Mick Hartley

From the Daily NK:

North Korea sees South Korean young people’s lack of interest in reunification and their weaker sense of ethnic unity as a “strategic opportunity” and has launched comprehensive changes to its psychological warfare operations against the South. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has personally directed the Institute of Enemy State Studies to develop new strategies, explaining that “reunification and ethnic unity no longer exist now.”

A Daily NK source in North Korea reported recently that the Institute of Enemy State Studies recently determined that “disinterest in reunification is rapidly spreading among South Korean youth and the very concept of ethnic unity is collapsing,” based on analysis of perception trends and changing social attitudes among young South Koreans.

The Institute concluded that young South Koreans have already “otherized” North Korea and consider climate, economic issues and other personal priorities more important than Korean ethnic unity. “Young South Koreans don’t want reunification,” it stated. “They’re not even interested in it.”

You can hardly blame them. The cost of reunification would be prohibitive. Any comparison with East and West Germany is looking less and less appropriate so long as North Korea continues to cement its position, against stiff opposition, as simply the worst country in the world to have the misfortune to be born in. And besides, China would hardly sit back and watch the South swallow the North, even if such a thing was possible. The other way round – the North swallowing the South – may have looked plausible back in the days of Great Leader Kim il Sung, when the South was limping along under a succession of hard-men dictators, but is out of the question now as South Korea has turned itself into a cultural and economic powerhouse.

These findings were reported to North Korea’s top leadership, and Kim Jong Un — who has been personally involved in this issue since last year, ordering the strategic shift — recently called young South Koreans “foreign youth who are no longer the same people as us and who can never be on our side.”

Kim views young South Koreans’ disinterest in reunification not as a simple opinion change but as justification for North Korea to abandon ethnic unity and adopt a “two hostile nations” strategy. He called for using this disinterest as crucial evidence supporting the party’s policy to make the “hostile division” of the two Koreas permanent.

“Outdated approaches based on ethnic unity will fail,” Kim said, urging officials to “boldly burn old reunification slogans and launch new psychological warfare operations tailored to generational and cultural changes.” He specifically instructed officials “not to even use the word reunification and adopt terms that encourage psychological distance.”

Following these orders, the Institute of Enemy State Studies has dropped terms related to inter-Korean cooperation or reunification from existing propaganda materials and begun developing indoctrination content that emphasizes “cultural and genetic differences.” Researchers have even proposed the novel approach of describing young South Koreans as “biologically foreigners who mimic the Korean language but have completely different identities.”

It's typical of North Korean propaganda – obsessed with racial purity – to emphasise "genetic differences", and claim that South Koreans are now “biologically foreigners".