Kim Jong On does everything to strengthen youth loyalty in North Korea

Kim Jong On enjoyed an absolute power throughout North Korea and his people treat him as if he was a god. But one threat seems to be hovering over the 41-year-old tyrant: lack of loyalty from the youth in his country.

He is particularly concerned about the curly communication to his country, whose freedom of information is depressed. The media gives the North Koreans a rare glimpse into the outside world, using Hollywood films or K-POP albums. Holding or distributing such content – which Kim calls “dangerous toxins” – drags increasing penalties, and even death.

Reinforces young people’s loyalty through manual work

Kim’s ability to preserve the illusion that North Korea is a socialist paradise, at risk. This illusion is the key to his ability to maintain power. And there is no more vulnerable group for ideological steam than North Korea’s youngest citizens.

Therefore, Kim recently delivered a major propaganda role to “Shock Brigade) of the heroes’ youth,” called Paektusa. The youth and 20-year-olds group, named after the country’s Holy Mountain, has recently been acclaimed as national heroes who have been rebuilt by a western border area destroyed in the summer floods. For four months, they established 15,000 homes, schools and hospitals, state media in the country claimed.

300,000 members of the young crushing division – as the best of Pittsburg population – joined instant alert and volunteered to go on a mission, the media outlets in the country said.

In a speech last month, Kim, calling himself the group’s “beneficial father”, praised the young friends, after calling them earlier to express their loyalty to the regime by carrying out a manual work project.

Construction work, Kim quoted as saying in the state media, was “a good opportunity to train our young people to be strong and reliable defenders of socialism.”

The upper legislative body of North Korea, the upper people’s assembly, also praised the “Great Construction Campaign” of the nation that demonstrated “our state spirit”, according to a report in the state media on Friday.

“Kim Jong Un wants to hire young people at work and thus prevent them from meeting to watch South Korean television together and developing heresy ideas about the country,” said Peter Word, a research colleague at the Sajong Institute, a team of thinking in Seoul.

Youth loyalty is a larger challenge than Russia and Trump

Kim faces a long list of challenges. He must avoid counter -reaction, internal and external, that he sent 12,000 soldiers to Russia. It maintains disintegrating economics through a sanctions breach. And he has to decide how to approach another four years with President Trump, who is an interview on Thursday to Fox News vowed to contact North Korean leader again.

However, the promise that North Korea’s younger generation will continue to adhere to his faith is the long -term challenge he has to deal with now. The indoctrination of the state’s young people has promised his regime’s survival for decades; Failure in propaganda efforts can create local instability or to bring a careful examination of his decisions, say security experts.

Kim’s decision a year ago to abandon the hopes of union with South Korea peacefully and declare Seoul as the new number 1 enemy of Northern Korea, pointing to the severity of the threat he attributes to a foreign influence. In recent years, Kim has also banned the use of South Korean fashion such as sexual skirts or phrases like Nam-Chin, a short way to say a friend (Boyfense in South Korea). The state has driven shooting commands at the border and set up high barriers to block the departure of the North Koreans-as well as the entry of information from outside.

At least a decade’s military recruitment obligation, which is subject to daily indoctrination rates. Among the soldiers fighting in Russia, loyalty appears to be high, based on investigations by soldiers who were captivated and according to reporters found on fighters killed. However, all this does not apply to women, young people at school and men who are not suitable for recruitment because of illness, height or physical defect.

Forced recruitment and life -threatening working conditions

The Paektusan Power Division is one of the dozens of semi-complex military organizations from the north Koreans who were removed from their daily works to accelerate large projects of construction under difficult conditions. Special mission forces (Shock Brigades) were forces organized in socialist countries such as the Soviet Union to overcome the lack of advanced mechanism.

While some of them are joined by the mission brigades, many others are forced and faced with a large -scale malnutrition, according to the Southern Korean government report from 2023, who saw North Korean fugitives.

The working conditions may be dangerous. About two years ago, state media in North Korea praised 18 -year -old “Virgin Soldier”, which they say died of her job despite an emergency surgery, after buying a huge incubator at peak speed. She reportedly wrote an apology to Kim that she was unable to fulfill her daily tasks.

Chu Chong-Hui, who fled Northern Curiya in 2011, was recruited over four decades ago for the youth division of youth. He was 17 at the time, a lower social status in North Korea’s Sungbon (class) system. Joining the division was one of the few ways to get companies in the workers’ party that could allow it a higher place in the company.

Construction began before sunrise and often continued until midnight, Cho said. Once during the tunnel excavation, the walls collapsed on Chu, and he was injured in his back. Some of his work friends died, while others suffered crises in the legs or wrist, he recalls. On the site of building rails it is sent to, employees have improvised tents in the cold.

“Maybe I had 10 days off a year,” said Cho, now 61. “I discovered about the existence of a five -day work week only when I arrived in South Korea.”

Northern Korean media has comprehensively preached the work of the Paektusan Brigade after being stationed to help Northern Pyongan, bordered by China in the northwest of the state, after being hit by the flood. Monthly updates have been delivered to the young workers’ activities, and they have been praised as patriots and motivated.

The companies in the youth mission division varies according to youth recruitment dates. But regardless of the composition of these groups, the Kim regime found that they are effective in north-Korean indoctrination blindly to fulfill commands, Kim Yang-So said, head of the North Korea Research Institute in Seoul.

“The teens may be replaced,” he said, “but the goal of the mission division never changes: prove loyalty to the Kim regime.”

Subin Kim contributed to this article.