Do North Koreans have access to K-Pop?

Then you heard there would be a new war in Korea. “The Chinese are coming…so what?”

The path of Juche is fraught with challenges and perils, but so is any path to greatness and righteousness. Any gym bro will tell you the same.

However, the Chinese People’s Volunteers and the North Korean guerrillas you met were unlike anything you’d ever imagined. Poorly armed but highly skilled, organised and disciplined, with a morale that never seemed to falter. When they had nothing to eat, they would eat the snow; when they ran out of ammo, they would resort to sticks and rocks, but they would never surrender.

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One thing’s for sure though - you would never look at the chop suey guy and the laundry lady back home the same way ever again. And neither would your descendants, though they would eventually forget about the war you fought in.

North Koreans know K-pop exists, they just don’t like it.

Basically, they’re reacting to this the same way you would react to something like Netflix’s Cuties.

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Picture yourself in the 1950s as a white US Marine from small town USA. The first time you saw an East Asian was when you ordered chop suey from a squinting, buck-toothed, pigtailed Chinaman, or took your dad’s laundry to an illiterate coolie lady whose backbone had become crooked from a lifetime of bowing down.

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And make no mistake, the K-pop industry is pretty must just human trafficking with shitty music and plastic surgery. Little girls and little boys are commodified and fetishised since an early age, forced to abandon all individuality, relationships and freedom, made to endure extreme work conditions, parasocial fandoms and immense psychological traumas, and scheduled to provide sexual favours to powerful perverts in business and politics.

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You got to meet the Japanese in combat during the Pacific Campaign, who were easy to kill as you had better weapons and more bombs, and you took great pleasure in mowing them down as they charged recklessly at you. After the war, you were stationed in Japan, and every night you would be pleasured by a different Japanese girl - wearing heavy makeup, slowly stripping off her kimono, smiling at you in a servile manner as she marvelled at your “big stlong Amelican muscles”.

I recommend NK-Pop instead.

They beat you in pitched battle after pitched battle, and it was only thanks to superior arms and logistics, and by the grace of God Almighty, that the war was a stalemate rather than a total defeat for your side.

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They’re not thinking “if I smile or cheer, Great Leader will sacrifice me to Cthulhu”. They’re thinking, “how sad it is to see our southern kinswomen exploited and degraded this way! We must defeat the American imperialists and liberate them, or else our mothers, sisters and daughters will be the ones in those slavish outfits, shaking their buttocks and spreading their legs for the pleasure of creepy men”.

The popularity of K-pop in the US is not just due to its sexually explicit nature, but also because it is part of an image of Asian society that appeals to American sentimentalities - exotic, passive, and subservient. Like Jeffrey Epstein’s island, just bigger and with more rice.

This isn’t me “shilling for” the DPRK. I think they have made serious mistakes (purging the Maoists, for one). But as a Chinese person, whose country experienced hardships not unlike theirs, I do have respect for their pursuit of true independence and self reliance.

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So what indeed. It was barely a century ago when China was curb-stomped by eight foreign powers, including yours. Their men are weak opium addicts, barely fit as servants; their women are easy and delightful to conquer, with their seductive slit-skirts and voracious lust for white men’s penises…

The comment section of that YouTube video is as predictable as can be…”if they clap then they will be shot/thrown into a gulag/disappeared”. That of course is just orientalist hogwash. I can tell you what the North Korean audience felt wasn’t fear, it was disgust.

And it is for these exact reasons that K-pop will never be popular in North Korea. When you’re used to standing up straight, kneeling just feels weird.

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Look at the stoic expressions of the North Korean audience as they watched Red Velvet’s live performance.

Their men had shaved their pigtails, and though they were malnourished, there was light in their eyes; their women - with their hair cut short, feet unbound, digging foxholes and tending to their wounded - were not the demure, infantilised objects you knew in Japan and the Philippines, and were far likelier to cut your dick off than suck it.

None of this is a secret by the way, there have been plenty of documentaries and video essays about the horrors of the K-pop industry. You would have to be morally bankrupt to mock the North Koreans for their feelings on this matter, or assert that K-pop of all things is proof of capitalism’s superiority over socialism.

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I think this is a major reason why westerners, especially Americans, feel this innate mix of fear, discomfort, hatred and disgust towards the North Koreans and the Chinese - we are so unlike the “housebroken” Japanese and the South Koreans. The same way misogynists are often intimidated by strong-willed women.