North Koreans Attend Ideology 101

SEOUL — Watching foreign movies clouds the mental and ideological health of the people.

Foreign hairstyles and clothing are signs of the "utterly rotten bourgeois lifestyle."

Shaking hands should be avoided in favor of bowing, as it is more hygienic and a part of the national culture.

It might sound like a cross between Miss Manners and a political screed, but this is the advice recently crafted by North Korea's ruling Workers' Party for indoctrination lectures at factories, collective farms and other workplaces.

For decades, North Koreans have been forced to attend such sessions to reinforce the national illusion that they are lucky to live under the wise leadership of first Kim Il Sung, the nation's founder, and now his son, Kim Jong Il, who inherited power after his father's death in 1994.

More than 100 pages of written lectures smuggled out of North Korea this year reveal that the leadership is in a state of near-hysteria about outside influences seeping across the nation's once hermetically sealed borders. The spread of "unusual lifestyles," the lectures warn listeners, could render them "incapable of following revolutionary thoughts and sacrificing their lives" for Kim.

The documents also underscore the extent to which anti-Americanism gives meaning to the country and its people. More than 50 years after the end of the Korean War, the United States is blamed for all of North Korea's woes, from food shortages to the infiltration of foreign culture.

"The bastards' indecent methods are clouding the mental and ideological health of the people," warns one lecture. "If we cannot stop them in time, we will be in the same position as the Iraqis."

Brian Myers, an expert in North Korean propaganda at South Korea's Injae University, said he detected an air of desperation in the material.

"This is a regime which for half a century claimed to have 100% support of its people. Now they are admitting that its people are succumbing to money madness and the desire for foreign things. Not just a few people but enough that it is a social phenomenon," Myers said.

North Korea takes extraordinary measures to insulate its citizens from knowledge of the outside world. Radios and TVs are preset to government stations; foreign newspapers, magazines, books, films and music are banned.