(Facts checked) 2014, a North Korean teenager is executed
in front of his classmates.
A girl, who’s secretly in love with this guy, holds back tears.
Inside she is screaming with furious resentment, knowing this young man did nothing more than
play a famous online computer game, a game she’s heard that her dear leader Kim Jong-il
secretly plays with American kids.
We’ll get back to this story soon.
2014 was a time of pervasive paranoia in the hermit kingdom since the supreme leader and
his band of merry men had created new legislation that looked strict even for North Korea.
They have Internet in North Korea, but it’s not the same one you use.
Their internet is state-run.
It’s called the Kwangmyong intranet system and is mostly used by people who live in the
cities.
Rural folks, in general, would not have the means to access it.
As for the regular global internet, you have to be an elite to access that or at least
a very important person, such as a leading scientist or state-sponsored hacker.
We’ll tell you soon what the elites get up to on the regular internet, something that
may surprise you.
If you’ve ever looked at websites in North Korea, you’ll know that fake news is the
news.
Spreading propaganda is the name of the game.
We know this partly because, about eight years ago, some of those websites were made available
to regular internet users outside of North Korea.
You can access them today, but rest assured, North Korea only allows us to see what they
want us to see.
There’s much more to their internet than meets the eye, literally.
Even something as harmless as a cooking website is home to unbelievably outlandish propaganda
and lies.
One such sight tells the reader that North Korea has existed as one homogenous nation
since the “dawn of human civilization.”
That’s plainly not true.
The site says North Korean culture goes back half a million years.
Funny that; civilizations might only go back 12,000 and homo sapiens 300,000.
We guess the first proto-humans must have been called Homo-Korectus!
These guys were apparently cooking up tasty cuisine and writing books when the rest of
the primates were picking the poop of each other’s butt hairs and hadn’t quite figured
out how to keep a fire going.
The website says of the thousands of North Korean dishes that have been around for thousands
of years, there is scientific evidence of them being exceptionally nutritional.
One article says North Korean food has created “world models in terms of nutritive and
hygienic values.”
The leaders don’t believe this, of course, but to remain in control, the citizens must
think they are getting food far superior to everyone else in the world.
Still, the many North Koreans who have starved over the years obviously see holes in this
narrative.
The problem is, they can’t talk about it.
Some of them want to.
It’s just hard getting the word outside of the country.
Another post says North Korean noodles were lifting up the nation thanks to the “sagacious
leadership of the Chairman who treasured the national things most.”
Another post says North Korean noodles were lifting up the nation thanks to the “sagacious
leadership of the Chairman who treasured the national things most.”
We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the craziest rules on North Korea’s internet,
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Now back to North Korea.
As we mentioned in the beginning of the video, when the leader makes a speech like that,
you’re expected to clap like crazy, and we mean clap until your hands hurt.
There’s barely a page on the North Korean internet where Comrade Kim Jong-un is not
celebrated.
The “immortal achievements” of “peerless great men” are talked about everywhere,
and when there are photos, you’d think that every single North Korean was the happiest
person alive.
God, they must love their country…
One thing they don’t love is the US, the country, along with Japan, that wants to ruin
the amazing life that North Koreans have.
You can learn on many North Korean websites, even in the movie review section, that America
is evil and its citizens are all drunk on propaganda.
We aren’t kidding.
They think it’s you guys that lap up fake news.
If they knew the expression, they’d call Americans “sheeple.”
We especially like a review we found for the classic movie “Outcry of Mothers.”
The movie apparently exposes how the US slaughtered North Korean kids back in the day.
Here’s some of the synopsis, written in flawless Engrish.
“The US imperialists brought fierce flames of war to this peaceful land full of laughs
with the liberation.
It depicts on the basis of historical facts that hot-blooded outcry of souls who were
massacred cruelly by the US imperialists and class enemies, cry out the revenge on the
US imperialists and we should surely sum up with the imperialists at the cost of blood.”
As you know, that’s not how things happened, but what if North Koreans could go online
and find out the truth?
