How North Korea Manufactures Hate of the United States

Blaine Harden writing for the Washington Post explains one of the ways that the Kim regime is able to manufacture hate of the United States to justify their rule:

Where does the hate come from?

Much of it is cooked up daily in Pyongyang. Like all dictatorial regimes, the Kim family dynasty needs an endless existential struggle against a fearsome enemy. Such a threat rationalizes massive military spending and excuses decades of privation, while keeping dissenting mouths shut and political prisons open.

The hate, though, is not all manufactured. It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.

The story dates to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force, in response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly easy pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many missions.

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the New Yorker in 1995. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.  (………..)

“It is still the 1950s in North Korea and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on,” says Kathryn Weathersby, a scholar of the Korean War. “People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened.”

There is real value in understanding this paranoid mindset. It puts the calculated belligerence of the Kim family into context. It also undermines the notion that North Korea is merely a nut-case state.  [Washington Post]

Harden concludes his article that some day the US should apologize for the bombing of North Korea.  Using that mindset should the US then apologize for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fire bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities as well?  Anyway the Korean War was a United Nations action, so shouldn’t the UN be the ones apologizing?