North Korea’s Latest Video Destroys New York City, Angers ‘Call of Duty’ Makers

In a bizarre propaganda film set to "We Are the World," a sleeping North Korean man dreams of a future in which a suspciously familiar American city is in flames.

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[youtube=http://youtu.be/yBBsd9JFDZE]

As North Korea prepares to conduct its third nuclear weapons test, the hermit nation’s propaganda machine is spinning at full, bizarre throttle. In its latest video, posted on the semi-official website Uriminzokkiri earlier this week, a young man sleeps peacefully, dreaming of a world where North Korean spacecraft roam the heavens, the Korean peninsula is finally reunited and an American city that looks suspiciously like New York is engulfed in flames.

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In the video, jarringly accompanied by a piano-and-synthesizer version of “We Are the World,” the sleeping man dreams of a string of North Korean victories, Reuters reported. He envisions a bright future where North Korea has successfully launched the Unha-9 rocket, a more advanced version of the Unha-3 that was sent into space in December, triggering new sanctions from the United Nations.

“Our Kwangmyongsong-21 spacecraft got separated from the rocket and traveled through space,” the Korean caption says, according to a translation by the New York Times.

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Then, the spacecraft is shown circling Earth’s orbit in search of a target. It passes a jubilant and reunified Korean Peninsula before the video switches to the scene of a burning American city that looks quite like lower Manhattan.

“It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze,” the video caption says.

Fortunately, North Korea is nowhere close to launching missiles that can hit the East Coast. In fact, it seems that it’s not even capable of rendering visual effects of a blazing New York on its own.

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According to the New York Times, animation of the burning city was lifted from the popular video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Uriminzokkiri took the video down after a copyright complaint from game maker Activision, but the video has proliferated on YouTube and also appears on the Live Leak website.

At the end of the video, the caption says “ One day my dream will come true. No matter how hard the imperialists try to isolate and stifle us, they will not stop our people’s path toward our final victory of achieving a unified, strong and prosperous Korea,” according to the New York Times’ translation.

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The U.S. State Department has declined to comment on the video.

“I have seen it,” State Department’s spokesman Victoria Nuland said in a press briefing, according to MSNBC. “I am clearly not going to dignify it by speaking about it here,”

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