Image: watson / dr
North Korean soldiers sent to Russia to fight alongside Moscow encounter an unfamiliar world: a free internet. Or let’s say, freer than in North Korea. And obviously, it didn’t take them long to discover porn there.
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North Korean soldiers have been sent to Russia to support Putin’s troops in the war against Ukraine. And the clash of cultures goes far beyond the battlefield.
The sudden access to the internet, banned in North Korea, is a game-changer for these soldiers who, for the first time, find themselves immersed in a virtual world of freedom, or let’s say, freedoms to which they have never had access. Like pornography.
North Korea, as we know, is one of the most closed countries in the world. The Internet is a purely theoretical concept there. Of course, it is possible, in rare cases, to get a pass there, but it only allows access to 28 sites, according to Matt Bryan, an American computer security researcher who made this discovery in 2016. And among the 28 sites, as one would have suspected, none is pornographic.
Everything thus passes through a national intranet rigorously controlled by the State, which barely allows you to consult some government sites, others to the glory of Kim Jong-Un, and to exchange between state agencies. So when these soldiers, who until then had known a highly supervised life, find themselves facing the internet in Russia, although known for its passion for censorship…
Internet… and much more
However, the information should be taken with a pinch of salt. It is up to a person responsible for Financial Times that we owe this story of North Korean soldiers titillated by the internet and the best (or worst) it has to offer. According to the journalist, who cites “a generally reliable source”, these soldiers “binge on pornography”.
You should know that in North Korea, even discussing the subject is taboo. Porn, for the majority of these young men, has never existed, except in rumors in the corridors. So for a North Korean soldier, raised in a strict, ultra-conservative and state-regulated society, such immersion in the world of explicit content is akin to opening Pandora’s box.
What does the future hold for these men when they return to North Korea? Even deprived of the internet, the images and ideas discovered at the front alongside the Russians will remain engraved. And this, even though Russia is not the most permissive country in the world on the issue of pornography: the two main sources on the internet, PronHub and YouPorn, have been blocked there since 2015.
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source: epa kcna / kcna
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