North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday called for a propaganda campaign that will help increase support for the country’s ideology of self-reliance amid “the worst difficulties.”
State-owned media outlet Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that Kim sent a letter on Monday to officials of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) attending a workshop that aimed to bring about a fundamental change in WPK’s ideological work and boost motivation for socialism.
In his letter, Kim said that the country’s “ideology-first principle is just the fundamental key to emerging victorious from difficult situations and a way of revolution peculiar to the WPK.”
The WPK’s “information workers should become powerful loudspeakers and hi-fi amplifiers in conveying and communicating the Party Central Committee’s idea and intention” and arouse “the entire Party, the whole country and all the people to their materialisation,” Kim wrote.
Noting that the party’s information officials are “revolutionaries who are directly in charge” of its ideological front, he added that they “should be responsible for the ideological life of the party members and other working people in their areas.” “If they forget such an important mission.” Kim cautioned, “it will leave a vacuum in the brains of the people and break the party’s ideological front and such consequences can not be undone with anything.”
He said that information officials must therefore “take charge of the ideological education among the people, be aware of their important obligations as professional revolutionaries guiding the ideological remoulding,” and positively find and utilise “the best method for information work and education.”
North Korea's Kim Jong Un is trying to create his own thought form, separate from his father who created "songun" and grandfather who introduced the ideology "juche."
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Kim further stressed that it is “necessary to make the officials, party members, working people and rising generations” realise the essence and structure of the Juche idealogy. In order to do so, it is important to explain the “theory of the party’s politics in combination with the actual work and life and in a proper and reasonable way.” Kim also noted that “the essence of ideological education is the education in the greatness of the party and the education in the loyalty to it.”
Kim also called for beefing up visual content and stressed film as “an ideological education means of the greatest influence.” To this end, Pyongyang has cracked down on the influx of South Korean pop culture and entertainment via the Chinese border in order to curb what it deems are non-socialist and anti-socialist influences.
Kim’s comments on the country’s “worst difficulties” are a reference to the ongoing severe economic crisis, which is largely attributed to the imposition of one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns. As part of the preemptive measures, the regime halted trade and people-to-people exchanges by sealing its borders to China last year, its main economic lifeline. International sanctions on Kim’s administration over its nuclear weapons programme have further strained the economy.
To make matters worse, the country is also speculated to be undergoing a health crisis. Despite vague admittance of COVID-19 cases within its borders, North Korea rejected planned shipments of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines last year that had been organised under the COVAX initiative due to concerns over side effects. Furthermore, the country also rejected an offer of three million vaccine doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine, UNICEF said last year. As the country has so far neglected to arrange for any shipments, COVAX, the global vaccine-sharing programme, scaled back the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses allocated to North Korea earlier this year.