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techumseh
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of the frozen North.
Apr 1999
time: 22:27
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quote:
N Korea wages war on long hair
BBC ^
North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut.
A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television.
The series is entitled Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.
While the campaign has been carried out primarily on television, reports have appeared in North Korean press and radio, urging tidy hairstyles and proper attire.
It is the strongest media campaign against men's sloppy appearances mounted in the reclusive and impoverished Communist state in recent years.
The propaganda drive on grooming standards has gone a stage further than previous attempts. This time television identifies specific individuals deemed too shoddy.
Pyongyang television started the campaign last autumn with a five-part series in its regular TV Common Sense programme. Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," "low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" - variations from one to five centimetres in length.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.
It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang. In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.
The series was shot at various public locations - on the street, at a sports stadium, a barbershop, a bus stop, a restaurant, a department store.
Some unruly-haired pedestrians or customers captured on camera "meanly ran away", the programme said, while others made excuses about being too busy to get a trim.
Television newsreels such as "Employees of Pyongyang Textile Plant keep their hairstyle and dressing neat and tidy" and "Hairdressers at Ch'anggwangwo'n manage men's hair according to the demands of the military-first era" have also aired.
State radio programmes such as "Dressing in accordance with our people's emotion and taste" link clothes and appearance with the wearer's "ideological and mental state".
People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin.
Tidy attire "is important in repelling the enemies' manoeuvres to infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era," the radio says.
Newspapers too highlight the civic advantages of short hair and smart shoes.
Hair is a "very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state", argues Minju Choson, a government daily.
"No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one's personality will be downgraded."
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.
"People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says. |
Better get those clippers out, comrades!
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Pyrodrew
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edit - image not working
Here's one that works, Gian and Kid beat me to it. Except he's the Asian version...
 Attachment: patnew.jpg
This has been downloaded 56 time(s).
Last edited by Pyrodrew on 03-02-2005 at 07:35
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techumseh
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of the frozen North.
Apr 1999
time: 22:27
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Is this hair trimming campaign a veiled attack on Kim's leadership? The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs thinks so.
quote:
At first glance, this may appear to be just another eccentricity in a nation known for its bizarre and sometimes outrageous displays of ‘national pride’ and the ‘socialist ideal,’ but the ramifications are likely to run far deeper than simply promoting a uniform appearance for North Korean men: it appears to be an attack against Kim Jong-Il. Shorter than most Koreans, Kim has typically worn lifts in his shoes and sported an odd-looking bouffant hairstyle aimed at giving him a notionally larger physical appearance. With an official proclamation that equates long hair with relatively-low mental capacity, Kim’s government has essentially forced the highly-vain dictator to reduce his apparent stature, or risk public doubts about his intelligence. In a state as tightly-controlled as North Korea, such embarrassments would not be promulgated by the official media, if Kim Jong Il was firmly in control. |
http://www.jinsa.org/articles/artic...3,2360,884,2822
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02-02-2005 21:41
Before it's too late!
Maybe you are in kahoots with Dear Leader. 
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