[ Kim’s comments were the latest in a string of broadsides from Pyongyang against foreign influence, which the Hermit Kingdom sees as a serious threat. For years, flash drives full of Hollywood blockbusters and K-pop have flowed into North Korea via balloons, human smugglers and even helicopter drones.]
Women should wear traditional
clothing that helps make “all the aspects of life brim over with our flavor,
taste and national emotions,” Kim commanded in a letter read by a top North Korean official. And so
they did: Row upon row of women wore brightly colored dresses and blue face
masks.
They should sing patriotic songs at
construction sites and write encouraging letters to male soldiers, Kim said.
And so they would, in a totalitarian state that left them little choice.
Above all, Kim warned women to
protect their children from “alien ideology, culture and lifestyles.”
Things as seemingly minor as
unusual clothing and speaking styles were, in fact, a “malignant tumor that
threatens the life and future of our descendants,” he said, according to NK News, an outlet based in Seoul that focuses on North
Korea.
Kim’s comments were the latest in a
string of broadsides from Pyongyang against foreign influence, which the Hermit
Kingdom sees as a serious threat. For years, flash drives full of Hollywood
blockbusters and K-pop have flowed into North Korea via balloons, human smugglers and even helicopter drones.
North Korea recently tripled the
maximum penalty for possessing such contraband to 15 years of hard labor, and
it has successfully pressed South Korea to ban sending flash drives, leaflets or money across the
border.
But after closing its border
completely last year to keep the coronavirus at bay, the country is now facing food
shortages so dire that Kim publicly admitted last week the situation is “tense.”
With internal issues mounting, it’s
no surprise that Kim is again warning of foreign influence, said North Korea
specialist Rüdiger Frank.
“North Korea is in the middle of an
economic crisis, and Kim Jong Un’s strategy to deal with it is
inward-orientation and strengthening the role of the state,” Frank, a professor
at the University of Vienna, wrote in an email. “A crackdown on the ideological
front is a logical consequence.”
Frank said he had seen the power of
pop culture during his teenage years in East Germany in the 1980s. So, too, had
Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, who warned a quarter-century ago of pop
culture’s role in the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
His son appears to have learned the
same lesson, Frank said.
“Now, new technologies such as
digital media, mobile devices, etc. are making it increasingly difficult to
isolate the population from South Korean culture,” he wrote. “Kim Jong Un’s
remarks are a confirmation that North Korea’s youth is under substantial
influence by this kind of foreign culture.”
Kim has sometimes sought to portray
himself as a cultural reformer and has made some symbolic gestures on gender
issues. The authoritarian leader sent his sister to the 2018 Winter Olympics, a
trip that made Kim Yo Jong the first in the Kim family to visit South Korea
since 1950, and earned her comparisons to Ivanka Trump.
His wife, Ri Sol Ju, appears
regularly in public, unlike her predecessors, and even walks arm in arm with
her husband — “a shocking public display of affection and
social equality,” according to Anna Fifield, former Korea correspondent for The Washington
Post.
“In a country where even the wives
of top cadres wore the shapeless socialist outfits that made everyone equally
drab, Ri cut a strikingly modern figure,” Fifield wrote in her book on Kim.
North Korea passed a gender equality
law as early as 1946, and its centralized, communist-run economy relies heavily
on female workers. But it remains a “de facto still highly patriarchic
society,” Frank said. Sexual violence against women, which often goes unpunished,
has been widely documented.
Kim’s letter underlines something
that has become increasingly clear in his recent speeches, according to Frank.
“When you face a crisis, you can
retreat or move forward,” he said. “Kim Jong Un’s reaction, including the
hyper-conservative attempt to regulate the way teenagers look and speak, shows
that the North Korean leader is not a reformer.”