North Korea just played the Hitler card on Trump

An American protester beats Kim Jong Un to the punch

(Image credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

published 27 June 2017

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is apparently unaware of the widely cited internet adage that the person who first brings up Nazi leader Adolf Hitler automatically loses the argument — or maybe he just doesn't care about Godwin's Law. On Tuesday, North Korea's state-controlled Korean Central News Agency argued that President Trump's America First policy "is the American version of Nazism far surpassing the fascism in the last century in its ferocious, brutal, and chauvinistic nature," and "Nazism in the 21st century," comparing Trump to Hitler.

The KCNA specifically cited U.S. sanctions against North Korea tied to its nuclear weapons program, calling them "an unethical and inhumane act, far exceeding the degree of Hitler's blockade of Leningrad," and compared Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement to a violation of international norms worse than Hitler's concentration camps. "Satellite imagery shows that North Korea operates a network of prison camps, which a United Nations report in 2014 compared with 'the camps of totalitarian states of the 20th century,'" The Wall Street Journal notes dryly. "North Korea denies their existence."

Pyongyang frequently deploys belligerent language about the U.S., but this kind of verbal attack on Trump is new. "The coarsening language toward the administration, and toward the president himself, seems to reflect a slowly sharpening discussion within the regime," Robert Carlin, a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, writes at the site 38 North. The Nazi references also come a few days before South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, travels to Washington to meet with Trump, and follows the death of American student Otto Warmbier, who died shortly after North Korea released him from 18 months of captivity.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.