North Korean state-run television station KRT aired an adorable COVID-themed children’s production earlier today.
The high-energy dance routine begins with a giant-headed, masked nurse puppet educating schoolgirls about how to keep themselves and their comrades safe from the COVID scourge. As carnivalesque music plays, the girls eagerly sign on to the regimen and line up to have their hands spritzed and foreheads scanned before capering offstage.
Next, three huggable bottles of hand sanitizer dance their way into our hearts while they further decontaminate the schoolgirls. They’re followed by a half-dozen temporal scanner thermometers, which pirouette to display their uniform perfect temperature readings. Then the sanitizers reappear to help out two giant hands, whose frowns turn upside down once they’ve been purified.
Reuters uncritically covered the charming musical number on their Twitter feed:
In an attempt to raise awareness on measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19, North Korean children performed a dance routine in hand sanitizer and thermometer costumes
In an attempt to raise awareness on measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19, North Korean children performed a dance routine in hand sanitizer and thermometer costumes pic.twitter.com/bHrn2PZn3i
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 2, 2022
Related: German Paper Apologizes for Scaring Kids With Panic-Driven Coverage of Covid
Reuter’s un-ironic report of the NoKo state-produced kiddie propaganda makes it all too easy to imagine the news service thinks it was a clever little show. In the United States, the sight of smiling communist children perfectly performing a propaganda routine should always make us uncomfortable. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Who could forget the creepy, dead-eyed Obama Children singing the then-candidate’s praises? This one went past “cringe” to “shudder” on the instinctive-reaction meter.
Propagandized children are always heart-breaking because it’s in their nature to be trusting and to try to please the adults in their lives, and it’s sad when monsters take advantage of that. It’s less sad but no less disturbing when grown-ups — especially those in a position of influence — participate in the brainwash games. In case you missed The Late Show with Stephen Colbert‘s work in this category, here’s a round-up of the “Vax-Scene,” a regular propaganda segment on the program. If your stomach can’t take the full 10-plus minutes of this compilation, skip ahead to the 9-minute mark for the big musical finale.
That was pretty bad: cheap costumes, low-quality animation, and zero original music or creativity. In fact, the only thing more depressing than what passes for comedy in our country nowadays is the realization that North Korea’s propaganda is better than ours.
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