_{A Painting of the Kims | Image Attribution: Roman Harak https://www.flickr.com/photos/51812388@N02/5015253795}

What is this?

#

This is “Truth of North Korea”, a script I wrote but never produced talking about the history of the division of Korea, misinformation surrounding North Korea and parts of South Korea’s history (its past record as an authoritarian dictatorship) that mostly go unmentioned in the Western world.

Much of this script inspired my writing for the MEGA documentary MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea, with many of the topics mentioned here appearing in the “Sanctions, Nukes and History Lessons” chapter of the documentary; However, some topics like the earliest parts of Korea’s history and most of the sections about South Korea were scrapped to save time, you can read about how this script influenced the making of the MEGA documentary in my article “The Making of MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea” and I recommend reading that article before reading this script.

“Truth of North Korea” was just a placeholder title that stuck because I never came up with anything better before I stopped working on this script, when I revisited the topic for MEGA, Yeonmi Park came into the picture as our gateway into the topic (she was never mentioned in this script) and that naturally led to the simple “Yeonmi and North Korea” title.

For anyone curious about this early script that, in a way, went on to become a MEGA episode, and for those who might want to learn about the topics we cut from that episode, this is for you.

This is the script in its original form, copypasted straight from the original LibreOffice document I wrote it in with only some extremely minor changes, which are:

• Adding the headings for the history section (which unlike the Mythbusting section wasn’t split up by topics in the document, it was just one big blob of text) and the conclusion

• Fixing a misplaced line: The line about the 38th Parallel being the line Japan and Russia planned to divide Korea by in the past was originally left above the paragraph it was meant to be included in, out of context, this was fixed with some small punctuation changes to slot it in

• Fixing some sources: At the time I wrote this document I didn’t know how to use “copy link to highlight” to link to specific sections of a webpage, so I just included the full link with instructions to use “ctrl+f” (the “find page” function in browsers) and type a specific keyword, this was changed to just link to the part I was talking about, some other notes and sources with extra notes on details like page numbers or timestamps have been changed into footnotes for nicer reading

• Fixing a few spelling and punctuation mistakes

I’ve also added a retrospective at the end of the script, reflecting on some of its contents.

Everything else has been left as is, including the sourcing (which I now think was quite poor, as I mentioned in the Making of MEGA article), I think not polishing the work beyond the very minor fixes I mentioned is the best way to present this, it’s a historical artifact rather than a representation of my current work or views.

With that being said, hopefully you enjoy this or at least find it an interesting curiosity, thanks for taking the time to check it out!

---

This script was originally written from the 26th of June to the 29th of July 2020, and first publicly released on the 24th of February 2024 (via this website)

---

Intro

#

This is North Korea, here in the West we always hear about it, but don’t really understand it.

Well, the most important question to start with when understanding Korea is, how did the country become divided in the first place?

Well, let’s look at what most people already know, most people already know that the country became split up at the end of the Second World War, cut in half with the North ruled by the Communist Soviet Union and the South ruled by the Capitalist Americans, and that these two occupied halves became their own countries, the Republic in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic in the North.

Most people also know that in the 50s, there was a brutal conflict between the two sides, where they both tried to reunify the country on their own terms and both failed in that goal, we just know it as the Korean War, but it has many other names¹, and there’s still a lot of confusion about the detail for many people.

The narrative we’re told about the Korean War in the West that it was a time where, as part of a great alliance, the West, led by America, came to the aid of the South Koreans in their time of need to defend their shared values of democracy, freedom of expression and inclusivity while they were being pushed around by the aggressive, cult like regime in the North that falsely thought it could impose an authoritarian regime over the country, we were the good guys, they were the bad guys, but sadly, we didn’t win, the result was a stalemate which led to an armistice that keeps the peace today, which the hostile, warmongering North Korean enemy has violated hundreds of times.

The North Koreans on the other hand, are taught something very different, they learn that the war was a time where their country held out in a brave resistance with the aid of the USSR and Chinese Volunteers, while they were being pushed around by the occupied, puppet regime in the South that falsely thought it could impose imperialism over the country, they were the good guys, we were the bad guys and happily, they won, although they tragically didn’t reunify the country, they kept the enemy from conquering them with strong counter attacks, and that’s enough of a victory to be worth celebrating. They managed to force the imperial powers threatening them to agree to an armistice that keeps the peace today, which the hostile, warmongering American enemy has violated thousands of times.

So, what’s the truth about the whole thing? Who really divided Korea? Who was the real aggressor of the war? Did anyone really win? Well, that’s what we need to find out, let’s start with a little background on what led up to the war, and work our way forwards from there.