That would be dangerous for the leaders and their great fictional narrative, which is
why a North Korean citizen can get executed for merely using an internet-connected device.
The regime just cannot have anyone doing this, even if it’s just a two-minute conversation
or internet search.
imagine if North Koreans went online and watched international news for a few minutes.
It would blow them away.
It would be akin to realizing you don't have a physical body and you’re just a brain
in vat; a la something like The Matrix.
Article 60, which was updated in 2014, states that a person who merely watches a foreign
DVD, even just a South Korean soap opera, could be acting to “overthrow the state.”
That’s right.
Just going online and streaming an utter garbage piece of television can end with ten years
in a re-education camp or execution.
Join a chatroom on the regular internet, and they can absolutely expect a death sentence.
You already know why.
They don’t want people learning something which could lead to a change in the narrative
North Koreans have had forced down their throats since birth.
Article 60 says they could be handed the death penalty for tuning into an online radio broadcast.
Even if they skip the news and only listen to music, that could also mean a death sentence.
After all, maybe they’d tune into a song by the rapper Method Man and hear:
“Hit the strip, I drop a bomb in thirty minutes like I'm North Korea
It take a lot to beat us; you better join us.”
That can of worms cannot be opened; it can’t even be shaken about or held too close to
a light.
That’s why the North Korean State Security Department (SSD) went after a guy named Ri
Kyung-ho and also took down his family.
His crime was reported as contacting the outside world.
His brothers, who were both arrested, held respectable positions, one as a choir singer
and the other as a children’s TV producer.
They were probably harmless, but if some light had gotten into North Korea via their brother,
it might have been passed to them.
This is why the state decided it was time for a black-out.
A North Korean source told the western media at the time:
“In times gone by, you could bribe your way out of this, but right now, they’re
sure to punish you.
Nobody knows when or why they might get caught up in it, so everyone is nervous.”
That’s the thing with totalitarian governments.
They keep everyone on their toes.
North Korea is following a model in this respect.
For instance, during the dark days of Stalinist rule in Russia, the brilliant composer and
pianist Dmitri Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase next to his apartment door at all
times.
Even though he tried composing ideological music that Stalin might like, he knew that
they might come for him any day.
Like in the Soviet Union in those days, in North Korea, they also come for you in the
middle of the night, and sometimes, you just disappear.
They might take your family, too.
The rules about the outside world are the same if people stream content or watch pre-recorded
content.
During those 2014 crackdowns, 100 people were rounded up all at once and accused of watching
South Korean dramas.
The news said they were all accused of “anti-socialist elements” and exiled to live in a rural,
mountainous area.
In another case, two teenage boys were shot to pieces for watching South Korean dramas.
Just a year before that, 80 people were executed for watching online content, although it’s
said some were killed for owning bibles.
Christianity is illegal in North Korea.
There’s only enough room for one opiate of the masses, the Kims.
A source said one man was machine-gunned down in a stadium with 10,000 spectators watching,
a spectacle of violence that the leaders must have thought would deter other people from
watching an episode of “My Love From The Star.”
As we said, it’s not that watching daft soap operas is in itself dangerous, but they
do show a life that North Koreans aren’t supposed to see.
Hmm, we don’t know what’s worse, totalitarian censorship or people thinking something akin
to “The Days of Our Lives” is reality.
It also has to be said that some South Korean soaps, such as “Doctor Stranger,” don’t
exactly paint North Korea in a very good light.
As one Korean expert said at the time of the mass executions, “The regime is obviously
afraid of potential changes in people's mindsets.”
Just recently, some people were sentenced to death when the authorities found out that
some students had been watching Squid Games.
They didn’t go online, though; the copies were given to them on a USB.
The smuggler got the death penalty, and the students who watched the show were given five
years of hard labor in the mines.
The authorities said this kind of thing was damaging to the nation.
An article at the time said even American pop music was a huge threat to the powers
that be.
Can you imagine North Koreans getting onto YouTube and watching this show?
