Shot for Watching ‘Winter Sonata’

“There have been two or three reports of public executions of North Korean young people in major cities including Chungjin, as punishment for having illegally copied and distributed South Korean visual material,” said Kang Chul Hwan, vice-chairman of the Seoul-based Committee for the Democratization of North Korea.

“It is not an overstatement to say that the Kim Jong Il regime is waging war on the South Korean TV drama,” he said, adding that the North Korean authorities have intensified surveillance and searches to prevent South Korean videos from entering North Korea. [Radio Free Asia]

I think that’s the same Kang Chol Hwan.

What absolute, absolutist desperation to shoot people to  save a system that’s more clearly doomed with each passing month, and hasn’t been worth saving for decades, if ever. It really reminds me of Berlin in 1945 when, as the Russians were closing in on the city, the Nazis sent out flying courts-martial to hang people on the spot for “defeatist” statements.