History

#

1. Beginning of Korea and Japanese occupation

#

Korea first began as a state in 918 as the Kingdom of Koryŏ, which united several kingdoms on the Korean Peninsula under one monarch, King Taejo, Koryŏ later became the Kingdom of Chosŏn in 1392 after a military coup, and the Kingdom of Chosŏn became the Korean Empire in 1871. Throughout the country’s history it was always a strategically important nation, sought after by many world leaders, while Koryŏ was independent, Chosŏn essentially acted as a client state of the Chinese Qing Dynasty, making it a key target for China’s long time rival, Japan.

In the late 1800s China was defeated in the Sino-Japanese war, forcing the Qing to give up their influence over Korea, the Russian Empire took China’s place, competing with the Japanese by supplying and training the Korean Army, but in 1905 they were defeated as well in the Russo-Japanese war, giving the ever expanding Empire free reign to push the country into its sphere of influence, forcing it to agree to a series of treaties that took away its power piece by piece, Gojong, the Emperor of Korea, secretly sent messengers to major foreign powers to complain about Japan’s actions, but his attempts failed after Britain and America decided to support the Japanese, Gojong was removed from power in favour of his son, Sunjong, as punishment for his defiance.

The first treaty in in 1905 made the country a Japanese Protectorate and stripped it of its rights to diplomacy with other nations, the second in 1907 demanded that all of the country’s top officials had to be Japanese and all of its policy had to be signed off on by a Japanese Resident General, the third and last treaty, signed in 1910, handed all soverignty over the country to Japanese Emperor Hirohito and fully annexed the Korean Empire into the Japanese Empire.

Korea ( along with many other Asian nations) remained a puppet of Japan for many years, with its people enduring theft, exploitation, forced labour and human experimentation, throughout this period local Korean culture was marginalised in favour of integration with Japanese society, sparking resentment and a growing Anti-Colonial nationalist sentiment, independence activists were frequently persecuted against by the authorities and forced to flee to neighbouring allied countries.

2. Path to independence

#

Soon numerous independence exile groups began to sprout up, the two most important of these to mention are the Rightist Provisional Government of Korea and the Leftist DIU, these two groups laid the foundation for the future leadership of the two Koreas. The PGK was led by Syngman Rhee, an Anti-Communist politician and Korean independence lobbyist who left the country to live in America after Japanese persecution while the DIU was led by Kim Il-Sung, a teenage refugee who was forced to flee Korea to live in China’s Manchuria region after his family became involved in independence activism.

While Rhee tried to lobby the Americans and convince them to change their minds on Korea, Sung trained to become a guerilla fighter, and after the Japanese invaded Manchuria to turn it into a puppet state, he waged war on them in the mountains throughout the 1930s, battling against Japanese Forces led by Major Kim Suk-Won, a Korean collaborator who had risen to a high rank in the Japanese occupation army.

In the 1940s Japan found itself on the losing end of World War 2, they had aligned themselves with the Nazi led Axis, which was being steadily pushed towards defeat by the Allies of Russia, Britain, America and their partners. In 1944, as the Japanese Empire began to crumble, Yeo Un-hyeong, a local Korean independence activist, formed the Founding Alliance, an underground movement mostly made up of left wing socialists, but also containing more moderate liberals and right wing nationalists, united by a consensus on their goal of nation building separated from Japan.

When the Japanese surrendered to the Allies a year later, Yeo quickly re-organised the Founding Alliance into the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, a temporary government with him as its Chairman, and the retreating Japanese made a deal with him, they would avoid interfering in Korean affairs if he guaranteed their safety as they evacuated from the country.

From there the CPKI began forming People’s Committees to act as local autonomous leaders for the country and introduced a 27 point program for national policy, some of these points included:

• close relations with the allies (Russia/the USSR, USA, UK and China)

• nationalisation of major industries

• land reform

• a minimum wage

• freedom of speech

and universal suffrage.

They also made plans to confiscate the property of wealthy Koreans who profited from collaborating during colonisation, receiving huge amounts of land and cash from the Japanese in exchange for their loyalty to the Empire, these were the so-called Chinilpa, and their property in the South alone spanned over 13 million square meters, worth billions in Korean Won, but that was all set to change, as the CPKI decided to hand the property out to the least fortunate, the peasants who had previously owned very little would suddenly inherit masses of land.

Shortly after deciding on their policies, the activists of the CPKI met in the capital, Seoul, and formally declared independence from Japan as the People’s Republic of Korea.

3. Independence lost

#

But the independence of the PRK, like that of most countries in the Cold War, didn’t last long, after the surrender of Japan the Americans quickly sent 2 young officers to grab a map and pick a spot to divide a country that had been united for 13 centuries, in the space of a single night they made a decision that would impact the peninsula for decades, maybe even centuries to come, they chose to split the country up by an arbitrary line of control on the 38th Parallel.

