Year after year, American military forces go through the motions while Western journalists report the same livid North Korean response.
It’s that time of year again!
Ever since Gerald Ford’s administration, the United States’ and South Korean armed forces have engaged in military exercises to practice what a conflict with North Korea ( the DPRK ) would look like. The first such dress rehearsal took place in 1976, shortly after North Korean soldiers axed two Americans to death when they attempted to chop down a tree in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas. Three days later, the American forces launched the quaintly-titled Operation Paul Bunyan , rallying an overwhelming show of strength and cutting the tree down to a stump.
According to the North Korean mythology, the so-called “U. S. imperialists” are desperate to make Korea their Asian beachhead as part of an attempt at world domination. So suffused is anti-Americanism in their vernacular that articles and textbooks blithely refer to “Yank bastards.” The U. S. imperialists have supposedly been plotting to seize Korea at least since the 1860s when U. S. S. General Sherman visited the country. The natives of current North Korean capital Pyongyang sank the vessel to the bottom of the Taedong River and killed the crew as well. The North Koreans claim that the assailants were direct ancestors of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung and the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il—without any basis in fact.
North Korean fears about American conquest do have basis in truth. The DPRK insists that Korea is one nation, indivisible since the Paleolithic era. As a result, the names of the two countries are rendered there as north and south Korea—the south being a region under U. S. imperialist occupation. The only thing keeping us Yank devils from conquering the north is whoever the current leader happens to be—in this case Marshal Kim Jong Un. One of the reasons activists tried to smuggle the film The Interview into North Korea is that it demonstrated that Americans do not, in fact, tremble in our boots at the mention of the leader’s name.
