North Korean Video Shows an Obama in Flames

North Korea has released a new propaganda video that shows President Barack Obama and American troops in flames and credits Washington with leading the impoverished country to become a proud nuclear power.

Songs, operas and novels that stoke hatred against the United States and belittle South Korea remain a daily fare for North Koreans living under a leadership that uses propaganda as a key tool of governing. In the last several years, the isolated country has taken its campaign to the Internet, posting thousands of videos onto YouTube that provided outside people with rare glimpses into the world of North Korean propaganda.

More recently, the country’s propagandists have been busy trumpeting its successful Feb. 12 launching of a satellite in December and its nuclear test, telling North Koreans that their country wasbecoming a high-tech nuclear power under the young leader Kim Jong-un.

“Thanks to the Americans,” was just the latest work by the propagandists, coming in the form of a 90-second video uploaded on You Tube by the North’s official uriminzokkiri Web site on Sunday.

“It is not incorrect to say that the United States’ gangster-like policy of hostility prompted us to become a most strong military power,” says the text that scrolls across the screen. “Thus it can be said that it was ‘thanks to’ the Americans that we conducted a nuclear test.”

In the footage, flames are superimposed on Mr. Obama walking into what appears to be the U.S. Congress, and American troops and screen shots of a South Korean television station reporting the North’s nuclear test. It ends with an animated simulation of a nuclear device exploding in an underground test site.

The scorching of the United States in “nuclear flames” or a “nuclear holocau! st” is a recurring warning in North Korean statements. A ubiquitous propaganda poster in North Korean towns calls for a “score-settling war” against the Americans.

While North Korea faced chronic food shortages and growing trade sanctions, its propaganda strives to inspire nationalistic pride among its long-suffering people, portraying their country as a small nation prospering despite the constant bullying of the “imperialist” Americans.

Part of a video posted on You Tube by the North’s Korean Central Television on Feb. 12 showed a boy wearing a red scarf sing a new children’s song against the backdrop of rockets flying into space and satellites circling the Earth.

“We will fill the space with satellites,” the boy sang. “We will grow to be conquerors of the space.”

Another video posted early this month showed a North orean man dreaming about circling the Earth on a homemade spacecraft and looking down to see the Korean Peninsula unified and Manhattan being attacked by missiles and gong up in smoke.