President Trump says he is reaching out to Kim Jong Un again, hoping for a summit later this year. While that overture plays out, North Korea is still killing its own teenagers for watching South Korean television.
That’s the story I want to tell you today, and why the timing is critical.
What is actually happening inside North Korea right now
Amnesty International published new testimony earlier this year from North Korean defectors. In Yanggang Province, authorities executed high school students for watching Squid Game. In Sinuiju, authorities once summoned tens of thousands of residents, children among them, to watch a public execution tied to South Korean media. Defectors say being marched to watch a killing is standard practice, framed to children as “ideological education.”
One escapee, Kim Eunju, said that she was taken to these executions herself as a teenager in the 1990s and 2000s: “People were executed for watching or distributing South Korean media.”
This isn’t old news. A 2020 North Korean law made owning or sharing South Korean film, television, or K-pop a crime punishable by hard labor or death. What has happened since then?
