Yesterday the Daily NK informed us that they'd acquired the full text of the “Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” aka the “anti-reactionary thought law".
Today it's the turn of the “Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act.”
Daily NK is the first news outlet to have obtained the full text of North Korea’s “Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act.” The law stipulates a maximum penalty of execution for North Korean citizens who use or spread South Korean-style language, even calling for efforts to arouse alarm among the country’s people by conducting “public executions” of violators of the law.
Article 6 of the law (The Principles of Legal Punishment Toward People Who Spread the Puppet Language) sets forth that “the State shall treat anyone who imitates or spreads the puppet language [a term referring to the South Korean language] as garbage contaminated with puppet culture and as criminals. Anyone, regardless of the seriousness of the matter, shall face serious legal sanctions, including the death penalty.”
Article 58 of the law (The Crime of Using the Puppet Language) states that “any person found to be speaking, writing, sending messages, or exchanging emails in the puppet language or creating printed materials, video recordings, compilations, pictures, photographs, or scrolls using the puppet language’s writing style shall be sentenced to six years or more of reform through labor.” The article goes on to stipulate that “if the severity of the crime is deemed high, the offender shall be sentenced to a lifetime sentence of reform through labor or the death penalty.”...
Article 35 (Education Through Public Struggle) of the law states that “legal institutions, including social safety institutions, shall conduct public struggles in various formats and sizes, including revelations through documentation, mass struggle meetings, public arrests, public trials, and public executions to break the spirits of those contaminated by rotten puppet culture and to awaken the masses at large.”
It is extraordinarily rare for North Korea to explicitly mention public executions in a legal document.
During the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) held by the UN Human Rights Council in 2019, North Korea partially acknowledged that the country conducts public executions. In response to a UPR recommendation to repeal the death penalty and ban public executions, the North Korean government refused to do this, saying that “public executions are not made known to the general public and are only applied in exceptional cases that are particularly serious.”
That being said, the reality in North Korea is that the regime actively uses public executions to create an atmosphere of fear and raise alarm among its population.
What's so bad about the South Korean language then? Well...
In Article 2, Clause 2 of the law, North Korea defines the South Korean language as “a jumbled together language that has completely lost the essentials of the Korean language due to its vocabulary, grammar and intonation becoming Westernized, Japanized and Sinocized. It is a lowly and disgusting garbage language that exists nowhere else in the world.” Article 5 of the law also claims that “the struggle to eliminate the remnants of the puppet language is a serious political and class struggle that affects the very fate of our socialist system and the very existence of our people and future generations.”
It's the old racial purity line, in new clothes.
So NK is insulting the language of China, which has done more to prop up this shambles of a country than anyone else?
Posted by: Gene | March 23, 2023 at 07:19 PM