Leader Kim Jong-un has called for amending Pyongyang’s constitution to classify South Korea as the “No. 1 hostile country”
North Korea has followed through on leader Kim Jong-un’s conclusion that peaceful reunification with Seoul is impossible, scrapping the government agencies that were involved in such efforts and preparing to constitutionally brand South Korea as Pyongyang’s archenemy.
Speaking to North Korea’s parliament on Monday, Kim called for changing South Korea’s constitutional status to the “No. 1 hostile country.” The parliament immediately agreed to scrap the agencies involved in promoting reunification with the South and inter-Korean tourism, Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Tuesday.
Kim reiterated his conclusion that reunification of the two Koreas is no longer possible, citing claims that Seoul seeks to force the collapse of Pyongyang to gobble up North Korea. His comments followed a statement in late December that Pyongyang’s approach to reunification based on “one state with two systems” was diametrically opposed to Seoul’s goal of “unification by absorption.”
The North Korean leader has claimed that the US is seeking a military confrontation on the peninsula and has essentially turned South Korea into a military base and “colonial subordinate state.” He warned on Monday that military conflict may be inevitable.
“We don’t want war, but we have no intention of avoiding it,” KCNA quoted Kim as saying. “We will never unilaterally unleash a war if the enemies do not provoke us,” he added, warning that the “enemies should never misjudge this as our weakness.”
The US and South Korea have ramped up joint military exercises in the past year, while North Korea has carried out a series of missile tests. Pyongyang reportedly tested a solid-fuel ballistic missile armed with a hypersonic warhead on Sunday. The South Korean Defense Ministry condemned the launch and vowed an “overwhelming response” if Pyongyang commits a “direct provocation.”
(Non-archived link: https://www.rt.com/news/590709-north-korea-abolishes-reunification-agencies/ )
That's a pretty big policy change
But a pragmatic one. At this point with how tightly they continue to hold to the failing empire, with how they beckon to their calls for shells for Nazis in Ukraine or joining their groups for isolating China, they are a vassal state and the US is simply not going to allow them to re-unify peacefully.
Realistically what the US and the Korean puppets in the south want is an East Germany situation which is as Un points out is absorption and negation of the socialist state by the capitalist one. That's the only kind of re-unification or even growing closer together they would accept.
It was a valiant and worthy effort to attempt to compromise, to offer peace, to try diplomacy but the south does not have enough people aware of the propaganda to resist it and the leadership are of course all puppets and American loving liberals and the American interest in maintaining a fascist buffer against communism and a staging area that close to China is too great. The old in Korea like the old in Taiwan who might know better and have some experience with the depravity of the Americans and the earnest goodness of the communists are a dying minority.
Now with Russian ties growing stronger and the alliance of resistance against US hegemony which includes China, there are opportunities for the DPRK that do not involve compromise with lying, backstabbing, fascists.
I do wonder how many people in the south are aware of the propaganda, but don't speak their minds, as they can be arrested for it (you know, the thing they accuse the north of doing).
Probably a lot more are aware than English-speaking people think. Most of the suppression goes untranslated, but there's quite a lot of it. Would probably be hard as a Korean to avoid mentions of it, but maybe a lot dismiss it like western liberals dismiss communist suppression in the west.
Yeah, my impression is that Southerners might in large part be liberals, but they are more acutely aware of what a farce the fake testimonies of defectors are than anyone in anglophone countries are. Some people gobble it up, but it would be (roughly) like how FOX News has avid followers but is broadly held in disrepute.
Its probably like it is in other places, there are more or less historically accurate "left" views that go unreported, completely bias mass media pushing the imperialist line, and popular media that appeals to petite bourg and aspirational, effite workers that pushes a propagandized version of history that is somewhere in the middle.
I forget where I heard/read it, so idk sources, but like Yeonmi Park is on a South Korean reality show akin to "real housewives" drivel. And as we know when she comes here she feeds the pigs, "we had to eat rats and dirt," but on the reality show she is like, "The communists took away my family's rental properties" which is probably true. They can't pull the same ridiculous bullshit there, because most people have lived experiences that would contradict her lies. So they tell like a very varnished and bias version of the truth, to people who (for example) would be very upset at the prospect of losing rental income or even like a small business or something. To the oppressor, that is those who benefit from oppression and colonization, making things fair and equal is, to them, the same as being oppressed.