The North Korean authorities are holding intensive study sessions to reinforce ideological discipline among the country’s young people, Daily NK has learned. The ideological study material says that viewing or sharing movies, television shows, or news programs from other countries is completely unacceptable.
“The headquarters of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League has called for intensive study sessions that are designed to uproot the capitalist and bourgeois ideologies implanted in young people’s heads and to equip them with a patriotic ideology and the belief that the Korean people are the best in the world,” a source in North Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
In line with those orders, the provincial branch of the Youth League has been drafting a study plan for each level since Jan. 22.
The study material sent by the Youth League states that “the bourgeois and capitalistic ideologies that are lurking among young people today are giving rise to non-socialist behavior. We need to find and quash the basic behaviors that are giving rise to non-socialist behavior.”
In the study material, The Youth League emphasized that “the most severe of the behaviors that need to be fundamentally quashed is watching or sharing movies, television series, and news articles from capitalist countries.” Such acts are “completely intolerable because they are unpatriotic and fail to regard our nation as number one.”
The Youth League continued: “This year, we will use these intensive study sessions to sweep away the dangerous ideological elements concealed inside the minds of young people and to boldly transform them into young people who unconditionally follow in the footsteps of our supreme leader.”
“This must be a year when young people are endowed with a sense of responsibility and mission and with infinite devotion to the supreme leader, the party, the revolution, and the people — a year when they are raised as revolutionary people who remain firm and unyielding regardless of hardship,” the Youth League instructed.
In keeping with the Youth League’s instructions, each local branch convened its members to explain the goals and objectives of the upcoming intensive study sessions.
The Youth League branch in Taechon, North Pyongan Province, gave all league members in the area the following introduction to the study sessions.
“We need to be fully armed with the revolutionary ideology of our beloved comrade, the general secretary. We will prepare young people of the next generation to stand in the vanguard and take the lead in becoming absolute believers, resolute achievers, and ardent defenders of party policy, which encapsulates the ideology and line of our comrade, the general secretary.”
The Youth League’s Taechon branch said, “The ideological instruction of young people is the most important and critical issue in the course of the revolution. Young people need to carry on their struggle while living according to party policy because that arms them with an indomitable weapon for victory and prevents them from becoming the ideological playthings of the imperialists.”
“We will reinforce our ideological training offensive to fill the ideological vacancy and eliminate mental wandering among all young people in Taechon and to enable them to live lives befitting young people of North Korea, who remain strong in body and mind and keep their eyes on the prize no matter how difficult things become,” the Tachon branch emphasized.
All members of the Youth League in Taechon have been attending two hours of intensive study with their organizations every day since Jan. 22, the source said.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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