For most Korea conjures up images of war and the ongoing conflict that resulted; video snippets showing thousands of North Korean troops goose stepping in massive parade, the Dear Leader, mass gatherings, and the DMZ. Many recall the harsh rhetoric unleashed by both sides in years past or, recently, the headlines full of news about the North’s rocket attack on a South Korean fishing island and the supposed sinking of a South Korean man-of-war by a Northern torpedo.
It’s ironic that the conflict and imagery which have so defined Korea for outsiders are so truly misunderstood, it is alarming how little the general populace knows about how and why the conflict that has shaped the present day political climate in the divided country came about. The headlines are full of catch phrases and sound bites that conveniently roll off the tongue and are easily and instantly committed to the memory of the news consumer, “Axis of Evil” “Rogue State” and “communist Dictator” just to name a few . Most are aware of the conflict but don’t truly understand the roots causes or they subscribe to the over simplified idea that it was the opening battle in the war between communism and democracy, or capitalism, that would shape the politics of the world over the next fifty years, that the communist North lead an unprovoked attack against the south in order to snuff out capitalism and install a communist government, all the while Joseph Stalin the grand puppet master furiously worked the strings behind the scene.
In order to better understand the divided nation we have to go much further back than 1950 for it was much more than a conflict between two ideological systems, it was a conflict rooted deep in the past of Korea, as far back as the 1592 invasion by the Japanese, who invaded with 158,700 troops in hopes of establishing a base in Korea which would allow them to launch an offensive against the Ming dynasty in China, and then eventually India. The Japanese swept over the peninsula at will but were rebuffed by Admiral Yi Sun-Shin and his Turtle Ships, the world’s first armor clad warships. The Ming dynasty sent 22,000 troops to assist the Koreans and together they pushed the Japanese into a small area up against the sea in the south eastern part of the country and forced them to terms.
Japan stalled in treaty negotiations and launched a second invasion in 1597, which was quickly rebuffed by Admiral Yi and the Ming forces, but this attack was different from the first in goal, its aim wasn’t to gain a strong hold to take the rest of Asia but to punish Korea for defeating Japan on their first invasion attempt. Japanese soldiers killed, raped, and tortured civilians, bringing over ten thousand noses and ears back to Japan. The invasion left a legacy of anti Japanese sentiment among Koreans that lasted up until the 20th century.
In 1904 war broke out between Russia and Japan over their spheres of influence in Korea, and Japan came out the victor. Under the peace treaty, brokered by Theodore Roosevelt, Japan gained paramount rights to Korea and established a protectorate at the point of a gun, taking control of Korean diplomacy, deploying police forces and taking over industry. By 1910 Japan had annexed the peninsula and made Korea a colony.
The Japanese were oppressive and put down all forms of rebellion and dissent with blade and bullet. Over ten thousand Korean women, known as “comfort women” were kidnapped and made sex slaves to the Japanese army. They were raped dozens of times daily by soldiers who believed the practice would make them victorious in battle. Rebellions threatened the Japanese government in Korea several times before the colonizers changed their tactics from brute force and repression to a divide and conquer mentality, taking loyal Koreans under their wing, giving them Japanese names, and installing them in positions of power. It was mostly the old landed class, or Yangban, that benefited while the rest of the Korean people starved in misery under Japanese rule.
In China tens of thousands of Korean rebels were engaging the Japanese army in guerilla style warfare, successfully enough in fact that the Japanese created special units, headed up by Koreans who were loyal to the Japanese, to track and destroy these guerilla leaders. One of the most well known and feared guerilla fighters was none other than Kim Il Sung, the first leader of North Korea.
Here can be seen the root of the conflict, it wasn’t about communism or capitalism; it was about collaborator against nationalist. After Japan surrendered in 1945 the Soviet Union swept into Korea and then allowed the United States to occupy the lower half of the country. The Americans immediately began making mistakes, they refused to turn Korea over to the Koreans instead they wanted only to create an anticommunist South Korean state, just as they would in Greece, Indochina, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua. It didn’t matter that many of the Koreans supported by the United States were seen as traitors and Japanese sympathists, it mattered only that they called themselves “anticommunist”.
