So, was just surfing around a bit and came across this story on Yahoo! that I thought I’d share. It seems that North Korea’s official website, Uriminzokkiri, has uploaded a video to YouTube. If you have time, click on the video and watch for yourself. Basically, the video is a dream sequence set to the tune of We Are The World with some guy dreaming about a unified Korea, a North Korean space shuttle flying about in orbit (it’s pretty funny to look at) and then dropping bombs on US cities, including a really touching sequence that looks like New York burning from alien death rays before being nuked into oblivion.
I’m sure that the North Koreans felt this would all be terrifying to us and get us to back off of riding them about their up coming nuclear weapons test or bothering them about their exploding rocket launches, but I was more bemused than terrified by the video.
It’s getting to the point where it’s almost impossible to parody North Korea; the minute you conjure up something comedically bizarre about them, they reveal something about themselves that’s even more bizarre.
The video would be weird enough if it were backed by a Korean song, either traditional or contemporary. But the fact that they chose an American pop song adds a whole new dimension; it’s sort of like if the US War Department had made a video to boost the morale of US soldiers in World War 2, and backed it with Es War Ein Edelweiss.
The dream like images and “We Are The World” instrumentals make it seem like the creators intended this to represent the nuking of a U.S. city as some wonderful dream.
Obviously this is propaganda, and quite hateful propaganda at that, and all tied up in a pretty bow with sweet music. Is this typical of North Korean propaganda? If so, what hope is there of there ever being any kind of sane relationship between NK and the rest of the world?
NK doesn’t hate the rest of the world quite as much as it hates the US. It has a semi-decent relationship with China and a few other countries.
The US, though, has been its sworn enemy for decades, so it’s not at all surprising that this newest bit of propaganda targets a US city. For whatever reason, the NK government finds it handy to think that every good red-blooded American spends a great deal of time plotting and scheming ways to destroy North Korea.
The government yes, but my understanding is that the typical citizen is taught to see the world in terms of the good guys (NK) versus everyone else, with China being perhaps not quite as evil as the rest.
You know that photo montage of the Earth at night from space? The one that shows all the city lights and how the northern half of the Korean peninsula is conspicuously darker than the south or Japan next door? Well if North Korea ever actually nuked an American city, they’d have to release a new version showing the former North Korea glowing in the dark.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a wonderful article on N. Korea in 2005. Although he was describing the regime of the departed Kim Jong-il, I doubt things have changed. He was amazed at the racism he encountered-the N. Koreans consider themselves vastly superior to the S. Koreans because they are a pure race. He concludes
