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Image: AP
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un who is known for his draconian antics has digitally removed a ‘disgraced’ North Korean actor from a 1990 series whose reruns are being aired on state TV. According to Mirror UK, the actor named Choe Ung Chol, who starred in a show called “Taehongdang Party Secretary” was digitally removed from the show. The highly celebrated show ran between 1998 and 2000. According to the British news outlet, the North Korean dictator and his regime in Pyongyang have a particular dislike for Choe due to his alleged association with Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek. The uncle of the Supreme Leader was executed back in 2013. The Pyongyang also accused the Choe of being a “womaniser”.
According to Mirror UK, in the reruns of the television show which are being aired by the state media, Choe was scrubbed out from the show, while the rest of the show remained untouched. Choe who played the main protagonist of the show was replaced by North Korean actor Pak Jong Taek. As per the report by the British news outlet, Taek was added to the show digitally. The popular show in North Korea depicts the life of North Korean potato farmers who are struggling in the 1990 famine. Re-running the show in today’s circumstances becomes ironical since the country is engulfed in a famine-like situation with growing food scarcity in the struggling nations.
According to Mirror UK, it was Tatiana Gabroussenko from the Korea University in Seoul, who was the first person to notice the change. “When the regime perceives somebody as an enemy, they will relentlessly hunt down and destroy this threat, squashing out any hint that they ever existed,” she wrote to the Korean news outlet NK News. “North Korea is clearly adept at highly advanced digital editing techniques, creating a sort of deep fake character for a TV series that’s a quarter-century old. Propagandists have evidently arrived at a suitable solution to the decades-old problem of how to erase problematic figures from an otherwise pro-regime cultural artefact without entirely destroying it,” she further added.
The South Korean professor stated that this is not an uncommon practice for the draconian North Korean regime to remove the historical database of the dissenters. The recent move by the North Korean regime is similar to the world established by George Orwell in his classic book “1984”. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right,” Orwell wrote in the book which was published in 1949.