The line wasn’t rational or fair or informed at all, it didn’t represent the wishes of the Koreans, who overwhelmingly supported the new Socialist system being developed internally² and it cut through 2 provinces and several counties and had no interest in political or geographical considerations, it was chosen for purely military purposes, allowing for Seoul to be kept in the South under American hands while the Soviets could have the North, the PRK committees received vastly different treatment depending on the side of the line they were on.

In the North the People’s Committees were re-organised as the Provisional People’s Committee of North Korea and allowed to carry on operating, governing the country alongside the Soviet occupation force, the Civil Administration. Just as the Soviets were searching for a candidate to lead the Committees, Kim Il-Sung returned from exile with his band of insurgents, after a few meetings he was decided on as the best person to lead the Committees, and he took charge as they enacted and expanded the old PRK program. The Chinilpa had most of what they owned confiscated and handed out to local farmers and agricultural workers, leading them to flee into exile across the border.

Meanwhile in the South the situation was much less stable, the People’s Committees were quickly banned by the Americans, who rejected all the existing forces in Korea and insisted that only they had the right to run the country, Yeo Un-hyeong was forced to resign and a new government made up of wealthy landowners and businessmen was installed under the rule of Syngman Rhee.

Rhee had returned to Korea after the end of the war and, despite having claimed to be Korea’s provisional leader for decades, had very little support in the country itself. He was seen by the CIA as unpopular, unreliable, and embrassing, but in spite of all his faults he was appointed to the leadership anyway because of his committed opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union.

To make matters worse the US also decided to keep the former occupying Japanese Imperialists as advisors and law enforcers even as the Soviets were sending them off to jail in the North, and introduced a new Korean Army and Police Force, not made up of nationalists, but of veterans who had served Japan’s occupation in World War 2. Adding even more fuel to the fire, President Rhee and the Military Government also decided to let the Chinilpa to keep their wealth, dissolving the committee that was set up to investigate their crimes and trying to push their findings out of the public eye. The local population quickly became outraged at this series of corrupt decisions, prompting the Military Government to ban criticism and suppress dissenters through force with the help of right wing militants and strikebreakers, instead of righting historical wrongs they hoped the past would just fade from memory.

Instead of getting the independence they were promised, the South Korean people ended up being held down by another foreign occupation and bossed around by the same Empire they were supposed to be liberated from.

While this was going on, the superpowers were busy trying to agree what to do with the country next, even though Koreans had already achieved independence with the People’s Republic, the US President at the time, Harry Truman, decided that they weren’t ready for it, that after 3 and a half decades of Japanese occupation, they ought to go through 4 more before independence, carrying on the thinking of his predecessor, Frank Roosevelt, he proposed a long trusteeship over the country between the US and the Soviets, he eventually moderated his position from 40 years to 30, then to 20, but he still didn’t commit to giving the Koreans what they actually wanted and expected, immediate independence.

The Soviets agreed to the idea of trusteeship thinking that if they supported power sharing in Korea they could make the Americans open to power sharing in other places like Japan, where the Soviets had no influence and were keen to gain it³. Despite major discontent among the population, Kim Il-Sung was successfully pressured into accepting the trusteeship, and those who didn’t kowtow the pressure, mostly Non-Communists, were pushed away from power.

4. Divisions entrenched

#

Cold War politics meant that every country was an important piece of influence, not something to be given up easily, the Americans didn’t want to give up their hold on the South and the Soviets didn’t want to give up their hold on the North, the ideal of eventual re-unification at the end of trusteeship became less and less of a realistic possibility over time as the two sides argued back and forth, America wanted Korea to be a buffer against Soviet expansionism, the Soviets wanted a Korea that would be on good terms with them, and when most of the Anti-Soviet buffer states had proven to be defiantly Anti-Communist, it seemed like these 2 goals couldn’t mix.

Reunification negotiations between the two sides fully broke down in 1948 as it steadily became clear that the superpowers wouldn’t be able to come to an agreement of mutual interests, as a consequence the division was made official as the Northern PRK became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, while Syngman Rhee’s government became the Republic of Korea.

Both sides later held elections to legitimise their leadership, the original plan was to have a single election in both Koreas, under the guidance of the UN, but the Soviet Union boycotted the elections after arguing that the UN wouldn’t be able to guarantee fairness, and as a result the UN elections were only held in the ROK.

Soviet fears turned out to be justified in the end, as the ROK’s polls only allowed land owners to vote in some areas, while in others village elders cast their votes on everyone’s behalf, the result was an easy win for Syngman Rhee’s National Association Party, as almost every other party boycotted the election and rejected its legitimacy, the South Korean Parliament left one hundred seats empty for representatives in the North to take their seats after reunification.

In response to the UN elections, the Soviets decided to organise their own inside the DPRK, there were direct votes for Northern citizens while some people in the South were able to vote underground, without the consent of the US administration, there was a clear dominance of power held by Kim Il Sung’s Worker’s Party, a party that had emerged from the DIU and the Korean Communist Party, but other movements were represented as well. They were all grouped together as a ruling coalition known as the “Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland” taking directions from the Worker’s Party, which was merged into a single party from its Southern and Northern branches.

