Lessons in loathing at museum on ‘ US atrocity’
■ North Korea’s ‘ Revenge Place’ zeroes in on massacre of 35K people
Sinchon, June 7: Every few minutes a new set of visitors arrives at the ‘ Revenge- Pledging Place’ at North Korea’s Sinchon Museum, where regime propaganda insists US troops massacred more than 35,000 people during the Korean War.
A volunteer among the group — they could be from a school, army unit, factory or official organisation — stands up in the concrete amphitheatre, where a mural reads “Let us drive out the Americans and reunify our nation", to issue a vitriolic denunciation of the US.
Fists clenched in the air, the crowd responds with unison shouts: “Smash! Smash! Smash!” Opposition to the United States is a fundamental cornerstone of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North is officially known.
Pyongyang says the nuclear arsenal it has spent decades developing, suffering sanctions and isolation as a result, is to defend itself from a possible US invasion.
That means next week's Singapore summit between leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump — where the North's weapons will top the agenda — presents a potential conundrum: could making peace with the enemy undermine the authorities’ claim to legitimacy? The Kim dynasty bases its right to rule in founder Kim Il Sung’s role in the 20th century fight against Japanese colonial rule.
According to the orthodoxy, that historic mission was interrupted when the US and Soviet Union divided the peninsula between them after Tokyo's surrender ended the Second World War. The North's attempt to reunify it by force with its 1950 invasion was then thwarted again by a US- led United Nations coalition.
The vilification of the US — and Japan — is constant in the North, from books and films to education centres in Pyongyang and across the country, including the centrepiece museum in Sinchon, which receives 500,000 visitors a year.