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/ )

  • Pili
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    11 months ago

    uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire

    • darkcallingOP
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • DamarcusArt
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        11 months ago

        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).

        • What_Religion_R_They [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            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.

        • Juice [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          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.

  • 201dberg
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    11 months ago

    West knows that as China and Russian ramp up trade with NK, NK will advance rapidly. China is already starting to outpace the USs military. Russia has shown they are capable of way more than what the west thought. If NK advances past what SK is able to respond to then that’s another foothold gone. I fully believe the US will try to start shit before 2025 when it’s projected they US military will never catch up to Chinas production. They are trying to lock down all their control points for when they kick things off. It’s why they are pushing so hard for Isn’treal to finish the genocide. That also don’t want to be the ones to start the war. They want to be the bully that pushes and pushes until someone finally pushes back and then scream and cry about it as the cry for war.

    • rando895@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      The US has made itself a great candidate for becoming a vassal state, since there is very little material wealth generated domestically. Imagine if/when American businesses in China/Russia (I can’t imagine there are any in NK right?) are nationalized. Especially if China stops exporting to the US. That would devastate the American economy, shortages of everything everywhere, and no productive capacity or expertise to fix it.

      Capitalism is abandoning the empire.

      • sinovictorchan
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        11 months ago

        The reason why USA, and other Western European diaspora had advanced economically in the Cold War, was because they depend on the enslavement, unethical human experimentations for human health research, and property thief in fake schools that imprisons Indigenous children since 1850s to 1998 although the fake school genocide might still continue unofficially. The fake school holocaust by the British diaspora is what inspired the Nazi Holocaust and they continue the imprisonment of Indigenous people in concentration camps in dangerous barren wasteland and the chemical attacks against the Indigenous people until they surrender their properties, their inheritance, and the reparation for the fake school holocaust that many Indigenous parents were tricked into funding.

        The centuries of fake school free riding had made Western European diaspora into parasites that free ride on the people of color to sustain their wasteful consumption, so the Western European diaspora are now trying to enslave or cheat on the immigrant of color and abandon the European diaspora in rural communities.

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      NK advances past what SK is able to respond to

      they’ve had that for a long time, it’s that the US & Japan are supposed to back SK up and make up the difference

    • freagle
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      11 months ago

      You mean that time the USA told Japan to not vacate the peninsula until the USA military arrived, took over the imperial colony of Japan on the peninsula, created an artificial border in the middle of a sovereign nation, and then used a crossing of that fake border to justify bombing nearly every single structure in the North until the military had to acknowledge there were no more targets left to hit, so instead they amped up their napalm campaign and Koreans needed to live in caves to survive while the USA occupation of South Korea was a racial and sexual domination playground until eventually they found enough compradors in South Korea to build a government with an air of legitimacy to provide cover for essentially turning the entire Southern portion of the peninsula into a USA military base and industrial base? That Korean War? The one that killed millions of civilians?

      • s_s@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I know this is lemmygrad, but seeing people stan for North Korea never stops being wild.

        • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          Do you have an actual argument to anything the above user said or are you just here to get mad that we’re defending countries you don’t like?

        • JucheStalin
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          11 months ago

          Have you ever researched the DPRK independently? Do you have anything positive you can say about them?

          • s_s@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            Have you ever researched the DPRK independently?

            What would “independent research” of the DPRK be exactly?

        • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          “My country’s media tells me they’re the bad guys, don’t you know they’re the bad guys?”

          Like dude we committed a genocide there and leveled every building, they would be stupid not to focus on military deterrents after that.

          Consider the way western media is covering the Yemeni resistance to the genocide in Gaza (a bunch of angry terrorist pirates who just hate boats!) and then compare that to all the absurd orientalist red scare nonsense we’ve heard about the DPRK. We’ve been marinating in that propaganda our whole lives, of course it’s going to feel weird for you to see people pushing back against it.

        • Kras Mazov
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          11 months ago

          Funny how your response to claims of a war perpetuated by the US that took the life of millions is to call us “stans” and point that we are the ones with the wild takes uh.

          Either engage in good faith and at least try to understand what is being talked about or get your liberal lemm.ee ass out of here.

  • Redderthanmisty
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    11 months ago

    I’m honestly surprised they’ve only just come to the conclusion that the South Korean govt will never, let alone be allowed by the US, to agree to a peaceful unification in any other form than that of East Germany.

    • darkcallingOP
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      11 months ago

      To be honest slamming the door on SK with all the sanctions on their country and the material suffering risk would have been irresponsible. I think this is mainly in response to not just the decades of failed peace processes and the recent provocations but also the new global economic reality that with Russia now isolated from the west and in their corner and China as well, shutting that door doesn’t mean the same potential death sentence it might have meant in say 2004 or 2014.

  • big_spoon
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    11 months ago

    i mean, when even south koreans hate their own country, is not the big deal when the north just puts himself in the line for “people who hate ROK”

  • Kirbywithwhip1987
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    11 months ago

    This happens when the other half of your country is an occupied militant puppet of USA