"Freedom of speech is the freedom to shout Long Live Kim Il Sung": This has been a commonplace here since Kim Su-yŏng’s famous poem to that effect in… - Brian Reynolds Myers

North Korea fears an improvement in relations.

Journalism is the most Americanized of all professions, and nothing is more American than the belief that economic matters trump ideological ones. There is very little talk of ideology in coverage of any country. Western journalists here see a poor North facing off against a rich South and laugh at the notion that the former might have serious designs on the latter. They don’t seem aware of what I call the South’s state-loyalty deficit.

[M]emory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was.