God, give us wisdom to understand the North Korean crisis from their perspective. Heal the hurts of the past and bring reconciliation and restoration to our nations.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 9:20)

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Any day of the week, the North Korean propaganda machine can be relied upon to spew out anti-American vitriol using some formulation of ‘imperialist’ and ‘aggressor’ and ‘hostile.’

The Kim family has kept a tight grip on North Korea for some seven decades by perpetuating the idea that the Americans are out to get them. From the earliest age, North Korean children are taught ‘cunning American wolves’ — illustrated by fair-haired, pale-skinned men with huge noses — want to kill them. . . .

‘North Koreans live in a war mentality, and this anti-American propaganda is war-time propaganda,’ said Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert in North Korean propaganda who teaches at Korea University in Seoul. . . .

The thing is: there is some element of truth to the North Korean version of events. It’s only a kernel, and it is grossly exaggerated, but North Koreans remember very well what most Americans have forgotten (or never knew): that the Korean War was a brutal one. . . .

‘The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, 10 percent of the overall population,’ Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of Korean history at Columbia University, wrote in an essay. ‘The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South.’

But the war ended with an armistice, not with a peace treaty. That means that, to this day, North and South Korea remain in a technical state of war.” (Excerpted from The Washington Post, analysis by Anna Fifield—Click the link to read this excellent analysis in full.)