After the governments of the DPRK and ROK ensured their power at home, their leaders both set about making war plans, neither of them wanted Korea to remain 2 separated states and both believed they were the legitimate government of the whole peninsula, the South saw the North as a Soviet puppet and the North saw the South as an American puppet.

5. Buildup to conflict and the Korean War

#

5a. Tit-for-Tat skirmishes

#

Rhee was confident in the power of his military, the ROK-AF ( Republic of Korea Armed Forces), boasting that the North Koreans would be no match for him, being only “target practice”, Kim Il-Sung on the other hand was also confident in his troops, the Korean People’s Army (KPA), after the Communists were able to claim victory against American backed Republicans in China, he gained a newfound optimism for his chances in a military conflict.

Though the Korean War officially started in 1950, its origins began much earlier, in a way they could be traced all the way back to Kim Il Sung’s guerilla conflict of the 30s, Rhee’s cosy relationship with ex-Japanese collaborators meant that Kim Suk-Won, the soldier who had led the charge against Kim Il-Sung’s independence forces during WW2, had ended up in command of the South’s border army and seemed far from willing to let his old rivalry with the Communists go away).

Won’s forces reportedly took part in repeated border raids on the North in late 1949, hoping to establish a foothold for an eventual Southern invasion, alongside this there had been cases of brutal crackdowns against PRK loyalists and their supporters who opposed Syngman Rhee during the South’s elections, meaning that even before the war technically began thousands of people had already died in political violence.

5b. Full scale war

#

But the 25th of June 1950 was where the small scale tit-for-tat skirmishes turned into a full scale war, on that day a major fight broke out between the North and South Korean armies on the border, prompting the North to ditch ambitions for peaceful negotiation and invade, hoping to take Seoul, capture Rhee and reunify the country once and for all. The ROK-AF was poorly equipped and totally unprepared, quickly collapsing in the face of the Northern advance, a few days later President Rhee fled Seoul, which was later taken by the KPA, and ordered what was left of his military to begin purging suspected dissidents, it seemed like a reunification of the country under Kim Il-Sung was inevitable.

But, this being the Cold War, the US wasn’t willing to give up its influence to the USSR without a fight, they felt that if Korea fell, other countries would fall too, and Communism would take hold of all of Asia, he wanted to follow a policy of what was called “containment”, limiting the global power of the Soviet Union and its allies by protecting neighbouring governments that would be friendly to Western interests, even if that meant supporting immoral⁴ regimes like Rhee’s, far more brutal than those they were fighting, that Westerners would never be able to tolerate life under themselves.

From July until September, the US proved incapable of resisting the KPA, the American forces were repeatedly defeated by the North and pushed back to the Pusan Perimeter, a small patch of land containing only 10% of the country’s territory. Out of desperation, Rhee’s forces ordered more mass killings of suspected dissidents and political prisoners with the blessing of the US. It seemed more and more like the defenders were failing to prop up the Korean Republic, and only delaying the inevitable.

5c. US intervention

#

But they still weren’t ready to surrender, and decided to call on others to help them carry on the fight. They appealed to the UN Security Council through several resolutions that encouraged support for South Korea and condemned the DPRK as an aggressor.

Almost all of the Council members were supporters of the West at the time, the only one that wasn’t was the Soviet Union, which normally would’ve been around to use its veto powers as a Permanent Member on the Council, but they were boycotting the UN at the time for recognising the small island government of Taiwan as the true leadership of China, rather than the People’s Republic on the mainland, and since they weren’t there to act America was able to get through everything they needed and provide themselves with the legitimacy to send forces under the name of the UN Command to intervene against North Korea.

In practice, thanks to Cold War divisions, the UN had no soldiers of its own to offer South Korea, meaning that the UN Command had to be made up by President Rhee’s forces, the US military, and the militaries of other supportive countries such as Turkey, Britain, South Africa and France. This means that for all intents and purposes the “UN Command” was just various Western aligned governments, with the US at the top, acting under the UN flag with no real input from any of the UNs institutions.

Although America would’ve easily been able to rally its allies without the use of the UN, having the resistance against North Korea be under their name allowed them to present the intervention as a broadly supported international effort, rather than just another one of the Cold War’s tit-for-tat proxy battles, this gave the South Korean defenders and their allies greater political leverage over the North, who were painted as aggressors with no legitimacy or right to rule over the Korean Peninsula.

After months of North Korea being the victor against its opposition, the intervention finally managed to turn the tide of the war, the UNC was able to land in the port city of Incheon and catch the North Koreans by surprise, cutting off their supply lines and sending their forces into collapse, this allowed the Americans trapped in the Pusan Peninsula to break out and move ahead with the help of UNC reinforcements, Seoul was quickly retaken and the KPA were forced to flee back across the 38th Parallel.

