Memories of propaganda leaflets

As I lived nearby Daegu in my childhood, I just heard of propaganda leaflets from North Korea but had never seen them. Friends who spent their childhoods in places around Seoul or north of Seoul said they used to pick up and deliver the North Korean flyers to the police station, and police officers used to give them a pencil for a reward. Even in the biting coldness, kids went around in the mountain and field to pick up North Korean propaganda leaflets. In those days when a mere pencil was scarce and valuable, some defected to the North longing for a better life after reading the propaganda leaflet from the North.

It was the late 1980s when I was serving in the military service that I started seeing lots of propaganda leaflets. At that time, most of propaganda leaflets argued that Korean Air flight bomber Kim Hyun-hee was a fake. The leaflet compared a Kim’s picture against a child’s photo claimed by Kim as her childhood picture, arguing that the shape of ear was different and they were different persons. While reading the leaflet, I had a thought that Kim might be a fake. Later in 2003 during the Roh Moo-hyun administration, MBC`s investigative program “PD Notebook” aired an episode to argue that the North Korean terrorist Kim was a fake by starring lawyer Shim Jae-hwan, husband of Unified Progressive Party Rep. Lee Jeong-hee. The program was not that different from the past propaganda leaflets from the North.

The propaganda leaflets are called "bbira" in Korean, which came from an English word "bill," meaning a handbill. Most convincing origin of the word "bbira" is that the U.S. military distributed handbills in Japan during World War II, and Japanese added their own language "hira," which means a piece. This Japanese word came into Korea and transformed into "bbira." Such propaganda leaflets are used to propagandize and instigate others, leveraging their ignorance when the accurate information is blocked. However, sometimes the propaganda leaflet is used to make public the truth while information is blocked. A representative case is the U.S. military leaflet to tell the Japanese civilians to evacuate prior to dropping nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

North Korea does not need to spread propaganda leaflets any longer since it is possible to wage a psychological warfare to the South Korean society through Internet. However, North Korea is isolated from the outside worlds even in the web. Here lies the asymmetry in psychological warfare between the two Koreas. North Korea now threats South Korea by shooting, arguing that leaflets by a civil group, not by South Korean military, are proclamation of a war. The North’s such act leaves me a question – what was all about that many propaganda leaflets from the North in the past.