There was a government set up by Koreans for Koreans in Seoul in 1945 called the Korean People’s Republic. General Hodge, the commanding American officer in Korea, “declared war” on the KPR on December 12th 1945 and later said “, one of our missions was to break down this communist government outside of any directives and without the backing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the State Department.” Here we can see one crucial problem of American cold war policy, there was no differentiation between communism, nationalism, and democratic socialism, as would later been seen in such places as Chile and Vietnam. It was a nationalistic movement in Korea, not a communist movement, Koreans wanted their country back they wanted to rule themselves after suffering at the hands of the Japanese for the first half of the century. They asked the United States for help but, instead of helping Korea achieve independence the US installed the very people into power who had worked for the Japanese, terrorizing their own countrymen in order to keep the Japanese in power, people who labeled everyone not in their small elite class as communists.
We can look at the Korean Nation Police force as an example. In 1946 eighty-five percent of the police force had served in the Japanese police force, the Americans put into power the same people that tracked down leaders of the Korean resistance movement during the Japanese occupation. The group the United States chose to support was, at the time
” A numerically small class which virtually monopolizes the native wealth and education of the country…Since this class could not acquired and maintained its favorable position under Japanese rule without a certain minimum of “collaboration”….the forced alliance of the police with the Right has been reflected in the cooperation of the police with Rightist youth for the purpose of completely suppressing Leftist activity. This alignment has had the effect of forcing the Left to operate as an underground organization since it could not effectively compete in a parliamentarysense even if it should so desire.”
And in referring to the structure of the southern bureaucracy the CIA said it was “substantially the old Japanese machinery” (National Records Center, CIA “The Current Situation in Korea,” ORE 15-48, March 18, 1948; and CIA, Communist Capabilities in Korea,” ORE 32-48, Feb. 21, 1948
In late 1948 the Soviets withdrew their troops and left North Korea to the Koreans and a little over a year later the war broke out. The North didn’t just invade the South, there were provocations on side; posturing, threats, border skirmishes and fire fights. The South was egging the North on in hopes of an invasion so they could call for international support and the North was waiting for a reason to invade. After the war started the story is pretty familiar to most but the often overlooked or ignored fact is it wasn’t a communist North wanting to spread their ideas southward, the DKPR felt themselves, and still does, to be the true Korea, a representation of the Korean people, they felt their governement was the one picked and supported by the people , the government whose members fought against the Japanese while they occupied Korea and China, while the leaders in power in the south had fattened under Japanese rule, hunted down and killed their own countrymen who opposed the Japanese.
During the American Civil War , France and England were in favor of the South, while Czarist Russia favored the North. How would the United States look today if the British and French threw their full weight behind the Confederates and Czarist Russia supported the North, what if a stalemate had been declared in that war? There wasn’t a stalemate, the States were left alone to determine for themselves what they would become. There were many lives lost and much bloodshed but it was a process that needed to happen in order for the country to move forward, there was a clear winner and a clear loser, the winners wrote history and the country moved toward repairing itself. Korea was given no such opportunity for self determination. It wasn’t the Chinese or Russians who invaded the South, let us remember, it was the Koreans. The only reason the Chinese later joined the war was because the U.S. had taken sides with the South and was advancing toward the Chinese border with MacArthur at the helm, who left to his own devices would have invaded China. China wanted to keep the U.S., with its hostile policies toward Communism and self determination for countries of the “third world”, off of its doorstep and it owed Korea a favor for their support in fighting the Japanese in China. As a side note it is also interesting that the United States supported not a democracy in South Korea, but a military dictatorship that terrorized its own citizenry right up until 1988.
