Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance with Socialist Lifestyle

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North Korea has launched an assault on ideologically incorrect haircuts, as part of a campaign to encourage tidy attire, which “is important in repelling the enemies’ manoeuvres to infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era.”

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.

(Via NK Zone)

Comments

January 10, 2005

Ian

Long hair needs more shampoo and water to wash, therefore causing a cumulative strain on the countries resources, which would otherwise be use on more worthwhile projects such as a impractical nuclear arsenal or yet another framed picture of the dear leader.

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January 10, 2005

Martin Adamson

I can’t remember where I read this, unfortunately, but apparently this is a sign of North Korea being affected by South Korean TV, in much the same way as East Germany was during its terminal phase. Seemingly, the prices of second hand chinese videos and DVD players have fallen so low that even North Koreans can afford them, and videos of S Korean shows now circulate quite freely in the North. Obviously this, if true, would be a huge breakdown in the regime’s ability to control its subjects.

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January 10, 2005

Scott

I heard this through one ear on Today this morning – the other perked up as the piece continued and the bizzaritude quotient increased, but I never did hear what country it was.
When they finished the item, I looked at my wife and said “Gotta be North Korea.”

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January 11, 2005

Rob Read

It wasn’t in North Korea it was the EU that issued this dictat.

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