If they did, those machine guns would soon be whipped out.
Moving on, in 2016, something appeared on the North Korean internet that we don’t
think was ever supposed to be accessible outside of the country.
Facebook…but not the real Facebook, a North Korean clone that was only up for a short
time.
No one knows why that happened, but if North Korea does now have a site that looks like
Facebook, rest assured that the unspoken community guidelines will contain words like “machine-gunned
to death” in the small print.
North Korean social media would be the polar opposite of Twitter, meaning it would be a
place where everyone says they are happy and compliments everyone and everything in society.
It would look like this: @Kim Jung-un
Poll: Who’s the best, most supreme, handsome, and clever leader of all time?
Me: 26,065,291 Someone else: 0
Also, in 2016, it was revealed that North Korea’s state broadcaster KCTV had invented
a box for citizens that gave them a kind of Netflix experience.
Its name was Manbang.
As usual, we don’t know much about it, only that it had five channels showing various
programs and a documentary channel.
There’s something else you need to know about the North Korean internet.
News can be ephemeral; it can disappear fast because when something happens, that contradicts
something that has been said in the past, people might start asking questions.
The obvious example is a high-ranking official being called brilliant, wise, and wonderful
for many years, and then the same guy gets executed.
In this case, all the news about him gets wiped from the Korean internet.
It happened to a high-ranking guy named Jang Song Thaek.
For years this man was hailed as a national hero.
He was loved by the people not only because of his immortal work but because he was married
to the only daughter of the former North Korean Premier, Kim Il-sung.
That made him the uncle by marriage of the great, illustrious Kim Jong-un.
Nonetheless, in 2013, Jang Song Thaek was introduced to North Korea’s famous firing
squad.
For what crime exactly, we don’t know.
He was accused of all manner of things from drug use to womanizing to corruption and gambling
and said to have lived a “dissolute and depraved life.”
The reality is that he’d been brave enough to criticize some of his uncle’s policies.
In his list of crimes, he was accused of only “half-heartedly clapping” when Kim Jong-un
was made vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission.
In case you didn’t know, just like in the days of Stalin, no one in North Korea dares
to be the first to stop clapping, which can make clap-fests go on for a rather long time.
On North Korean TV, about 20 percent of the content is happy people clapping.
Everyone must have really strong biceps there, which, as you’ll see, could come in handy
for some people.
Many top officials end up being sprayed with bullets, so every now and again, someone has
to go through the internet to make sure their name no longer appears in any stories.
That must have been some job with Jang Song Thaek because he was all over the internet.
In one year alone, 15 officials were executed after being accused of challenging Kim Jung-un’s
authority.
The people don’t usually question why someone goes missing from their internet because they’ve
already been told the guy is a traitor.
Still, what would you guys think if Donald Trump or Joe Biden were rubbed from online
history after being impeached and removed from their POTUS position?
You’d be suspicious, and we guess some North Koreans have felt that way, too.
It goes without saying that the real internet won’t come to North Koreans anytime soon.
Just in 2021, Kim Jong-un called the global internet a “vicious cancer.”
in reference to the things found on it, including pop music.
Reports at the time said some people had just been executed for nothing more than “watching
or distributing K-pop videos.”
It’s more likely they watched copied content rather than accessed the outside internet,
though.
The supreme leader said such content corrupted the minds of North Koreans, seemingly unaware
that he’d spent his entire life doing exactly that.
He wanted to make the message clear to all, with reports saying some of the young K-Pop
fans were executed in front of their parents.
Sometimes the executions were shown in schools.
One girl said she and her classmates were forced to watch one when they were only in
grade 2.
She said: “The prisoner could hardly walk and had
to be dragged out.
I was so terrified that I could not dare look at a soldier in uniform for six months afterward.”
It sounds awful, but state media reminded them that K-Pop will make North Korea “crumble
like a damp wall.”
Also, in 2021, it was reported that North Koreans who mimicked the south’s accent
or sang songs that vaguely resembled the music of the south would be arrested.