Both the North and the South have been active participants in revisionist history,as this is how history is written by the victor and when there is no clear victor we have two opposing stories. In hopes of reconciling a divided country the two Koreas, as well as the rest of the world, must to take an honest look at the root cause of the conflict, as damning as that might be to national pride or sense of righteousness, it needs to happen in order for the country to move forward. No side can claim innocence in a war that snuffed out the lives of millions of people, in having participated in the creation of two opposing systems that have turned brother against brother and led to the oppression and silencing of countless more millions on both sides. If one claims to be more just than the other there will be no way out but for one side to be destroyed, be it by war or famine. The mistakes that have been made must be admitted, the South must admit the role they played in repressing the majority and welcoming yet another colonizer into their country and the North has to realize just because it has suffered at the hands of imperial powers and in some way been demonized it doesn’t make their behavior, or what their country has become, any more tolerable or acceptable.
For further reading: The Two Koreas by Don Oberdorfer, Koreas Place in the Sun: A Modern History by Bruce Cummings. *These two books are a great place to start and they include a long list of other books for further reading. I would like to include a small cautionary warning about any book, especially first hand accounts of events such as The Aquariums of Pyongyang, published by a South or North Korean. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t great resources but you have to remember the citizens of both countries have been shielded from anything that isn’t state approved history, the South does have freedom but with the spectre of a repressive miltary dictatorship looming in the recent past. The point is have your propaganda filters tuned to a high pitch.
A much-appreciated history lesson.
This is rubbish. You sell your self cheap to Kim the bastard.
ha ha ha know your history retard.
Korea is a land of such tragic history. Hopefully some day it will be united.
While it’s healthy to be reminded that great events have complex contexts, you seem to have fallen for the very fallacies you criticize. Sixty years of history can’t be reduced to such a simplistic morality tale without ending up with your own propaganda, complete with your own private the axis-of-evil-in-reverse.
The story you’re telling is an important part of the context needed for a serious interpretation, though less for the evidence you bring up than for how it evokes (or repeats) the classic recipe for dictatorship. You’ve noticed the narrative’s similarity to tales told elsewhere, and in fact could have applied it to many other dictatorships camouflaged as movements of national liberation (the early USSR, Central America, post WWII eastern and central Europe, Afghanistan, Mongolia, SE Asia, China, and on and on). Each case has the same basic elements: an “authentic” hard left that cast itself as a fully realized expression of national aspirations, an illegitimate ruling elite disgraced by its venality and subservience to an outside power, and a nefarious America responsible for a wholly avoidable bloodbath.
This narrative makes perfect sense in Europe and South Korea—to many people of course it is the only one that makes any sense at all. The problem is that it’s always someone else’s liberation: the peoples whose national aspirations were comprehensively extinguished by the many victorious stalinist movements tend to have a rather different view if things. No doubt there were plenty of corrupt, viscous dictatorships of the right in the twentieth century; nor that more than a few (though not nearly enough) right-wing oligarchs and outright fascists got what was coming to them. But let me suggest that the people to consult on these matters tend not to be romanticized by the affluent left—in fact you’ll often enough find the latter complicit in depriving them of their histories, using just the explanatory devices you’ve employed above. North Koreans, Czechs, Cubans, etc. may have few champions in our universities, at least until recently, but ask and you’ll probably get an earful. If there’s anything to seek a second opinion on, it’s just these questions of authenticity, national identity, and corruption you raise above.
Madprof, first and foremost let me say thank you for taking the time to write such a precise and well thought out response, this is exactly what we are trying to do here on this blog, get dialog started about important issues. I am not trying to sum up sixty years of history with simple tale of morality, I am trying to do just the opposite to say that five hundred years of history can’t be summed up into a paragraph about the communist North invading a Capitalist south. I really am not trying to make any commentary on what happened after the war just on the history leading up to the war. The aim of the article is to give the reader a starting point to start their own investigation.
