North Korea loves American white power groups
Justin Flagg, 7, gets a hug from his father, Lee (R), as he sits on the trunk of an Oklahoma trooper police car on May 2, 1995 at the site of the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. The Flagg family came to Oklahoma City to bring 4000 teddy bears they collected as a gesture of solidarity with survivors and people affected by the car-bomb explosion.
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea's government might not like the United States per se, but some North Koreans like individual Americans who want the United States to be bombed. That counts for something, right?
Nate Thayer at NKNews has published a 10,000-word expose on the links between Pyongyang and US fringe organizations. According to Thayer, the North Korean government has befriended groups such as the US Songun Study Group, a radical clique of Americans who want to establish an Aryan state.
Many of these Americans have made official visits to North Korea as the invited guests of the Pyongyang government, Thayer reports. Other American political activists to become allied with North Korea include Americans fighting for the extermination of the Jewish race, people who applaud the 9/11 and Oklahoma City terrorists attacks and Americans who support Osama bin Laden.
More from GlobalPost: Dennis Rodman in North Korea latest chapter of basketball diplomacy
Many experts argue that North Korea today has more in common with military-led, purist Nazi Germany than with the communist Soviet Union. So it makes sense that, in the US, North Korea has found common ground with white supremacists who want to overthrow the government and establish an Aryan state.
But the US isn't the only target for North Korean zealotry. Since the early 1970s, the North Korean government has gone around the world promoting its self-reliance and national purity ideology called Juche (and more recently, the policy of militarism called Songun).
In the '70s and '80s, the country made an effort to spread Juche among small study groups in Africa and Southeast Asia. Every year, the regime even holds a "World Juche Conference," bringing in so-called scholars of the ideas of Kim Il Sung from around the world.
But North Korean ideas have pretty much failed to catch on around the world, and remain restricted to small bands of extremists.
Geoffrey Cain contributed to this report from Seoul.
More from GlobalPost: Bringing The Simpsons to North Korea