Wednesday 6 June 2018

Smash Americans! Revenge-pledging museum in N Korea against US atrocity

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a celebration for nuclear scientists and engineers who contributed to a hydrogen bomb test. Photo: KCNA via Reuters

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.

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