[최보식의언론=최보식의언론 ]

The death of culture begins quietly.
North Korea announced on the 30th that it had newly selected more than 400 “Model Units of Socialist Lifestyle Culture” nationwide.

This phrase is unfamiliar to South Koreans. What does “model people’s unit” even mean? It is symbolic of a system in which the North Korean regime evaluates and controls its citizens’ daily lives based on political criteria.

What exists inside your home, how you maintain the garden in front of your house, what slogans you put on your wall, what books you read, and what words you use — all of it is monitored and assessed according to the standards of “socialist lifestyle culture.”

This reality is not simply “lifestyle improvement.” It is systemic violence that annihilates cultural freedom — in other words, cultural genocide.

Genocide includes ethnic genocide and political genocide.
Yet there is another form of genocide that academia still fails to address sufficiently: cultural genocide.
This is genocide not by bullets and knives, but by eliminating language, books, emotions, memories, senses, and imagination.

For more than 80 years, North Korea has normalized this cultural genocide — controlling language, banning books, persecuting religion, policing emotions, and severing all ties with the outside world.

Many people ask, “Why don’t the people inside North Korea rise up?”
But that question stems from a misunderstanding of the essence of totalitarianism.

Socialism or communism is merely an economic system.
China is the example.
Because the Chinese Constitution incorporates elements of capitalism, it is entirely different from North Korean-style socialism.

North Korea may enshrine “socialism” in its constitution, but it has never once implemented genuine socialist ideology.
North Korea is not a socialist state — it is a totalitarian dictatorship.
And the fear within it is far deeper and more horrifying than what most imagine.

Totalitarianism does not merely forbid negative thoughts.
It forces citizens to display positive emotional loyalty toward the dictator — and demands their lives as collateral.
It controls thought, regulates emotion, dictates behavior, and instructs people on what they must feel and what they must love.
And it packages all of this under the name of “lifestyle culture.”

In short, it is a system that uproots every flower with a different root and forcibly replants flowers of the same color, destroying everything that originally existed.

Examples of cultural genocide in North Korea — clearly visible from the “Three Major Evil Laws” enacted after COVID — include:

• Language deprivation: banning native Korean expressions; only “Suryong language” allowed

• Book & publication bans: possession of foreign books punishable by death

• Religious persecution: destruction of religious sites; total prohibition of religious confession

• Erasure of cultural heritage: nationalizing or eliminating traditional and folk culture

• Abolition of basic rights: total ban on freedom of expression, thought, and conscience

• Economic control: prohibition of independent livelihood; people controlled through state rationing

• Destruction of education: questions forbidden; comparison equals betrayal; all subjects revolve around the Supreme Leader; schools function as propaganda institutions; teachers act as monitors, not educators

These are not merely acts of political oppression — they erase the very sensory experience of life. This is cultural extermination.

Is South Korean society safe today?
To what extent are unions, publishing, the media, and the education sector resisting totalitarian language?

#NorthKorea #CulturalGenocide #HumanRightsAbuses