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“That smuggling mission was planned and executed last September by the North Korea Strategy Center and its 46-year-old founder, Kang Chol-hwan. Over the past few years, Kang’s organization has become the largest in a movement of political groups who routinely smuggle data into North Korea. NKSC alone annually injects around 3,000 USB drives filled with foreign movies, music, and ebooks. Kang’s goal, as wildly optimistic as it may sound, is nothing less than the overthrow of the North Korean government. He believes that the Kim dynasty’s three-generation stranglehold on the North Korean people—and its draconian restriction on almost any information about the world beyond its borders—will ultimately be broken not by drone strikes or caravans of Humvees but by a gradual, guerrilla invasion of thumb drives filled with bootleg episodes of Friends and Judd Apatow comedies.
Kang likens the USB sticks to the red pill from The Matrix: a mind-altering treatment that has the power to shatter a world of illusions. “When North Koreans watch Desperate Housewives, they see that Americans aren’t all war-loving imperialists,” Kang says. “They’re just people having affairs or whatever. They see the leisure, the freedom. They realize that this isn’t the enemy; it’s what they want for themselves. It cancels out everything they’ve been told. And when that happens, it starts a revolution in their mind.””
– Wired, The Plot to Free North Korea With Smuggled Episodes of ‘Friends’.
“In one of Sun Mu’s best-known paintings from his “Happy Children” series, uniformed North Korean kindergartners sing like birds huddled together on a clothesline, their beaming faces so alike they could be clones. At the bottom of the posterlike image, a red slogan leaps out again
When Sun Mu, an artist from North Korea who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, first exhibited paintings like this in Seoul two years ago, the police showed up to investigate. They had been tipped off by viewers who, missing the intended irony, were upset by what they took to be Communist propaganda — a possible crime under South Korea’s national security laws. After all, rapturously smiling child performers are a familiar feature of North Korean pageants, and the style mimics posters celebrating the North’s authoritarian regime.
“I’m not pro-Communist, far from it,” said Sun Mu, 36, who fled North Korea in 1998 to escape famine and arrived in the South in 2001. “When people look at my paintings, I hope they can hear the children asking, ‘Do you really think we’re happy?’””
– NY Times, After Fleeing North Korea, an Artist Parodies Its Propaganda.
“We’re here to hack the North Korean government’s monopoly of information above the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula. The North Korean dictatorship continues to be one of the most totalitarian regimes on the planet. While other regimes oppress their dissidents and censor the Internet, North Korea has no dissidents and no connection to the outside world. It has no Internet. The Kim family rules with absolute authority, arbitrarily imprisoning or executing anyone who stands in their way. The regime goes even further; not only is the offender imprisoned, but entire generations of his family are also sent to the gulags. The embargo of information into and out of the country has forced human rights groups to be creative in their methods of reaching North Korean citizens.”
– The Atlantic, We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives.
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Download the 18″x24″poster (.pdf), World News #14 – Free the Happy Children.
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World News
World News is a project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories from around the world.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
