Mick Hartley

Still with North Korea – from Yonhap News:

North Korea has removed "unification" from the name of a building on the North's side of the truce village of Panmunjom, Seoul's unification ministry said Monday, as Pyongyang has stepped up its campaign to redefine relations with Seoul as hostile.

A Daily NK commentary:

North Korea’s removal of the word “unification” from its Panmunjom building represents far more than a simple name change. By renaming the “Unification Pavilion” to the neutral “Panmun Hall,” Pyongyang has symbolically abandoned the shared Korean dream of eventual reunification. This deliberate erasure, completed in stages over the past year, is part of a systematic campaign that extends beyond physical landmarks to educational materials, with North Korean authorities ordering teachers to literally cross out words like “reunification,” “reconciliation,” and “fellow countrymen” from existing textbooks with pens and pencils.

The modification aligns with Kim Jong-un’s January speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly demanding the “complete elimination” of unification terminology from the national history. This represents a calculated strategy to eliminate all references to reconciliation from North Korean policy and consciousness. The urgency of this ideological shift is evident in the stopgap measures implemented—teachers must spend five minutes before each class crossing out banned phrases and explaining the “correct understanding” of party policies to students. One elementary school teacher in Uiju was fired for failing to implement these orders, demonstrating the regime’s zero-tolerance approach to ideological compliance. Even songs like “Reunification, May You Come Soon” are now forbidden in classrooms….

Seoul must recognize these changes as part of a broader, deliberate strategy by Pyongyang to permanently redefine the Korean peninsula as two hostile states rather than one temporarily divided nation. The simultaneous alteration of physical spaces and educational content demonstrates the comprehensive nature of this policy shift. This transformation demands a clear-eyed reassessment of South Korea’s unification policies and security posture, acknowledging that the path to peaceful reconciliation has grown significantly more challenging as North Korea systematically dismantles both physical connections and linguistic references to a shared Korean future.

I've documented this before. Here, for instance, on the occasion of the demolition of North Korea's Arch of Reunification in Pyongyang last April:

For Great Leader Kim Il Sung reunification would have involved the triumphant North, a beacon of socialist success, taking in the hopelessly corrupt and decadent South. As it's turned out the South's been resurgent, an economic and cultural powerhouse, while the North's turned into a starvation-ridden dystopian basket case. The only conceivable reunification now would follow the collapse of the Kim dynasty, with the South trying to pick up the pieces – at huge cost.

From North Korea's official point of view, then, reunification has now to be truly dead and buried.

We've seen East and West Germany reunite; we've seen North and South Vietnam reunite. This, though, may well be a step too far. Reunification is officially dead in North Korea, and though the Daily NK commentary assumes that the South must still be striving for one unified country, my feeling is that for the majority of South Koreans this is no longer the case. They have their own problems, and really, after over 75 years, seem to have little enthusiasm for rescuing their fellow Koreans, at enormous expense, from the hell they've built for themselves.