Amid the escalating cultural war, North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un blamed South Korea originated music genre K-Pop, a ‘vicious cancer’ , saying that it has corrupted the youth of North Korean youths, according to a report by New York Times.
The North’s state media has warned that K-pop’s growing influence, which it calls “anti-socialist and nonsocialist”, on youth would make North Korea “crumble like a damp wall.”
Kim has ordered his government to clamp down on the cultural invasion, which he said is corrupting the ‘attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviours’ of North Korea’s youth, the paper reported.
Kim introduced a series of new laws in December that raised the punishment for watching or possessing South Korean entertainment from five years of hard labor to 15 years in a labor camp.
Kim has now apparently declared a culture war against South Korea as the North Korean leader believes the popular culture of the South is corrupting the “attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviours” of the country’s youth.
“Young North Koreans think they owe nothing to Kim Jong Un,” Times quoted Jung Gwang-il, a defector who runs a network that smuggles K-pop into North Korea, as saying.
North Korea has been one of the world’s most repressive authoritarian regimes for more than 70 years.
( Input: The New York Times)
