It seems like everybody on the web is watching Netflix’s runaway hit Squid Game, and that features a North Korean propaganda website, which praises the collection for “exposing the reality of South Korean society, where weak meat and corruption has been on the rise and scoundrels are commonplace.”

The commentary comes from Arirang Meari (by way of Insider), and it’s precisely what you’d anticipate from a totalitarian state mouthpiece. The piece slams the inequality wrought by South Korean capitalism and a society the place “people are treated like chess pieces.”

This will not be the primary time that North Korean propaganda websites have performed one thing like this. According to Reuters, a North Korean day by day additionally praised Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite for doing the identical factor when it received the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020. It’s simply, who precisely is all this grandstanding for?

As you may think, North Korea doesn’t have Netflix. (Though, it did create a Netflix-like app referred to as My Companion 4.0 in 2017.) And although North Koreans do have access to smartphones, they’re restricted to one thing referred to as kwangmyong, or a state-controlled intranet that doesn’t have entry to the skin world. Internet entry as we all know it within the U.S. is proscribed to these with particular permission. Basically, the typical North Korean citizen isn’t more likely to have entry to Squid Game. So both the propaganda is aimed toward residents, or it’s poking South Korea and the skin world… which doesn’t give a hoot what North Korea thinks about capitalism.

It is feasible that Squid Game may make it throughout the forty eighth parallel. Activists have been identified to send balloons with leaflets or USB drives containing K-dramas as a way of exposing North Korea’s bullshit. It’s a harmful past-time, nevertheless. Those caught watching South Korean dramas face getting imprisoned, sent to labor camps, or executed. In 2014, at least 50 people were reportedly publicly executed for doing simply that—together with 10 officers from chief Kim Jong-Un’s personal get together. Kim Jong-un additionally not too long ago referred to as K-pop a “vicious cancer,” a transfer that was spurred by the truth that South Korean popular culture—of which Squid Game is a component—is changing into more and more standard with youthful North Koreans.

Even if an individual was courageous sufficient to observe contraband content material, it’s nonetheless a foul search for the regime. One of Squid Game’s fan-favorite characters, Kang Sae-byeok, is a North Korean defector whose essential purpose for coming into the dystopian event is to earn cash to convey her household to South Korea. Sae-byeok additionally hides her North Korean accent when talking to South Korean characters, and is derided as a “commie” or “spy” when different characters discover. That’s along with the very fact the entire collection negatively portrays arbitrary violence and executions over rule-breaking.

The irony of all that is really next-level self-ownage. Then once more, maybe nobody writing the propaganda has watched the precise present.