Mick Hartley

Coming soon. From the Daily NK:

North Korean authorities have ordered intensified anti-American and anti-South Korean propaganda activities during the “anti-U.S. joint struggle month” from June 25 to July 27, with special focus on indoctrinating young people.

According to a Daily NK source in Pyongyang recently, the ruling party’s propaganda and agitation department convened a meeting for central government and provincial party officials above department chief rank early this month. The meeting emphasized that anti-U.S. and anti-South Korean ideology would be the centerpiece of this year’s campaign, with officials instructed to focus particularly on reaching youth.

The department warned that the “revolution cannot survive if generations that haven’t experienced war become consumed by individual selfishness.” Officials were instructed to “awaken youth class consciousness by repeatedly emphasizing the atrocities committed by U.S. imperialists and puppet forces during the Korean War.”

The campaign calls for maximizing anti-American and anti-South Korean sentiment through shocking imagery—depicting U.S. tanks crushing elderly people, women and children during the Korean War, or American troops burying and burning people alive.

Officials were directed to organize visits to propaganda centers and field trips to cultural facilities displaying anti-American artwork.

Perhaps with South Korea’s recent presidential transition in mind, the meeting reaffirmed North Korea’s policy of completely ignoring the South under the party’s “two hostile states” doctrine.

“The propaganda and agitation department made clear that regardless of which government holds power in South Korea, it remains fundamentally a hostile force, and our party will maintain its strategy of ignoring South Korea indefinitely,” the source explained. “Officials said political changes in South Korea after the election provide no reason to alter this policy.”

Perhaps that'll go some way to deter South Korea's recently elected left-wing president Lee Jae-myung, who has a starry-eyed vision of reconcilation with the North.

Will South Korean President Lee Jae-myung Bring Peace to the Korean Peninsula? File under "questions to which the answer is no".

The South seems to alternate between right-wing North Korean haters, like Moon the disgraced former president, and cosy left-wing reconciliationists like Lee. It makes absolutely no difference to the North.