Propaganda piece currently making rounds: foreign spy identified after wife pays with US dollars at local market.
Reporting merchant—portrayed as ordinary auntie—is actually national security agent operating undercover among the cabbages.
Translated video attached.
Beyond the surface absurdity (traceable USD salaries for covert operatives, elite agents selling vegetables), these stories reveal deeper mechanics: they train citizens to view routine transactions as potential threats, while presenting state surveillance as benign and ever-present.
In a high-trust society, such tales would be dismissed as fiction.
Here, they circulate widely—lowering the threshold for suspicion and acceptance of increasingly implausible official narratives.
When everyday commerce becomes counter-espionage theater, the system has successfully internalized fear as social norm.