ABSTRACT
Many people in the Western and Western-influenced world think they know about North Korea and have an opinion about it; North Korea is a poor country of brainwashed or hopelessly trapped people led by a lunatic head of state bent on preserving his own power by any means necessary, even if that means starving his own people and destroying the world with nuclear weapons. US media have been at the creative center of these notions, not only in news stories but also in films and television programs, which generally depict North Korea as the current arch-enemy of the US, like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan before World War II and the Soviet Union were during the Cold War. Like other such political representations, these inscriptions function to describe the US and the capitalist West by contrast. Red Dawn (2012) and Olympus Has Fallen (2013), two of the few recent Hollywood films representing North Korea feature the American Midwest and the US capital being bombed by North Korea. This is ironic not only because North Korea has yet to attack any country but also because during the Korean War the US-led three-year carpet bombing and napalming of mostly civilian targets – 1950s Korea had no significant military targets – destroying the economic infrastructure of the Northern and central Korea and resulting in the deaths of an estimated four million people, 70% of them civilians. North Korea claims to need nuclear capacity to defend against the threat of a US aerial attack.
