Socialist Women’s Union members in Sariwon question narrative shift away from “dying wish of past leaders,” with some sarcastically comparing North Korea’s dictatorship to South Korean democracy after Nov. 21 lecture.
A source in North Hwanghae province told Daily NK recently that a women’s union branch in the city of Sariwon held a lecture on Nov. 21 asserting that “our republic is a completely independent state, rather than a divided state,” and that “North and South Korea are two states that can never be made one, so unification is absolutely unnecessary.”
But on their way home afterward, some members of the women’s union were apparently critical of the lecture, commenting that “it didn’t make sense.”
One union member said she doesn’t accept the regime’s current efforts to scrub the unification narrative. “Considering they used to tell us that unification was the dying wish of past leaders, what kind of nonsense is it to suddenly say we don’t need unification?” she asked.
A second member shyly suggested “we wouldn’t need to worry about our livelihood if the country were unified.”
“Unification is the only way to become a powerful country. The ‘strong and cultured socialist country’ we’re always talking about is a slogan that would be impossible to realize in this land right now,” said a third member, expressing her irritation with regime propaganda.
Two years after “hostile states” declaration, public struggles with narrative shift
North Korea first broached the “two hostile states” narrative in the ninth plenary session of the Eighth Central Committee at the end of December 2023. During the subsequent two years, the regime has been working vigorously to erase its former emphasis on “one Korean people” and unification.
But it appears there are still many in North Korea who struggle to accept the new narrative.
“They’d always told us that unification, as the dying instructions of our former leaders, was something we had to achieve. But then they suddenly started saying that South Koreans aren’t part of the nation and that unification isn’t worth pursuing. That strikes people as bizarre and hard to swallow,” the source said.
“People can’t be spoon-fed ideological education and lectures anymore. Hardly anyone takes the lecture material at face value,” the source added.
After the lecture, some of the union members reportedly made a sarcastic joke comparing North Korea’s dictatorship to the South Korean political system.
“Down there (in South Korea), they get a new president every five years, and even the president goes to jail if they mess up. But up here it’s pretty easy to stay supreme leader forever because everybody is laying down their lives for you.”
“People nowadays are interested in the foreign news and information they hear at the marketplaces and often talk about the outside world. It’s becoming more common in these conversations for people to compare our country’s systems with those in other countries,” the source said.
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