There’s a recent article on Cracked which made a passing joke about North Korea claiming it was the country that won WWII by dropping the atom bomb on Japan in 1945.
Okay, I know what jokes are and I’m not going to cite Cracked. But we are talking about North Korea, so this has at least a bit of plausibility. This is the country, after all, that claimed unicorns were real.
Has the North Korean government ever made such a claim?
Again North Korea disappoints the Western world.
Quite right. Mad dictators ought to be really mad, dammit. State-ordained haircuts and unclecide just don’t do it for me.
If the TV there drops the occasional howler, good sense and self preservation dictate not howling or pointing out the inaccuracy of the official media line, even if you are able to afford the TV.
Seems unlikely. If it ever made such a claim in the past, it isn’t doing so now; recent DPRK publications, such as news stories from the Korean Central News Agency, credit the US with detonation of the atomic bombs which ended World War II. For example, from the 2009 article “KCNA Dismisses Japan’s Frantic Anti-DPRK Racket”:
Of course, that’s not to say that the North Koreans don’t overinflate their own role in the war and in bringing an end to Japanese rule. They just tend to do it via omission, exaggeration, and misdirection rather than outright fabrication. For example, one of their official accounts of the modern history of Korea states,
This is technically true but rather misleading. The omission of any mention of the Allies’ attacks on (or threats to attack) Japan makes it seem as though the Korean revolutionaries kicked the Japanese out all by themselves. Kim Il-Sung was indeed a major player in the Koreans’ guerilla war against the Japanese, both before and during World War II, though at the time of Japan’s surrender he probably wasn’t even in the country. (He was serving as an officer in the Soviet army.)
Suppose this is the North Korean version of a statement by Al Gore that’s interpreted as “I invented the Internet”. If we have a strong political motive to cast somebody in an unfavorable light, we can even make them sound silly in our own language by misquoting things they didn’t even say. Imagine how much more abuse can be piled on one, when it involves a free-wheeling sensationalist translation from another language.
I would have to see an accurate text representation. in context, of the statement actually made by an authorized spokesman for the North Koreans, with an unbiased translation into a language that I understand. I will not accept at face value, a “translation” provided to me by a World News Daily stringer.