“I love you.” Those three little words may not be as offensive as Western music or South Korean films, but they’re not to be whispered or written in North Korea.

That expression of passion was enough to result in the public humiliation of a young man after his letter to his girlfriend was found in an inspection of his belongings in the industrial city of Hamhung, on North Korea’s east coast. That’s according to a South Korean website, Daily NK.

Daily NK attributes the news to a “source” inside the North. The source, one of several in North Korea with whom Daily NK remains in touch via illicit cellphones near the Chinese border, blamed the deputy chief of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League for not only discovering the letter but turning it “into an ideological issue.”

The source was quoted as saying, “They criticized the phrase ‘I love you,’ which was in the letter, and made a big deal of the matter,”  though it was nothing like the death sentences, lengthy imprisonment, and torture routinely inflicted on those discovered to have been hiding foreign music and films. 

It was during a search for that kind of incriminating booty that the official came up with the note that the young man had penned for his girlfriend, presumably to give her personally since no one in North Korea is going to trust the mail system for anything other than official, authorized messages.

If he survived physically unscathed, though, the miscreant still had to face the sneers of his peers. Ordered to stand up in front of his co-workers, he hung his head in shame and apologized profusely for what the official said was his “decadent lifestyle, imbued with capitalist views of love.”  

Castigated for his “rotten spirit,” the young man also had to engage in self-criticism, the highlight of “an ideological struggle session” in which his co-workers rebuked him for veering from a dictatorial, top-down system in which only the elite surrounding North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, get to live and love as they like.

There was no clue as to whether the object of his affection was in the audience, but the session was intended to promote just the spirit that Mr. Kim is attempting, with highly mixed results, to inculcate among his people, perpetually hungry, ill paid, and yearning for entertainment.

In a speech before his rubberstamp Supreme People’s Assembly, Mr. Kim attacked “such deviations as paying little attention to the working and living conditions for the working people,” according to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, while deriding “the abuse of power, bureaucratic behavior and infringement upon the interests of the people.”

On a grassroots level, “Young people have various ways to avoid detection, but they can’t escape surprise inspections,” Daily NK’s source said. “The league made a big deal of this incident to intimidate young people and suppress even their personal feelings.” It’s doubtful, however, if the lesson in decadence penetrated the minds of North Koreans, increasingly discontent with the harsh conditions in which they survive.

“News of the struggle session spread quickly, sparking public criticism mixed with sarcasm,” Daily NK said. “People called it absurd, saying things like, ‘If ‘I love you’ is decadent, then the entire world is decadent.” Most people, it seemed, “couldn’t understand why authorities would crack down on private emotional expressions.”

As if scrawling “I love you” were not bad enough, the lover’s note added, “The only thing I think of is you” — a sentiment that is way out of line in a system under which such love and adoration should be directed only at “the dear leader.”