just a guess, but in Western rotten puppet regime clutures it might be illegal to doxx even some NK teenagers who have ruined their own future by watching decadent recordings…
Yeah I don’t want to deny the horrific living situation of NK’s citizens, but after some of the outrageous propaganda we’re fed in the west, mostly by SK media groups, I am reluctant to believe anything about that country that is presented in this way.
What sources do you trust if I may ask?
I don’t really know, tbh. But I do know a lot of the stuff the corporate media in the west reports on about NK are verifiably flat out lies. Stuff like “every male citizen is forced to get the same haircut as KJU”. That was a story invented whole cloth by a broadsheet rag in SK, then picked up by western media sources and reported to us as fact.
There is a financial element to this: saying outrageous things about NK leads to tidy profits. Even NK defectors have been caught lying about the place. What’s her face was touring Americas right wing talk shows recently, saying things that either just aren’t true or wildly exaggerated. She’s made a good career of it.
So don’t trust immediately. Verify. Every media source has a bias and recognize that whenever you view one.
It just puzzles me that you don’t know which media you trust. How do you verify then? What do you read?
