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.