Why does North Korea hate the U.S.?
“Korea is called the forgotten war, and part of what has been forgotten is the utter ruin and devastation that we rained down on the North Korean people.” JOHN DELURY PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA— Any day of the week, the North Korean propaganda machine can be relied upon to spew out anti-American vitriol using some formulation of “imperialist” and “aggressor” and “hostile.”
The Kim family has kept a tight grip on North Korea for some seven decades by perpetuating the idea that the Americans are out to get them. From the earliest age, North Korean children are taught “cunning American wolves” — illustrated by fair-haired, paleskinned men with huge noses — want to kill them.
The thing is: there is some element of truth to the North Korean version of events. It’s only a kernel, and it is grossly exaggerated, but North Koreans remember very well what most Americans have forgotten (or never knew): that the Korean War was a brutal one.
“Korea is called the forgotten war, and part of what has been forgotten is the utter ruin and devastation that we rained down on the North Korean people,” said John Delury, a professor in the international relations department at Yonsei University in Seoul. “But this has been ingrained into the North Korean psyche.”
First: a little history. The Korean Peninsula, previously occupied by Japan, was divided at the end of the Second World War. Dean Rusk — an Army colonel at the time, who went on to become secretary of state — got a map and basically drew a line across at the 38th parallel. To the Americans’ surprise, the Soviet Union agreed to the line, and the communist-backed North and the American-backed South were established in 1948 as a “temporary measure.”
On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung, installed by the Soviets to lead North Korea, decided to try to reunify the peninsula by force. (Although in the North Korean version of events, the South and their imperialist patrons started it.)
The push south was surprisingly successful until Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed his troops on the mud flats at Incheon. Then the Chinese got involved, managing to push them back to roughly where they started.
For the next two-and-a-half years, neither side was able to make any headway. The war was drawn to a close in 1953, after exacting a bloody toll.
Canada was part of the UN troops fighting alongside Americans. Five-hundred-and-sixteen Canadians died in the conflict.
“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, 10 per cent of the overall population,” Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of Korean history at Columbia University, wrote in an essay. “The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South.”
But the war ended with an armistice, not with a peace treaty. .
On the peninsula, it was total devastation, particularly for the North. The United States dropped 576,000 tonnes of bombs in Korea, not counting the 29,500 tonnes of napalm, Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago professor who’s written several books on North Korea, wrote. This compared with 456,000 tonnes in the entire Pacific theatre in the Second World War.
The Kim regime keeps its people afraid by constantly blaming the United States for its situation, especially sanctions for its economic plight. But this also helps it unify the populace against a supposed external threat.
“Anti-Americanism is an ideological tool of the government,” said Peter Ward, a North Korea researcher affiliated with the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “They need an enemy and a villain to blame for the division of the country, a scapegoat for the situation they are in.”
As tensions between North Korea and the United States have escalated in recent months, the North has turned up the volume on its propaganda machine, in addition to launching a series of missiles.
In response, U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to use force to punish North Korea.
“When a new and untested American president starts dangling out the prospect of a surprise missile attack as the solution to the North Korean problem, it plays directly into their worst narrative that the regime tells its people,” Delury said. And the worst narrative is bad.
From the very real events of the Korean War, North Korea’s propagandists have created a version of history that is designed to keep the shock and horror alive.
North Korea’s discourse on the Korean War — called the “Victorious Fatherland Liberation War” in North Korea — was constructed according to Soviet propaganda used against Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
Russia perceived itself as being attacked by Germany in what it called “The Great Patriotic War,” said Tatiana Gabroussenko, who teaches at Korea University in Seoul. “So, according to the North Korean version of the Korean War, they were also fighting a great patriotic war against American intruders.”
Take the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities south of Pyongyang, which recalls what North Korea says was a massacre carried out by U.S. troops.
There was fighting and death in Sinchon during the Korean War, but North Korea is widely held to have vastly exaggerated them with its claim that some 35,000 “martyrs” were killed by U.S. soldiers during a massacre there. This is one of what Ward calls the “fake atrocities” that North Korea has created to bolster antiAmerican nationalism.
Kim Jong Un has visited it several times since he became leader at the end of 2011. During a visit after a major expansion of the museum in July 2015, turning it into “a centre for anti-U.S. class education,” Kim celebrated “the victory day when the Korean people defeated the U.S. imperialists.”
He also ordered his cadres to “intensify the anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. education.” The Korean Central News Agency reported in March, that “more than 18,000 service personnel, working people and youths and students visited the museum” in the first 10 days of the month, “their hearts burning with the resolution to punish the U.S. imperialists and the South Korean warmongers.”