North Korea will no longer pursue reconciliation with South, Kim Jong Un says
North Korea scraps agencies managing relations with South as Kim Jong Un cites hostility with rival
I read a long time ago that German reunification was possible because the division was 2 generations long. They hypothesized that when you get to 3+ generations long it would be extremely difficult, which is where Korea is.
Yeah. At the start, it was friends and family members.
Decades later, it was uncles and grandparents.
Nowadays, it's basically refugees who speak the same language, but a different accent...and are VERY culturally different.
Good luck convincing a developed nation to accept 26 million refugees overnight, who are likely undernourished and undereducated. In exchange, you get 120K KM of land which might be resource-wealthy, but then you also have to be mindful that there might be terrorists who oppose the government.
Reunification sounded great decades ago. It still sounds great on paper in a best case scenario (aka. fantasy land). Even if it's "the right thing to do", though, it's not going to be easy.
It's hard to annex a nuclear armed country that has a well trained military, especially one that knows what the capitalist empire is up to.
Yeah people only saw the treats West germany had but not the shameless exploitation needed to acquire them. They didn't know what actual life under capitalism was like. After reunification the mass layoffs and wholesale of entire industries came as a big shock, some people genuinely thought the state could just provide them with a different job if the capitalists fired them. A lot of women were shocked to find out how much gender equality was lagging behind what they previously had had.
Lol
Here the full address:
Notable bits:
Today the Supreme People's Assembly newly legalized the policy of our Republic toward the south on the basis of putting an end to the nearly 80 year-long history of inter-Korean relations and recognizing the two states both existing in the Korean peninsula.
As solemnly clarified at the 2023 December Plenary Meeting of the Party Central Committee, our Party, government and people had shown great magnanimity and tireless patience and made sincere efforts always with the view that those of the ROK are still the fellow countrymen and compatriots in the long period of history and even discussed with them the great cause of national reunification in a candid manner.
But it is the final conclusion drawn from the bitter history of the inter-Korean relations that we cannot go along the road of national restoration and reunification together with the ROK clan that adopted as its state policy the all-out confrontation with our Republic, dreaming of the "collapse of our government" and "unification by absorption," and lost compatriotic consciousness, getting more vicious and arrogant in the madcap confrontational racket.
The north-south relations have been completely fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states, not the consanguineous or homogeneous ones any more. This is the present situation of the relations between the north and the south today caused by the heinous and self-destructive confrontational maneuvers of the ROK, a group of outsiders' top-class stooges, and the true picture of the Korean peninsula just unveiled before the world.
I have already recalled at the recent plenary meeting that the so-called constitution of the ROK openly stipulates that "the territory of the ROK covers the Korean peninsula and its attached islands".
...
There is no provision specifying such definition in the existing constitution of our country. Since our Republic definitely defined the ROK as a foreign country and the most hostile state after completely eliminating the original concept contradictory to reality that the ROK is the partner for reconciliation and reunification and the fellow countrymen, it is necessary to take legal steps to legitimately and correctly define the territorial sphere where the sovereignty of the DPRK as an independent socialist nation is exercised.
In my opinion, we can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annex it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case of a war breaks out on the Korean peninsula.
And I think it is right to specify in the relevant paragraph of our constitution that such linguistic remnants misinterpreting the north and the south as fellow countrymen as "3 000-ri tapestry-like land" and "80 million compatriots" are not used in the political, ideological, mental and cultural life of our people, and that education should be intensified to instill into them the firm idea that ROK is their primary foe and invariable principal enemy.
For the present, we should take strict stepwise measures to thoroughly block all the channels of north-south communication along the border, including the one of physically and completely cutting off the railway tracks in our side, which existed as a symbol of north-south exchange and cooperation, to an irretrievable level.
We should also completely remove the eye-sore "Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification" standing at the southern gateway to the capital city of Pyongyang and take other measures so as to completely eliminate such concepts as "reunification", "reconciliation" and "fellow countrymen" from the national history of our Republic.
Lol, reconciliation was never actually on the table.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.
The North Korean steps come as Kim has been actively boosting his partnerships with Moscow and Beijing as he attempts to break out of diplomatic isolation and increase his leverage by joining a united front against Washington.
Kim said it has become impossible for the North to pursue reconciliation and a peaceful reunification with the South, which he described as “top-class stooges” of outside powers that are obsessed with confrontational maneuvers.
He specifically demanded cutting off cross-border railway sections and tearing down a monument in Pyongyang honoring a pursuit for reunification, which Kim described as an eyesore.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during a Cabinet meeting in Seoul said Kim’s comments show the “anti-national and anti-historical” nature of the government in Pyongyang.
The assembly said North Korea’s government would take “practical measures” to implement the decision to abolish the agencies handling dialogue and cooperation with the South.
The original article contains 977 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is very sad - the DPRK and it's government have made every good-faith attempt to pursue reunification and reconciliation but the occupation government, controlled by Capitalist interests, has never stopped its aggression towards the North or considered reunification through any means but subjugation seriously.
*until the next food crisis
Did they ever?
That's really tragic, after all we surely all recognize the great strides he took toward uniting Korea! Of course most of them were strides towards Food Aid, but he needed to get his steps in anyway.
Good for the DPRK to cease tolerating Fail Korea and instead pursue more useful diplomacy. Closing the border to FK would allow the DPRK to focus its efforts elsewhere.
Fail Korea will always be a US puppet that would gladly separate the Korean people in service of imperialism and capitalism.
Juche is looking good in 2024.
I hope this doesn't lead to tension between the two countries.