Perspective is (almost) Everything

"[U.S. student Otto Warmbler was provided with excellent care by North Korea which spent] all the money for nursing [him]."
"The U.S. administration, or some people with a certain intention, let him die. This must be intended to foster and spread anti-Communist hatred within America."
"The situation on the Korean Peninsula is on the eve of the breakout of nuclear war."
"We can survive [such a war]."
"[ U.S. President Donald J. Trump is] a crazy man, a thug, a pathetic man with a big mouth."
Choe Kang-il, senior official, North Korean Foreign Ministry

"There will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!"  BBC News

It seems that Mr. Choe got that one right. Unsurprisingly, he was also describing North Korea's dear little chubby leader to a T. But then he is also advocating in his professions of being able to distinguish acceptable behaviours as opposed to those that are clearly aimed at slurring North Korea's leader as a juvenile enfant terrible best left locked behind bars in recognition of his bellicose threats to turn the world into a fiery cauldron, the perverse direction given to the people of North Korea to regard the United States' ambition to incinerate them post-haste.

The other leader, the crazy man, the thug, the big mouth did, after all say something quite approximating that as a testy rejoinder on Twitter, the official communications organ of the White House. So the expectation is there, a nuclear war in the offing, North Korea matched against the United States. Patriotism is in evidence everywhere with high school students marching in military uniform daily denouncing criminal America in the streets of Pyongyang.

Where billboards and posters on public roads feature missiles sending the U.S. Capital into smithereens, the American flag shredded beyond repair. Even kindergarten playgrounds are not off limits for posters of deadly missiles. State television is fixed on those images. But are North Koreans fearful of any outcome between the two nuclear-possessing adversaries? Not really, since North Koreans have it on the most reliably reassuring advice that it is not America that will win that war.

"If we have to go to war, we won't hesitate to totally destroy the United States", Mun Hyok-myong, 38, and a teacher, stated with confidence. More or less quoting Donald J. Trump in reverse. And since that Trump statement of reckless idiocy there has been an appreciable rise to prominence within North Korea of hard liners, responding to the American president's promise to "totally destroy" their country. Whoops, hard liners in North Korea and the same in America, however polarized their vision happens to be.

While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson engages in a futile effort at diplomacy, his president casually tweaks his nose on Twitter. Trump, it would appear, is confident that his bullying will influence Kim Jong-un to surrender his schoolyard taunts to the greater bully; except that Kim appears to feel he has the upper hand, and in any event, has no intention whatever of giving up his toys; they're his, he wants more and what Kim wants Kim gets.

Mr. Choe iterates what is already generally assumed to be fact, that North Korea took its lesson from Iraq and Libya both of which surrendered their aspirational nuclear programs only to have the United States move in on them removing their regimes, which North Korea takes as its signal that it would be extremely foolhardy to make themselves vulnerable in the same manner. North Koreans cling to the notion of their infallible dear little leader leading them to the apex of world power.

After all, in every obscure, isolated village, in every home there are Big Brother speakers broadcasting morning propaganda doses. The totalitarian state issues its own version of the history of the world and North Korea's rightful place in the order of world influencers and power-mongers. All adults sport facial pins of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader, Kim's grandfather and father, whose portraits appear everywhere in homes, factories, classrooms, public arenas. The most adored portrait, however, is reserved for reverence of Kim himself, the tiny perfect monster.

Of the United States and its people, North Koreans believe that "just as a wolf cannot become a lamb, so an American imperialist can never change his aggressive nature", a bit of a spin on a leopard never changing its spots type of thing. The corollary to which is that a Kim is a Kim is a Kim.

So, given the principles and the principals involved here, let's just hope there are no accidental aerial collisions between an American and a North Korean warplane. And that the U.S. can resist the temptation to bomb a ballistic missile site whose missile, they intuit preventively is in preparation for launch over Tokyo with a nuclear warhead.