Rhee and the Americans saw the successful UNC push as an opportunity and took advantage of their victory, settling scores by sending more suspected dissidents to their deaths and moving troops forward to invade the North. As the UNC pushed further and further the KPA collapsed under the pressure, on the 17th of October they moved to take hold of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, and by the 20th they managed to totally clear the KPA out of the city, as this was happening the UNC was also steadily cutting through most of the KPA’s defence near the Yalu River, the DPRKs border with China. This led China’s leader, Chairman Mao, to intervene, realising that a strong Anti-Communist, Pro-Western military force right next to China would be a serious threat to its security. Mao organised a militia force known as the People’s Volunteer Army to intervene in the war in favour of North Korea and push the UNC back.

5d. Chinese intervention

#

In practice, the PVA was just the regular Chinese Army, the People’s Liberation Army, operating under a different title, before the beginning the intervention Mao decided that sending in the PLA under its true name would be too risky, because it had the potential to provoke a full scale war with America, by branding his force in Korea as a separate, volunteer faction, unrelated to his regular army, Mao could be confident that the war would be kept within Korea’s borders and could ensure China’s security.

The Americans were keen to limit the scope of the conflict too, they never officially declared a war on North Korea or China and the US President at the time, Harry Truman, specifically denied that the United States was at war when asked by journalists, he originally described the UNCs mission in Korea as a “police action" instead, something simply designed to keep the peace rather than fight a full scale conflict, even though his plan at the time was to invade North Korea and have it annexed into the Southern Republic, a fact that was kept hidden from the international community at the time to keep the narrative of the UNC being a protector, rather than an aggressor, alive.

Truman’s statements gave him the added benefit of avoiding accountability with a useful loophole, normally the US Congress has to authorise the military to go to war, not the President, but since it was technically just the UNC involved in the conflict, and according to him there wasn’t a war going on, he had free reign to do what he wanted, how he wanted, without consulting others first.

So, officially, the American Army and the Chinese Army weren’t fighting each other, even though that’s exactly what was happening, and both sides had a nice bit of plausible deniability to ward off the prospects of a Third World War.

Mao’s intervention was successful at pushing the UNC back from North Korea, but for several more years the war carried on with neither side being able to reunify the country, after 3 years more bombs had been dropped on the North by America than on all of the territory held by Japan’s Empire ( All of Korea, large parts of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, etc etc) during World War 2, destroying almost all of the country’s cities and killing millions of people, roughly 10% of the total North Korean population, Pyongyang, a city which had once been a well developed home to millions, was reduced to a smoking rubble pile, other places faced the same fate.

5e. Consequences and Ceasefire

#

The impact of the devastation was nothing short of near total annihilation, not only were cities totally wiped out, but dams, power-plants and railways too, everything, it sounds like something more resembling a genocide than a war. The result was a deep sense of anxiety for the North Korean people, and the emboldening of an Anti-American sentiment that the DPRK government has fostered ever since.

The impact is still visible today, too, North Korea is still digging up thousands of unexploded bombs from its countryside all the time, the bombing campaign was so extensive that the cleanup is not expected to be completed for another century, 3 years of combat for Americans, 170 of dealing with the aftermath for Koreans.

In late July 1953, after years of border lines and armies going back and forth, the Korean status quo was re-established as the UNC, China and DPRK finally agreed a peace deal which provided a cease-fire and prisoner exchanges, the division went back to how it was and thousands of families were separated as a result, most of whom will likely never see their relatives again.

The problem with this deal was that it only a cease-fire, a prelude to bigger peace talks where all of Korea’s major problems could be worked out, nothing more, what it offered was a pause in the bloodshed, no answers to questions and no clear solutions, and that pause is all the Korean people have had to work with 7 decades on.

6. Post-War

#

6a. Post-War in the South

#

The end of the Korean War finally put the breaks on the hopes of both sides to reunify the country militarily, leaving it to be divided by the 38th Parallel to this day ( a line that Japan had plotted to divide the country under with Russia decades earlier). In the West the war is now known as the “Forgotten War”, rarely talked about in depth and left to a few paragraphs in the odd textbook or two, in Korea it’s still remembered clearly and painfully by many, a source of deep rooted bitterness and regret.

