What North Korea Is Really Afraid Of

For the last 24 hours, I've had to listen, ad nauseam, to people debate and virtue-signal over the Super Bowl halftime show, and I'm over it. It was 15 minutes of our lives that we'll forget about next week. But the thing is, as annoying as it has been, none of us has died over it. You liked the Bad Bunny show? Great. You preferred the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) version? Good for you. You want to argue about it? Go for it. Donald Trump will never have you executed for watching, liking, disliking, or debating any of it. 

If we lived in North Korea, that might not be the case.  

In 2025, Amnesty International conducted in-depth interviews with a group of people who were lucky enough to escape Kim Jong Un's little hellhole between 2019 and 2020, just before the pandemic led to tighter border restrictions. Most of them were teenagers and young adults at the time, and some of the things they had to say will — or should — make your blood boil. 

Though I'm sure there is some Democrat member of Congress out there reading the report and thinking it sounds like a dream world.  

Anyway, one of the biggest crimes you can commit in North Korea is consuming international entertainment, especially if it comes from South Korea. The escapees confirmed that if you do, it can land you in a labor camp or even get you executed. That goes for children, too. Several media outlets have also confirmed this in the past, but the interviewees say they saw it firsthand: High school students were executed for consuming South Korean media.  

This might mean listening to K-Pop, which is short for Korean popular music, or watching television shows like Squid Game, Crash Landing on You, or Descendants of the Sun.  

In 2020, North Korea introduced the Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act, which describes anything that comes from South Korea as "rotten ideology that paralyzes the people's revolutionary sense." Anyone found with the media in their possession can be sentenced to five to fifteen years in a labor camp, and anyone who distributes it or organizes a viewing is subject to the death penalty. 

But this was going on long before this "law" was passed. The escapees said that part of their own education as school children was watching the executions. 

"When we were 16, 17, in middle school, they took us to executions and showed us everything," said one of them. "People were executed for watching or distributing South Korean media. It's ideological education: if you watch, this happens to you, too."

Despite this, the escapees describe how, when they left the country, South Korean media and other foreign cultures were becoming increasingly widespread and easy to access. It's often smuggled in on USB drives from China and watched on computers. And everyone watches it and knows everyone else watches it. How it's handled depends on who you are.  

"Workers watch it openly, party officials watch it proudly, security agents watch it secretly, and police watch it safely," one of them said. "Everyone knows everyone watches, including those who do the crackdowns."  

Sometimes, it's just a matter of how much you can bribe authorities.  

One guy said he managed to avoid punishment because when he was caught by the "109 Group," a law enforcement unit that goes around and searches homes and stops people on the street to search their bags, his family had connections that prevented them from arresting him, but some of his sister's friends ended up in labor camps. 

He also said that others who have a little money can often bribe the officers. Some people have even sold their homes to pay to stay out of the labor camps... all for the cost of watching TV or listening to music.   

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