So I, unfortunately, came across this TikTok on my FYP and it set off major alarms. First of all, why the hell did it come onto my page, and second, is this even true? If you don’t want to watch the TikTok I’ve got you covered:
The person who made the TikTok cites these books and articles:
Dear Leader My Escape From North Korea by Jane Jin Sung
Nothing To Envy Ordinary Lives In North Korea by Barbara Demick
Rogue Regime Kim Jong Il and the looming threat of North Korea by Jasper Decker
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
Under The Loving Care Of The Fatherly Leader by Bradley K. Martin
North Korea’s Organization and Guidance Department by Robert Collins
The articles:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/22/kimworld
https://www.gq.com/story/kim-jong-il-sushi-chef-kenji-fujimoto-adam-johnson
Transcript:
“The pleasure squad is comprised of about 2000 North Korean girls divided into three different teams: there’s the sexual services team, the massages team, and the entertainment team. These young girls are appointed to the squad in middle school or high school, typically between the ages of 13 to 16 and they serve for about 10 years. This squad is run as official part of the government. It’s under the Cadres department, which is run by this man, Kim Phyong Hae, and it not only serves Kim Jong Un, it serves his top leaders and his inner circle. This squad is also nothing new in North Korea. Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, and his father, Kim Il Sung. Both had pleasure squads for themselves. The government has an official process which they do every single year to find new girls for the squad. Theres also specific selection criteria for who they can choose to put on the squad and I want to read a firsthand account from this book (Nothing to Envy) on what the process looks like: this is a firsthand account from a woman named Mi-ran
now, fortunately, Mi-ran was not selected to go any further, her family was not at a high enough social class for her to be selected, but the girls who do go further have to meet strict criteria: they have to be a certain height, free of scars and blemishes, and had to have a soft, feminine voice, they were also required to be a virgin. After the top girls are selected they are sent to Section 5 of the Cadres department. The Cadres department reviews the list, whittles them down, and then sends their final selections to the North Korean leader. He then handpicks who he wants to be on his squad, thee new recruits go to a six month training course before they start, they are then assigned to one of the royal residences around North Korea. It says 32 here but there’s a lot more nowadays. This book (Rogue Regime) is a little bit old. We have stories from men who are either related to the North Korean leader, or served him in some capacity, talking about the Pleasure Squad. The girls were constant presences at guest houses regardless of what team they were on. They typically all had to do some sort of sexual services including stripping naked or playing erotic games. Once the girls have served a decade, when they hit their mid twenties, they’re retired from their roles, they’re typically then married off to elite guards of Kim Jong Un and regardless, they’re kept under close watch because they’ve seen so much behind the scenes. Theres only one case in history where we know a group of girls were allowed to return to their families; they were each paid $4000, which is a lot in North Korea, as well as giving gifts in exchange for swearing to secrecy. Anybody who broke this pledge would be immediately executed.”
Most people in the west are so flooded with bullshit about the DPRK that they are literally living in a “post-truth” reality on the country. They legitimately cannot handle the idea that it is a real place, it’s this hypothetical “perfect evil villain country” to most westerners, the place where all the bad things happen all the time. Not only do they not actually think about how such a society could run, how their economy could possibly work, or how if a society were to be as horrific as they claim it would collapse within a few short years, they are actively hostile to these concepts. They refuse to view the people there as people, they are dehumanised to such an extreme extent that they can’t imagine anyone in the country, “evil dictator” or “innocent victim” actually doing anything every single normal human does.
That’s insightful. When I’ve spoken to people about the DPRK, it’s like they can’t imagine someone there going to bed at the same time every night after a wash, getting up, having breakfast, commuting to work, and all the rest of it. If these things didn’t generally happen, the wouldn’t be a country there at all. Certainly not one powerful enough to keep the US at bay for decades.
We’re dealing with people who don’t have a class analysis. They don’t know that workers are the motive force of history, so they have an idealist version of everywhere rather than a model that builds up from the question: so how does everyone stay alive? We might still need some hypotheses as it’s hard to get many details about the DPRK in particular, but there are nonetheless some things that must be true and some things that cannot be true.
Like unicorn caves, for example. It’s a ridiculous story. The unicorns are free range because how else do you harvest their horns to do Juche necromancy?