There’s a story about North Koreans once getting their hands on some smuggled digital
content, only to learn to their utter astonishment, that while they were experiencing a famine,
people in the South were obsessed with weight loss diets.
They couldn’t believe people actually wanted less food.
As you know, even when they’re starving to death, North Koreans are reading about
happy people enjoying plentiful, nutritious food that goes back half a million years.
Just looking at food and health websites on the real internet could really turn things
upside down for North Koreans.
Still, maybe more people are starting to see the truth.
The Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies conducted
a study of 116 people who’d managed to defect from North Korea.
It was discovered that half of them had watched foreign content at one point or another while
in North Korea.
An official government document that was smuggled out of the country stated, “The phenomenon
of distributing impure publications and propaganda is not disappearing, but continuing.”
It’s hard to keep an entire nation down, but in a way, you have to credit North Korea
for managing to keep up this theater for so long.
Still, you have to wonder how much longer the secrecy will last.
If many folks are really watching outside content these days, something should change
soon.
That crack in the door is widening.
The worms are pushing themselves out of the can, inch by inch, and when enough of them
escape, Kim Jung-un’s house of deceptive and flattering cards will come tumbling down.
The people will soon figure out that their leaders have about as much intrinsic value
as a moldy potato.
They’ll discover their great nation comes absolute bottom of the World Press Freedom
Index and realize they live in a country where “systematic, widespread, and grave violations
of human rights” are what they’ve normalized since childhood.
About 4 million people already have Korean phones in North Korea, but those things are
only good for calling people inside the country and have zero internet access.
But we found reports that shed some light on how many North Koreans are watching foreign
content these days.
It seems people are smuggling phones across the Chinese border that are hooked up to the
Chinese internet.
Sure, China has its Great Firewall, but it’s more like a rickety old fence compared to
North Korea’s firewall.
Some of those smuggled Chinese phones have already been used to access non-approved content.
People just have to be careful who they discuss the content with, ‘cos rest assured, just
as the Stanford Prison Experiment showed us, more people are followers than natural-born
dissidents.
In North Korea, friends can easily become enemies.
Others are rightly afraid they’ll get a visit from the North Korean security personnel,
“Group 109.”
This outfit has been aggressively monitoring the people of late to ensure they’re not
getting a whiff of that other reality.
Arrests were made not long ago after Group 109 found signals coming from those contraband
phones.
One thing we’re absolutely sure of is that Kim Jong-un, and his buddies at the top of
the regime’s pyramid, are all using the regular internet.
Western researchers in 2017 said they tracked North Korean internet activity and found out
that the top dogs have a penchant for browsing Instagram accounts, looking at Facebook and
Amazon, and even playing online games.
They particularly liked the online multiplayer game, “World of Tanks.”
That means some of you out there might have possibly played against the tubby tyrant and
not even known it.
Meanwhile, the regime is getting kids to play homemade games that promote the Kim family
ideology.
World of Tanks means the death penalty for those kids.
You might not be surprised to hear that this band of murderous men in the Hermit Kingdom
also spent a lot of time working out their clapping biceps during long sessions on pornography
websites.
While regular folks in North Korea were getting their pornography fix in the shape of bootleg
videos of women dancing in their underwear, the elites were using VPNs to get their rocks
off to American MILFs and faux-Japanese schoolgirls: the enemy!
As they feed the people balderdash and warn them about their minds being corrupted by
South Korean pop songs, they’re busy answering that ancient Zen Buddhist riddle, “What
is the sound of one hand clapping?”
It sounds like totalitarianism watching Pornhub is the answer.
If you’re watching this show, dear North Korean officials, we expect there’s a chance
you know the game is almost up; the secrets are spilling out, megabyte by megabyte.
You should hold up your hands and come clean.
As a famous man once said, “The truth shall set you free.”
Now you need to watch “What If North Korea Launched a Nuclear Bomb (Minute by Minute).”
Or, learn about North Korea’s endgame, “North Korea's Plan to Save Itself.”