North Korea’s latest issue of postage stamps may be full of “bold, bizarre, and in some cases extraordinarily mundane designs,” as CNN puts it, but two of the stamps are especially noteworthy for their anti-American images.
One of them shows a mighty North Korean fist crushing an American missile and shredding the American flag, while the other depicts a cluster of North Korean missiles targeting the U.S. Capitol.
The stamps are part of an annual initiative to commemorate the Korean War, touchingly titled “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month,” by Pyongyang. The Washington Post describes the festivities as including huge anti-American rallies and state-run media demanding the world unite with North Korea to battle “the fatty monster U.S. imperialists.”
CNN notes that, in addition to the creepy propaganda dedications to “revolutionary history” and “respected comrade Kim Jong-un” one might expect, a surprising number of North Korean stamps feature cute kittens. It sounds like Hell’s version of Etsy.
Many of the designs, such as an eighties series commemorating the death of Princess Diana, were previously intended to entice Western stamp collectors, who purchase them with valuable foreign currency. The Washington Post points out that stamps pitched at foreign collectors are printed on higher-quality paper. The Chinese stamp collecting market is much hotter these days, so North Korea is cranking out stamps with Chinese appeal.
Quartz offers a look back at notable North Korean propaganda stamps from days gone by, including a 1975 stamp that showed “a muscular North Korean civilian pummeling a wimpy U.S. soldier with ‘Yankee bastard’ in Korean splayed across the field.”
Outsiders may have difficulty grasping just how pervasive North Korean propaganda is. It serves a dual purpose, both enhancing the regime’s power over its robotic citizens and sending a message to foreign powers that “decapitation strikes” cannot easily topple the Kim regime.
A recent example from outside the world of collectible postage stamps is a new propaganda video of a woman named Lim Ji-hyun, who defected to South Korea in 2014 and became a popular television personality but has supposedly returned home. In the propaganda video, she claims she was tricked into abandoning her beloved homeland and saying bad things about it.
South Korean authorities are working to determine if the propaganda video is a fake, or if Lim was abducted by the North Koreans while attempting to smuggle some of her family members out of the country.
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