Schoolchildren all across the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are taught from a young age to despise everything about America, especially its culture and military. They refer to American people as “imperialist pigs” and create effigies of American soldiers in order to joyfully destroy them. On the surface, it would seem that the DPRK is brainwashing their children for no reason, but when looking at what happened in the past, their hatred for America not only makes sense, it is justifiable.

The DPRK’s government is based on a twisted, distorted revision of Marxism called Juche. Despite how far they have deviated from Karl Marx’s ideas, a core pillar of Juche, as with all far-left ideologies, is anti-imperialism. As a result of this, they are vehemently opposed to any imperialist actions from any nation. The reason why they specifically hate American imperialism so much is because America completely and utterly destroyed the DPRK during the Korean Civil War. To this day, North Korea is still suffering from the atrocities that America committed against them in the war.

In 1948, the US installed a murderous anti-communist regime in the Republic of Korea that later executed more than 100,000 people suspected of supporting left-wing ideas. America supported this same corrupt regime in its war with the DPRK. Both the US and South Korea committed war crimes against the people of North Korea. The ROK reported that there were 373,599 civilian deaths during the war. The American military dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea. That’s more bombs than were dropped by America in the entirety of the Pacific Theatre during World War II. It was revealed that the US military had a theatre-wide policy of shooting at refugee groups. In one such instance, the No Gun Ri massacre, 300 South Korean civilians were killed. When the war was over, America had killed 20% of the entire population of the DPRK. That’s around 2 million people dead from North Korea’s 1950 population of 8 million people.

America’s slaughter of its people, combined with an ingrained ideological hatred for any form of imperialism, created the immense animosity the DPRK holds towards the United States. This hatred is also based in fear – fear of another American invasion, a fear that has been present since the end of the Korean War. For decades, America has conducted countless land, air, and naval military exercises in areas around North Korea. On top of this, the US maintains an immense military presence on the Korean Peninsula and in Japan. The reason why the DPRK has such a pervasive military culture while pursuing the construction of nuclear-armed ICBMs is so they can prevent, or be prepared for, the practically inevitable American invasion.

When taking this into account, it sounds foolish that anyone would support war against the DPRK. Even though the Kim dynasty is an oppressive regime that has caused immense suffering throughout the DPRK, the liberation of the North Korean people must come from themselves, not from an invasion by a foreign country, especially the country that put North Korea into its current position.