In the Post-War South Rhee began to face increasing dissent, suspected sympathisers of the North, Left-Wingers, and general perceived enemies of the state were frequently executed, thrown in prison, or placed under house arrest for their disloyalty, this quickly generated an atmosphere of resentment from the South Korean people, which eventually turned led to a major, brutal crackdown in April 1960, over 100 demonstrators were murdered by the authorities after protesting election fraud and authoritarianism, sparking the two week April Revolution. Rhee’s attempts to end the unrest by force failed miserably, and as crowds of rebellious students began to outnumber the police, the authorities refused to fight back, Rhee was forced to resign and was covertly evacuated out of the country by the CIA as protesters began to surround the Presidential Palace, leaving him in exile in the US. After Rhee’s exile South Korea became increasingly authoritarian and unstable, the idea of peaceful transfers of power went out the window as the country faced 3 different military coups between the 1960 and 1980, rule by a string of autocrats became the norm.

The last coup, organised by Military Generals Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, abolished the South Korean National Assembly and dissolved the one party system of the ruling Democratic Republican Party.

After facing resistance to his coup, Chun accused North Koreans of infiltrating the country and implemented nationwide martial law, universities were closed, political activity was banned and the press were severely restricted.

However, when the people of one city, Gwangju, had their protests responded to with beatings, they decided they’d had enough and revolted, forcing out Chun’s occupying troops. Gwangju effectively became a self-governing commune, a symbol of hope outside the grip of the authoritarian system swamping the rest of the country.

But Chun wasn’t one for tolerance, and immediately decided his approach to this crisis would be one of zero tolerance, troops were sent to surround the protesters and crush the revolt and Carter’s administration threw its support behind his regime, they decided that stopping the uprising was the first priority, and pressuring the regime about its disastrous authoritarian practices could come later.

The revolutionaries expected that America’s leaders, the self proclaimed leaders of the free world, would come to their aid, they were wrong. America had already lost their hegemony over one country, Iran, after a popular revolt overthrew its ruling western-aligned Pahlavi dynasty and US President Jimmy Carter decided that losing another country wasn’t acceptable.

After the rebels refused to lay down their weapons and give in to the military junta, its special forces and army, with the green-light of the US, stormed the city, mobilising a massive force of troops, armed to the teeth, to harshly deal with its own people, they left trails of blood in their wake as the defiant rebels fought to the bitter end.

Chun was able to hold on to power, presiding over years of horror, including the use of “purification campaigns” against the poor, the disabled and the homeless, pushing them into slave labour in concentration camps. But supressing the Gwangju uprising only bought Chun time, the brutality he used ensured that people never forgot his crimes, nor did they forget the crimes of the US in supporting him, they knew why they had to fight for democracy, what was at stake. After much pressure, change finally came in 1987 when Chun decided to retire and direct, free elections were held for the first time. South Korea finally became an open democracy. The former Chun regime’s political organ, the Justice Party, picked Roh Tae-woo, one of the old coup leaders, to be the next President.

Thanks to a splitting of the opposition vote, Roh became the country’s first fairly elected leader, but the remaining elements of the military regime were eventually ditched with the election of Kim Dae-Jung, a former protest leader, to the Presidency in 1998, Roh and Chun were put on trial, and the country began the process of slowly coming to terms with its past through a commitment to truth and reconciliation, compensating the many who were mistreated and finally renewing its investigation into the Chinilpa, over 50 years after President Rhee shut it down. This new period of openness and hope didn’t come about thanks to foreign powers, but through the efforts of the Koreans themselves, who were committed to fighting for their rights against all odds.

The country also found itself in a much improved economic state throughout the 80s, while its economy had been very poor for much of its history, at a similar level as North Korea, it was able to take off with mass growth thanks to the aid of other developed nations such as Japan and the US, becoming a major player on the world stage and even managing to avoid the recessions experienced in most wealthy countries during the 2008 financial crisis.

6b. Post-War in the North

#

The North on the other hand had a very different experience after the war, Kim-Il Sung stayed in his post for over 45 years and completely secured his control over the DPRK, pushing out rival factions within the leadership and cultivating a new, idealised image of himself as the father of the nation, a hard-working “Great Leader” for everyone to follow.

The wide range of parties found in 1948 was eventually narrowed down to just 3, the leading Worker’s Party, the more moderate Social Democrats, and the religious Chondoists, they were grouped together alongside several other movements (a banned South Korean party, the Anti-Imperialist Democratic Front and the unions: Zainichi interest group, Youth League, Women’s Union, Children’s Union, Christian Federation, etc etc) to act as the country’s sole political representation.

All of these groups were placed under the unified state ideology of “Juche”, or self-reliance, an ideological shift away from the Marxism-Leninism which had been preached before towards something new, something that the leadership saw as better suited to Korean conditions, a mix of Radical Socialism, Defiant Patriotism and Absolute Loyalism that everyone had to rigidly conform to, setting the nation apart from the emerging, opposing currents in the ever-changing Communist World of Soviet Reformism and Chinese Maoism.

