Posted on 02/10/2013 7:28:16 AM PST by re_tail20
WITH her turquoise top, Dayglo trainers and Hello Kitty mobile phone, Jeon Geum Ju fits right in among the young latte-sippers in a Starbucks in downtown Seoul. Her dark eyes sparkle as she talks—and she talks a lot. The only time that the 26-year-old hesitates, and tugs at her hair awkwardly, is when she is asked about Kim Jong Un, the young leader of North Korea who took over her country in 2011, a year after she fled to South Korea. She was, she says, so brainwashed from a very early age that she still cannot bring herself to criticise him.
Ms Jeon is no apologist for the regime. Though her escape from North Korea was not caused by the starvation and abject cruelty that force others to leave, it was, she says, still a flight from oppression. What she craved was the freedom to wear flared jeans and jewellery and to let her hair, which most North Korean women keep in a bun, grow long and wavy. She even fantasised about driving a red sports car, with dark glasses on.
Related topics China South Korea North Korea Pyongyang Seoul She nurtured such dreams in her bedroom, watching illegal South Korean and American TV dramas smuggled in from China and shared among her friends on memory sticks which they plugged into black-market computers, some made by South Korea’s Samsung. She even flaunted her tastes in public. That was until the fashion police—no figure of speech in North Korea—arrested her for wearing a winter hat with “New York” on it. She was screamed at as “bourgeois trash” and released only when her mother, then a black-market trader, handed over two dozen packets of cigarettes as a bribe.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
and some people think we have it rough in the US-—
A view into the fascist leftards’ “Utopian Society”.
Nowadays, when I read an article from any periodical, I tend to look for hidden agendas or bias. It can’t be helped, most of modern media has been usurped by leftist agendas. As a North Korea watcher, I enjoyed this article for what I thought was a distinct lack of bias, and a refreshingly, objectively written article. Just my opinion..
bflr
The Economist is in the UK.
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