I think it’s important to note that countries such as the early USSR were somewhat forced into becoming dictatorships because of the outside pressure to destroy their newly formed governments. The Russian revolution simply wanted Russia for Russians, it wanted to break the yoke the landed elite had over the populace but the west forced it into a corner when Woodrow Wilson refused to recognize the government and called it a “demonic conspiracy” followed by US and Western funding of the Don Cossacks. The radicals were forced into power because of the radical stance of US cold war foreign policy, not that the policy was in effect in 1917 but what Wilson did really was the opening shot in the Cold War and set the precedent. What I am saying is that Stalin and those like him were allowed or given the chance to come to power because outside forces were bent on the overthrow of earlier less authoritarian versions of these governments. The most powerful nations on earth said in so many words “we are going to take you and your government out at all costs”. It was either become a super paranoid dictatorship or be over thrown.
I am by no means romanticizing the whole thing, or making excuses for what North Korea has become, but I do believe that Cold War politics and policies are crucial in understanding the state of the world today. In the case of Korea we can look at documents that prove the governing body the Japanese had constructed under their rule, a group of Koreans that tortured and killed any patriots wanting freedom from the Japanese, was supported by the US and not by the population. It is also interesting to note that the Soviets pulled their troops out in 1947, that there are no Chinese troops in North Korea, but the US maintains around 40,000 troops in South Korea.
I truly believe that had the US been more receptive to calls for liberation from oppressed nations it would have worked out a lot better for everyone involved, especially US interests. Ho Chi Min came to the US for help first in getting the French out of Vietnam, he read the US Declaration of independance declaring Vietnam free, but the US turned him down because there wasn’t any distinction between nationalism, democratic socialism, and communism. Where else was there to go at that time but to the Soviets? We can see the same thing in Cuba. The US drove a lot of potential allies into the arms of the Soviets because of a rigid policy led by men who in no way were interested in spreading democracy, just US style capitalism. We can see this in the first 9/11 in Chile, a democratically elected government overthrown by a military dictator supported by the US and the CIA, with intelligence, money, and materials, which reined terror on his people for over twenty years.
I don’t support communism because there has never really been a communist government, it is a theory, but on the other hand I don’t support an unabashed capitalist free market setup. I think one problem I encounter when discussing these things is the mixing and matching of philosophical, economic, and political terms. We can have a democratic form of government and run on any economic model, free market, Keynesian, ect ect. I think in a lot of conversations I have people fail to make a clear delineation between the two and I think that during the cold war, either by design or by ignorance, the US made no effort see the difference, making capitalism synonymous with democracy when they are two totally different things.
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Honestly you have been tought by revisionist historians trying to promote marxist history. This is classic peoples history, trying to demonize the leaders of the South as all japanese sympthisers and out of touch with Korea while Kim Il-Sung was a popular freedom fighter. History vindicates the decision as we see today, the result of the split in Korea today is the North being ruled by a despotic dictatorship and starving while the South is thriving and bustling with self determining democratic ideals.
You complain about revisionist historians when you are in fact participating in your own revision of the facts we see today. Stop apollogizing for socialism, please. There are enough socialist appologists in the world who bury their heads in the sand to escape the reality of history.
This is very compelling and interesting take on the situation in the Korean Peninsula. Having lived there for two years from 2000-2002, I met many different people and have heard many stories. One day I was walking near the Seoul National University subway entrance and a gentleman in his 70′s stopped me and in perfect English asked if I was American. I said yes and he told me to sit on a bench and he shared story after story about life before during and after the war. Some of the stories were graphic, but one in particular was interesting. He spoke of being a guard at the bridge of no return and he said all the bull shit about people choosing north versus south was not about politics or government but about family. At that time most of the people felt like they were choosing the lesser of two evils.
I find that through this, history is in the eye of the beholder. Many others who were alive at the same time as this man may disagree with his account. He was obviously Pro-American and so his views were skewed to a point.
I have also spoken with a north defector. He was a taxi driver and had left the north when he was 1o or so. The one thing that he said that left an impression on me was he had love for his home but not for the government who killed his father in cold blood because he questioned the rationing system.
Most of history is lost in the shuffle.