The Chosun Workers’ Party has weighed in once again on efforts to hold advanced capitalist cultural influences at bay. The move follows Kim Jong Eun’s demand earlier this month that the wind of capitalism be kept out of North Korea.
In an article carried today, the Party’s own publication ‘Rodong Shinmun’ declared, “The imperialists see the young as the main target of their cultural and ideological invasion scheme,” before emphasizing, “This reality demands that we wake up to the imperialists’ plan to undermine our youth.”
“The ‘fragrant wind’ being stubbornly pushed upon us is like a drug for the young,” it went on, adding, “If the new generations being raised today are swayed by the bourgeois wind of liberalism then they will become ethically corrupted by decadence.”
Kim Jong Eun led off this latest attack on encroaching liberal values during his visit to NSA headquarters in Pyongyang during the first week of October, a visit made to commemorate the erection of a standing statue of Kim Jong Il outside the building.
Reporting the visit on the 7th, Chosun Central News Agency cited Kim Jong Eun as saying “The NSA must engrave deep in the people’s hearts the point that even a hint of illusion or submission to the enemy is the shortest road to death and self-destruction. We must extend the fight against the enemy’s ideological and cultural infiltration and psychological scheming, and must ruthlessly crush those hostile elements with their childish dreams.”
While troubling, articles of this nature do provide good anecdotal evidence that flows of illicit media including movies, music and dramas across the Sino-North Korean border continue to trouble the regime of Kim Jong Eun, even though the regime’s efforts to clamp down on cross-border flows have been stepped up since the beginning of 2012.
