American Goliath feels brunt of national hatred
The 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War marked the climax of a month devoted to hating ‘American imperialists’
SUSAN-RI, South Korea — June is something like Hate America Month in North Korea.
Officially, it’s called “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” and — more so than usual — it’s a time for North Koreans to swarm to war museums, mobilize for gatherings denouncing the evils of the United States and join in a general, nationwide whipping up of anti-American sentiment.
The culmination this year came Thursday — the 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War — with a 100,000-strong rally in Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Stadium.
Though often called the “Forgotten War” in the United States, the 1950-53 Korean War is anything but forgotten in North Korea. As the anti-U.S. fervour reached its crescendo this week, The Associated Press took a look at what North Koreans, who aren’t privy to conflicting versions of the history of the war, are taught about it — and how they are constantly told they “can never trust the American imperialists.”
There is no dispute that the Korean War was particularly brutal, claiming millions of Korean lives, possibly hundreds of thousands of Chinese who were sent to fight with them, and tens of thousands of Americans left dead or missing in action.
But the North Korean version of the war, including the claim that it was started by Washington, is radically at odds with that of the United States and often doesn’t even jibe well with documents released over the years by its wartime allies, China and the Soviet Union.
For Pyongyang, however, the conflict isn’t just about history.
What’s more important to the ruling regime is the official moral of the story — that it was thanks to the wise leadership of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and since then his son Kim Jong-il and now grandson Kim Jong-un, that the country has managed to survive in its struggle against the ever-present threat of the American Goliath.
Before attending the “Pyongyang Mass Rally on the Day of the Struggle Against the U.S.,” a carefully orchestrated display of angry speeches, fist-pumping and calls for blood revenge, we toured two sites overflowing with soldiers in olive-green uniforms, schoolchildren wearing their bright red scarves and community groups of every stripe.
Both sites were devoted to stories of atrocities, massacres and grisly tortures committed upon the nation, their walls covered by fuzzy black-and-white photos of horrifically mangled bodies, displays of skulls with spikes driven through them and oil paintings of almost cartoonishly fiendish American GIs and crazed Korean “stooges” who collaborated with them.
At the Susan-ri Class Education Centre, guide Choe Jong Suk, a sombre middle-aged woman in a black-and-white traditional gown, gave a well-practised lecture on the variety of tortures — 110 in all, she said — inflicted on Koreans by the U.S. that, she said, were “worse than the methods of Hitler.”