Hating G.l.s Is Child's Play

Young Nam, a North Korean preschooler, has a problem: he cannot bring himself to shoot at American G.I. target dummies during kindergarten practice. He loses sleep at nap time, brooding over his failure. Nam has every reason to learn to kill the Yankees, his teacher tells him, since they force South Korean children to become homeless street hucksters.

Happily, the remedy to his dilemma comes to Nam in a dream: a blue-eyed American sergeant breaks into a bucolic toy community and despoils the place. Animal figurines and little children drive out the invader. So inspired is Nam that he rushes out to the rifle range and knocks off four G.I. targets in a row. As schoolmates cheer, an instructor exclaims, "When you have enough hatred, you can hit them!"

That bit of bloodthirsty anti-American child's play, titled Hunting Yankees, is standard fare in North Korea these days, part of the indoctrination into the cult of Great Leader Kim II Sung. The special children's film, and others like it, is shown at nursery schools throughout the country and sometimes exported to Communist audiences abroad.

It has long been North Korea's contention that only the presence of U.S. troops--"bloodthirsty wolves"--in the South has prevented a popular uprising against governments in Seoul. For a time, while ex-President Jimmy Carter favored a unilateral U.S. troop reduction in South Korea, the propaganda abated. Now the hate mills have cranked up again.

Films like Hunting Yankees are shown to North Korean youngsters practically from infancy, since children from the age of 19 months are reared in state kindergartens, away from their parents for five days a week. Anti-Americanism is supplemented with history lessons and lectures, operas and television programs.

Indeed, whole museums--off Emits to visiting non-Communist foreigners--are devoted to the task of teaching youngsters like Nam to hate --and shoot straight.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.