The State Department today declined to talk about a 3-and-a-half-minute propaganda video posted to YouTube by the North Korean government. The film shows a young man dreaming of a rocket attack on an animated American city that resembles New York’s Lower Manhattan.
“I’ve seen it, I’m clearly not going to dignify it by speaking about it here,” Victoria Nuland, State Department spokesman, said at a briefing.
Nuland said Secretary of State John Kerry spoke today to Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi about North Korea’s provocative nuclear testing rhetoric, and the need for consequences if the reclusive state fails to cooperate with existing UN sanctions. Until recently, China had been one of North Korea’s few remaining allies.
The call follows similar conservations over the weekend with Kerry’s counterparts in Japan and South Korea, which warned at a UN press conference Monday about an “imminent threat” of nuclear testing by their northern neighbor.
In late January, North Korea unleashed its harshest language toward the United States since Kim Jong-Un took power, pledging to build up its arsenal and test nuclear weapons and describing the U.S. as the “sworn enemy of the Korean people.” The defiant move came days after the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution that tightened sanctions against the country and condemned the Dec. 12 North Korea rocket launch as a violation of an existing resolution.
The North Korean propaganda video, originally uploaded Saturday to a YouTube site that carries state-run media, can now be seen on LiveLeak.
What the overall production lacks in quality, it makes up for in offensiveness. The dream sequence ultimately shows an American city in ruins after a fiery attack.
According to a translation by The New York Times, the subtitles over the video read in part: “It appears that the headquarters of evil, which has had a habit of using force and unilateralism and committing wars of aggression, is going up in flames it itself has ignited. Just imagine riding in a Korean spaceship. One day, my dream will come true. No matter how hard the imperialists try to isolate and stifle us, they will not stop our people’s path toward our final victory of achieving a unified, strong and prosperous Korea.”
The video is also set to a bizarre instrumental of “We Are the World,” written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and performed by a supergroup in 1985 to raise money for African famine relief.
The video-game blog Kotaku identifies the doomsday footage from the North Korean propaganda video as coming from the popular video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
David Schoetz