![Garbage against K-pop: the war of nerves resumes on the border between the two Koreas Garbage against K-pop: the war of nerves resumes on the border between the two Koreas](https://media.lesechos.com/api/v1/images/view/6666ce79cbb3be5f941f490a/1280x720/01101777130041-web-tete.jpg)
On the South Korean side, the gigantic loudspeakers were turned back on at 5 p.m. (local time) Sunday evening, near the barbed wire barriers marking the border with the North. Pushed hard, to be heard up to 30 kilometers, inside North Korean territory, they began to broadcast the South’s national anthem then the words of a presenter. “Dear fellow North Koreans. We will now begin to broadcast the voice of freedom, delivering truth and hope,” said the voice before reading information on the country’s economic successes and continuing with several titles from the boy band BTS, stars K-pop.
For the first time in six years, Seoul decided this weekend to resume this propaganda strategy in reaction to the recent campaign of sending, by Pyongyang’s troops, large balloons loaded with garbage bags filled garbage and excrement.
USB sticks loaded with TV series
Since last month, the Kim Jong-un regime has flown more than a thousand rudimentary balloons to the South in an attempt to pressure the South Korean government to stop sending them in the other direction. , by private activists, balloons loaded with leaflets denouncing the crimes of the Kim clan, 1 dollar bills and USB sticks filled with videos of South Korean TV series.
Pyongyang fears the arrival of these images showing a very developed and peaceful South Korea in the villages of the North, deprived of everything by a exhausted collectivist economic system, while the regime has been making its population believe, for decades, that it protects it from the threat of malicious foreign powers.
“Power needs this justification of an external danger to justify its internal controls,” explained Jonathan Corrado, an expert from “The Korea Society,” recently in a seminar. “And this is why it blocks any information coming from abroad, from the United States or South Korea, and in particular TV series, which would show that these countries do not pose any particular danger” . “This argument of external threat also allows Kim Jong-un to justify the acceleration of investments in military programs, particularly nuclear,” points out Soo Kim, an analyst from LMI Consulting, who came from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). .
Psychological battle
Ulcerated by this psychological war and the reactivation of the South’s loudspeakers, Kim Yo-jong, the sister of dictator Kim Jong-un, described, on Monday, in state media, Seoul’s initiative as “the prelude in a very dangerous situation. She suggested that the North, which resumed its shipments of waste balloons during the night, was preparing “new counter-action” against the South. “Seoul must immediately put an end to this dangerous act,” insisted the young woman, who concentrates a lot of power in the North Korean regime and regularly adjusts the tone of exchanges with the South.
Kim Yo-jong was one of the main facilitators of an beginning of warming between the two nations in 2017 and 2018, when South Korea was led by a center-left majority and tried to lower tensions on the peninsula . It was at this time that Seoul, as a sign of goodwill, turned off its loudspeakers on the North Korean border with the hope of attracting Kim Jong-un to negotiate the dismantling of his nuclear arsenal with the States. -United. An exchange that never materialized. Since then, the relationship between the two neighboring countries has deteriorated again and the two executives no longer have any direct contact.