North Korea recently launched its ninth trash balloon blitz against the South this year. Pyongyang is now working overtime to convince its own citizens through lectures that these trashy tactics are not only legitimate, but praiseworthy.
A source in North Pyongan Province, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Daily NK on Tuesday that since the beginning of July lectures have been held at factories and enterprises in various parts of the country to inform workers about the waste dumping and explain the reasons for it. Most of the lectures are being held in areas near the border with China.
“Piles of garbage are only suitable for puppets who are themselves human garbage and have become lapdogs for the U.S. Let’s dump more garbage in the Seoul area,” the script used in the lecture said.
The lecture did not specify that the garbage balloons were a response to propaganda leaflets being flown across the border by North Korean defector groups in South Korea.
Nevertheless, the language about “human garbage” and “lapdogs for the U.S.” suggests that South Korea was the reason for launching the garbage balloons.
Echoes of Kim Jong Un’s anti-South rhetoric
In fact, the phrase about becoming “lapdogs for the U.S.” echoes comments made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the Ninth Enlarged Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea late last year.
“It is not befitting the prestige and position of [North Korea] to discuss the issue of reunification with the strange clan, which is nothing but a colonial stooge of the US, just because of the rhetorical word ‘fellow countrymen.’ South Korea at present is nothing but a hemiplegic deformity and a colonial subordinate state whose policy is completely out of order, whose whole society is contaminated by the Yankee culture and whose defense and security are totally dependent on the United States,” Kim said at the meeting.
“North-South relations have been completely fixed in the relations between two hostile states and the relations between two warring states, no longer consanguineous or homogeneous,” Kim said in the same speech, taking the position that South and North Korea are completely separate countries.
While North Korea often uses the phrase “puppet clique” when disparaging the South Korean government, the more general mention of “puppets” in this speech seems to indicate that the garbage launches are aimed not only at the South Korean government, but also at the South Korean public as a whole.
The same speech claimed that the South Korean government had besmirched the dignity of North Korea’s supreme leader.
“These puppets who insult the esteemed name of Marshal [Kim Jong Un] deserve to continue picking up the feces and garbage we send their way,” the lecture said, in an apparent attempt to stir up the North Korean public’s antipathy toward the South.
“Lectures of this kind are held every morning before work,” Daily NK’s source said.
Controlling the narrative in the border regions
North Korea is not currently printing photos of the garbage balloons in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper or other media available to the general public. But since information from the outside world is more likely to reach North Koreans in the border region, the authorities appear to be using these lectures to dominate the local narrative and convince locals of the legitimacy of the garbage balloon launches.
In fact, some residents of the border area in North Pyongan Province were already aware that the leader’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, had made a statement about the garbage launches.
“After several days of the lecture, some people noticed that Comrade Kim Yo Jong had released a statement that captured public sentiment. [The authorities] seem to be holding these lectures out of concern that people’s ideological commitment will be undermined by all the information coming out of China,” the source said.
Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons.
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