North Korean state media present an easy target, but the latest from the official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, is a doozy even by the DPRK’s already-monumental standards of lunacy. A recent editorial in the paper repeats the usual exhortation to each and every North Korean to “devote oneself to building an economic giant with burning patriotic enthusiasm to fully demonstrate Korea of the sun.”
This 1999 North Korean stamp is a small but telling indication of the regime’s obsession with achieving a successful launch into Earth orbit, which it finally got in December. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP Images)
What’s interesting is that the state-run Rodong Sinmun seems to employ a new, unofficial name for the North Korean people: “space conquerors.” In only 365 short words, it refers to North Koreans five different times as “space conquerors,” according to the official English translation. To give you a sense of how firmly the paper is hammering this home, here are two successive paragraphs (my emphasis added):