While the 80s proved to be a time to shine economically for the South, the North had the exact opposite experience, the Iron Curtain was beginning to fall apart, Communist and Socialist states across the world were either forced into dramatic reforms or faced outright collapse. In 1991 the biggest player of the Socialist world, once one of the globe’s two dominant superpowers, the USSR, dissolved and 3 years later Kim Il-Sung passed away, leaving his son Kim-Jong Il to succeed him and deal with the upcoming crisis. The North was incredibly vulnerable, losing almost all of its political allies and, most importantly, its trading partners.

This loss of trade, along with natural disasters such as floods and droughts, severely damaged the country’s distribution system and plunged the country into a widespread economic and humanitarian crisis, malnourishment and austerity became commonplace throughout the 90s in a period that became officially known as the “Arduous March”, China was one of the few countries still trading with the North by this period, and is now responsible for almost all trade with the country in the modern era, including taking 87% of its exports and receiving 90% of its imports while the South has become the 7th largest importer and exporter in the world.

In the 2000s economic sanctions closed even more doors for the North on economic development, having been applied by the UN in the mid 2000s and increasing over time in response to the country’s progressing nuclear program, this resulted in a drastic difference in prosperity between the two Koreas, the South, free from restrictions, was able to continously expand and become one of the biggest economies in the world, while the North was blocked from a share in that development and forced into isolation, only able to do business with the select few countries willing to break the rules and work around the sanctions.

Mythbusting

#

So, to recap, what are the main takeaways from that long history lesson?

1. Korea’s division isn’t the fault of the Korean people, they all, North and South, wanted an independent, democratic country and tried to establish one with the People’s Republic, but that effort was halted by the foreign powers, the US and USSR, who had their own ideas

2. The Korean War wasn’t black and white and definitely wasn’t a fight for freedom on our part, it was a battle for control, a product of the Cold War just like the wars that happened later on in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia

3. North Korea isn’t just poor today because of its state run economic system, its current conditions are generally down to the intense economic embargo and loss of trade partners it’s been facing for the last few decades, the kind that realistically any economic system, private or collective, socialist or capitalist, would fall apart under.

Now we know how the two Koreas came to be, and the greatly different outcomes they ended up with, let’s talk about the modern perceptions around the North and why they are at best misguided and at worst just flat out wrong.

1. WMDs and Sanctions

#

Let’s start with the main the main thing people usually hear about when it comes to North Korea, their nuclear weapons program and the sanctions put on the country because of them, the common narrative around this in Western countries is that North Korea’s WMD program is a major world issue and a big problem for international security, and that the sanctions imposed on the DPRK to stop this are an effective, necessary way to stop the country from making any more nuclear missiles.

To address this we need to ask ourselves 2 questions:

the first is: What does the North want nuclear weapons for?

and the second is: What are the sanctions doing to stop their attempts to get them?

The first is simple to answer, the North wants nukes for the same reason any country would want them, a deterrent, the classic turn-off of mutually assured destruction.

The DPRK has always been at risk of invasion, it’s a real threat for them, they already faced near total annihilation once with the Korean War and they’re not looking for a repeat performance, from the 1960s to the 1980s this wasn’t much of a problem, as they could rely on their WMD armed friends from the Soviet Union and China to back them up if the threat of another serious war did come about. Now times are different, the Soviet Union is gone and the old clear cut, comradely alliance between the North and China has withered away.

So in other words, the DPRK is much more open to the threat of attacks than it used to be, so they’ve needed to look for other ways to ensure their security, having nukes is the most surefire method of doing this. No one so far has tried war against a nuclear state and that’s not likely to change any time soon, so if you think about it, North Korea doesn’t have much of a different mindset from any of the other nuclear states, they just don’t want anyone coming in to take them over, and now they have the perfect way of making others back off and think twice.

So, is North Korea’s nuclear program a threat? Well, yes, but so are the programs of America, Britain, Russia, France and all the other countries armed with nukes, world ending atomic bombs will always be a serious threat to everyone, but that counts just as much for the West as it does for North Korea, probably more so even, given that while the DPRK only has around 30 bombs according to estimates from the Arms Control Association, America has over 5000 (enough to potentially destroy the entire planet), has shown a willingness to use them twice already, and has done more tests than any other country in the world, yet you don’t see them being piled on with restrictions by the UN.

So, realistically, North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not any scarier than that of every other country that has nukes, which is to say, very much so, but most people don’t keep themselves up at night fearing annihilation thanks to America or Russia, so why hold a double standard for Korea?

Nonetheless, the big guys of the international community decided that nuclear testing is only okay when they do it, so they implemented sanctions on the country to force them to dismantle their program. So that brings us to our second question, how well does that strategy work?

Well, that question can be answered with just five words, it doesn’t work at all. Like I said before, we already know North Korea already has roughly 30 bombs, enough to destroy its rivals several times over if provoked, and according to Kim Jong-Un the North Korean Army completed its goal of having a weapon able to reach the mainland United States back in late 2017, that means that the sanctions haven’t been successful in any way at stopping the DPRK’s program, which has continued to function and grow from the early 2000s to now, and the country has been very clear that imposing more restrictions on them won’t intimidate them or force them into changing course.

