I find some of the claims made about North Korea rather fanciful and unbelievable.
Some foreigner came into their country and tried to 'illuminate' the 'unwashed' masses via tearing down propaganda and was promptly thrown into some hellhole of a jail.
Seems to me like a normal thing to have happened. By the standards of the Global North, that is.
Doesn't seem meaningfully different from today's USA.
I'm mostly trying to make light on the fact that trying to validate outlandish propaganda by using an event which actually happened as some kind of 'gotcha' falls flat when the event you're talking about is something that happens routinely in the USA and, more generally, in the Global North.
If I went to the USA and took down a MAGA poster, my ass would be in Alligator Alcatraz 2.0 within the day and nobody would ever find me again. At least until I land in South Sudan or some shit.
Sounds like the most innocuous thing in the world
A lot of it was driven by quotas that the police had to meet.
I'm not even saying this country is not paranoid, but its nearly not as bad as everyone is imaging, and frankly, considering what Americans have inflicted unto the korean people, its fairly understandable.
The kind of obvious propaganda like "it's a crime to have the same haircut as Kim Jong-Un" (or to not have it, depending on the source). No one is saying life there is great, but there is a track record of fantastically untrue stories.