North Korea’s repression continues to grow

Imprisoned in a small country where they are watched night and day, North Koreans live a life of tension and hunger under the extreme laws of President Kim Jong-Un, who forbids, with cruel penalties, any cultural product coming from abroad.

This oppressive regime, borrowed from the former Soviet Union and repeated until it exploded in the form of changes in many Eastern European countries, has been applied for many years in this Asian nation, where all its inhabitants are distrustful of others and terrified.

Yoon Mi-So recalls that, when he was 11 years old, he saw a man executed because a South Korean film had been found on him. The execution was made public to make an example to the people. He says the man was crying and the guards showed no mercy.

Those who try to cross the border to flee abroad are killed, those who still live there have no Internet or social networks and are forced to watch a few national TV channels, permeated with ideological messages and distorted news.

To top off this repression, the president has imposed a new law against all “reactionary thinking” and those caught with paper and audiovisual materials, in any format, that are not from the country, face the death penalty.

Just for watching a foreign film the sentence is 15 years in a concentration camp. Not long ago, three teenagers were sent to a re-education camp for cutting their hair like K-pop idols and wearing their pants above their ankles.

Like Hitler and Stalin, Kim subjects his country’s population to dense and constant ideological propaganda and prevents them from having any reference to the world, at a critical time when a pandemic is raging, food is scarce, and the police and military are cracking down hard.