🚨 #Korean_Wave and #BTS: Attractions and Harms

👤 Hojjat al-Islam Mahdi Qiasi Kargar-Moqaddam

#️⃣ #Emerging_Spiritualities

South Korea, facing economic weaknesses, turned toward a cultural wave known as "Hallyu" or the Korean Wave. Hallyu splits into two branches: K-pop and K-drama—the very shows like Jumong you watch. K-pop refers to music groups, one branch of which is BTS, another EXO, another Blackpink, and other groups. In these groups, individuals enter camps with grueling training, numerous cosmetic surgeries, and harsh austerities that create a fantasy face called a "star." This star is then placed before our youth.

I'll skip what happens in these camps—who commits suicide, why they do it, what modern slavery and bondage these teenagers endure. Instead, let me ask: what have they done to their own society and to the societies they've entered?

This teenager is placed before our youth, and the first thing our youth feels is dissatisfaction with their own appearance—because a fantasy face born of dozens of cosmetic surgeries has been created. We see fantasy faces in animations, the so-called "third gender," the movement of effeminate men, boys who look like girls. Everywhere it has gone, it has brought high suicide rates, high rates of men using women's cosmetics, high rates of cosmetic surgery—to the point that in Korea itself, they teach teenagers a book titled "Who Is the Next One?"—meaning, who among the next five people in South Korea will go under the knife? Because in South Korea, one in five people undergoes cosmetic surgery. "Who is next?"

Everywhere they've gone, they've brought depression, high suicide rates (per official statistics in South Korea), and these problems. And that's just the superficial issues—before we even get to the semantic ones: their lyrics. In an interview, the leader of BTS was asked, "Where do you get your storyline from?" He said: from Hermann Hesse's novels—which abandon Christianity for nature-worship, evil-worship, or Satanism. We see this storyline in some of their music videos. So both superficially and ideologically, there are countless harms. We unknowingly go along with it, or we see strange accompaniments happening. At first, this companionship may seem attractive—to me, to any person, not just teenagers and youth—but afterward, I see these effects creating disorders and harms in my own life, and many of them are truly irreversible.

https://t.me/jscenter/22323

🆔 @rahyafte_en