Can't just blame North Korea

The tensions in Korea this year are as it happens no
different than any other year, there are a series of threats and playground name calling every year between the North and South and they are both as bad as each other but at the moment the degree of political propaganda being tactically fed to the media on either side is just better publicised than usual. The North has a new leader in Kim Jong Un the eager young whipper snapper taking the reins from his deceased father and now rather predictably the US want to stick their oar in and will tell us all the nasty things the evil communist North are saying but omit the equally naughty things the heavenly US aligned South are saying.  This makes it sound as if Kim Jong Un is "Sabre rattling*" and using "bellicose rhetoric*" which is exactly the kind of propaganda the North are supposed to be famous for  (*obligatory use of current media buzzwords).  So North Korea make strong verbal threats whilst South Korea conduct joint military exercises with the US  firing artillery, drop anti-submarine bombs and engage in high-profile military manoeuvres.  So who are the antagonists here??


Add to this increasingly tougher UN sanctions penalising North Korean banking, travel and trade and is it any wonder they are defiantly testing their nuclear capabilities and boasting about the range of their missiles?

Don't forget the atrocities of the Korean war in the 1950's when the US came to the aid of the South and indiscriminately firebombed North Korea. The Pentagon was ordering the firebombing of North Korean cities more intensively than any of those it firebombed during World War II.  Shin Eui Ju, on the Chinese border was 95 percent destroyed, Pyongyang 85 percent, and Hamhung, an industrial city, 80 percent. By the end of 1951, there weren’t many bombing targets left in North Korea.  Nobody won that war and 3 million died as a result of it.

I'm not saying North Korea are innocent victims in all this but the point I make is why would they not set up to defend themselves?  America says they will not accept North Korea as a nuclear power and North Korea says its nuclear arms are a treasured sword that it will never give up which given the history and current situation any country would surely take the same stance.