‘Flood the Zone with Shit and Howling’. Lessons from North Korea

A balloon from North Korea carrying garbage and excrement lying in a South Korean rice field in the Spring of 2024.

These days, a deliberately unsettling medley of sounds are being blasted across the DMZ by North Korea. It’s what’s known as ‘noise bombing’, a nasty aural dimension of psychological warfare. The sounds mostly consist of deep apocalyptic droning, wailing sirens, and on occasion, screaming women and howling wolves. We can sometimes hear some of the sounds in our village - it depends how strong the wind is blowing from the north - but so far, I’ve only been able to detect the droning and sirens. South Korea sends its own ‘noise bombs’ towards the North - K-Pop music and other good news about living in a free country. Before, when the North noise-bombed the South they also used patriotic music and loud-speaker announcements about how their country is a workers’ paradise.

This new unsettling development signals a change in strategy in which the North no longer uses ‘noise-bombing’ as propaganda in the obvious sense. The change parallels  another new strategy:  sending helium balloons across the border which now are not filled with DPRK propaganda, as before, but with garbage and human and animal excrement.  So far, none have come down near our village, so I have only seen them in the news media.  This is ostensibly a response to actions originating in the South - balloons sent by North Korean defector groups and Christian organizations which contain propaganda. In fact, it’s an illegal activity in the South, but nevertheless continues to be a regular occurrence..

Both the howling and the shit are a reflection of Kim Jong-un’s declaration that North Korea’s goal is no longer a re-united Korea, and that the South is now an implacable enemy to be ultimately destroyed.  This has, of course, been the truth since the Korean War, but until last year the North persisted in maintaining the fiction of reunification as an inclusive aspect of their much bigger fiction – that of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a whole. This fiction included the assumption that the people in the Republic of Korea were oppressed and just waiting to be liberated by the North.  Now the North has re-written or erased part of the official narrative, evidently because it no longer serves any practical purpose, and can be discarded without threatening the status quo in the North. as I noted in my previous post, there are obvious reasons for the change in relationship. Almost no one in the North is old enough to remember when there was just one Korea, and who perhaps have relatives living in the South. The new leadership under Kim Jong-un is much too young to know anything except two Koreas, and have no sentimental attachment to the South. But I also think something more momentous is going on.

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Communication theorists refer to what they term ‘information noise’: an external input into a communication channel between a sender and a receiver that potentially obscures or makes incomprehensible the signal,or the message. In other words, an increase in ‘noise’ results in a decrease in determinable meaning. There are various categories of such ‘noise’. The North Korean variety in the ‘noise bombing’ is ‘physical noise’, that is,  a disturbance or interference coming from an external source that obscures or obstructs the signal. In the case of the balloons, it’s ‘semantic noise’, an interference in the common background or knowledge that makes sharing ideas possible..

But North Korea has weaponized this ‘physical’ and ‘semantic noise’, and by so doing turned it into a kind of information.  Paradoxically, the very targeted noisiness of the ‘noise’ becomes a message. It signals that North Korea now assumes there is the total absence of a shared, common cultural background or store of knowledge, and so it is impossible and pointless to freight ‘noise bombing’ with any information in the form of communicable ideas.

The North consciously intends through their latest aggression to show what they think of the South’s propaganda efforts, and to announce the fact that North Korea has given up trying to communicate a message that the receivers, South Koreans, can understand.. However, I think one can argue that unconsciously the North is finally telling us the truth about their own regime. The shit and howling says quite a lot about the sender, because they an inverted expression of what life is really like in North Korea, a nation where communication is effectively entirely devoid of ‘noise’. Everything is organized so that on all levels – physical, physiological, psychological, semantic, cultural, technical, and organizational – the regime can optimally deliver a pure message without ‘noise.’ This is another way of saying that North Korea is a totalitarian state.  In a democratic society there is always bound to be ‘noise’ in any communication, especially in a multi-cultural society with multiple senders of messages - a Babel magnified infinitely by the Internet.

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Sometimes, I’m grateful to North Korea for helping me to see more clearly what’s happening in the world more generally. In this case, their ‘noise-bombing’ and balloon sending has helped me understand President Trump.  During his first presidency, Steve Bannon famously coined the motto ‘flood the zone with shit.’ Well, North Korea have inadvertently taken his advice. They are trying to flood the Demilitarized Zone with ‘shit’ – quite literally in some instances.  For Bannon was advocating a strategy of maximum communication ‘noise’. You create so much of it that the real messages are rarely received.

So, what is the real message? It looks more and more likely that the real message refer to a coming coup d’etat.  The ‘noise’ makes it possible for the coup to happen in slow-motion, so to speak. Without the usual violence, the messiness of storming the Capitol. When will freedom-loving Americans wake up to this increasingly obvious fact? I certainly hope they don’t copy the Germans after they elected Hitler in 1933.

NOTES

The image is a screenshot from:

https://www.euronews.com/2024/10/24/north-korean-balloon-dumps-rubbish-on-south-korean-presidential-compound-a-second-time

For more on ‘information theory’ see: https://www.soundproofcow.com/4-types-of-noise-in-communication/?srsltid=AfmBOorXhkA_oW2-HHLfmkLeVIe-iBH5uXlu6qjjjqfJxbkmyDQDZgEF

https://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/WhitePapers/WP1066_Communcation_Theory.pdf