But this doesn’t mean the sanctions don’t have an impact, they do, in fact they have a massive impact, just not on the thing they’re supposed to impact. Instead of damaging the DPRK nuclear program, or the ability of the state to operate, the sanctions have massively damaged the livelihood of ordinary people who have no connections to the international crisis going on with the rest of the world.

The food problem is the most notable example on this, since the DPRK can’t trade with most of the outside world, they can’t just pay to import food in bulk to tackle the shortages, they need to rely on their own local food production systems to make ends meet.

But the challenge with this reliance on local production is that the vast majority of land in the DPRK is mountainous terrain, not suitable for farming, only about 20% is usable for crop growing and its viability is dependent on weather conditions⁵, poor harvests can lead to seriously damaging results.

Additionally, a block on imports of machinery and spare parts by the sanctions has caused more problems for the agricultural sector, thanks to the lack of supplies lots of workers have to do their jobs entirely by hand instead of making use of machine farming, further reducing potential gains.

What this essentially means is that both importing food and locally producing food are both not viable options for helping a lot of the rural community in the DPRK, so the country is forced to rely on UN food aid programs to try and accommodate for them, plugging the gaps the other systems can’t fill.⁶.

To make the situation even worse, the political dispute between the DPRK and other nations has led many to refuse to provide money for the UNs humanitarian programs in the country, meaning they end up facing massive funding problems, trying to operate with budgets nowhere near their realistic requirements and unable to deal with major issues like disease, water contamination and safe waste disposal.⁷

While the UN does allow exemptions on the sanctions to be made, it’s only on a slow, case by case basis which depends on months of consideration⁸, and while those considerations are happening the DPRK’s attempts to resolve its health crisis are still bound up in red tape.

And while to some that red tape might seem like a small thing, a minor problem that’s a price worth paying in order to pressure the DPRK, on the ground there’s a real, awful human cost that they might not want to see, ordinary services like healthcare that people across much of the world take for granted are stifled in North Korea, where a ban on fuel imports into the country has caused shortages that prevent the transportation of patients to hospitals, that means that people who don’t live near health centres may end up dying before getting the chance to receive care.⁹

This real human cost, happening because of bureaucratic slowness and wilful ignorance, means that humanitarian NGOs are in a steep uphill battle just to do their jobs, a factor not helped by the US government’s decision to force vital humanitarian workers to leave the country. The end result of this is that some of the least fortunate in North Korean society are missing out on life saving care, not because of their own government, but because of foreign governments imposing an atmosphere of hostility towards any dealings, no matter how innocent or well intentioned, with the DPRK.¹⁰

The media has a habit of downplaying or outright denying the reality of this humanitarian crisis, claiming that any issues in the country are the fault of the government, and pushing the idea that sanctions are “smart” and “targeted”, only affecting those at the top of the leadership, that all the suffering going on is only because of internal issues, and that whenever the country tries to evade sanctions, it’s only to fund their WMDs.

Since the Western world, and much of the world in general, is already convinced that the DPRK government is evil, or at the very least incredibly immoral, people find it easy to believe talking points that deflect blame for humanitarian issues onto it, its an easy scapegoat, which means that conspiracy theories accusing the leadership of intentionally starving its people are often just accepted as either very likely or just outright factual, real humanitarian concern for the Korean people can be dismissed as propagandising for a crazed rogue state.

This allows world leaders to carry on guilt free with their severely damaging campaigns, no need to answer serious questions or face genuine criticism, while putting on an act to the rest of the world, appearing as just helpless bystanders horrified by the very problems they cause.

This nicely brings me into the second major problem about North Korea, perceptions of its system and the rules it imposes on the people who live under it.

2. The Korean System, common misconceptions

#

The image of North Korea’s government presented by the media is a kind of distorted, cartoonish mix of half truths and lies that circle around between news outlets, sometimes from genuine misunderstanding, other times from intentional lies, which give us the image that nothing in the country is normal, that it’s the kind of country where falling asleep in a meeting can get you shot with an anti-aircraft gun, where people close to the leadership are routinely sentenced to death for no reason, where no foreigner can get in or out and everything that happens there is just a show, a front to deceive people, a country of bombastic mass military parades, atomic threats, crazed, unstable authority figures and absolute secrecy.

So, lets shine a light on some of these ideas, and talk about what’s wrong and what’s right, we’ve already gone over the nukes, so lets try something else…

2a. Ideology

#

Lots of people who learn about the DPRK wonder how it works, or what side of the political spectrum it belongs in.

Some have accused the country of being Far-Right, based on Nazism or Fascism, giving out the idea that Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un based their rallies and ideas of conformed, one minded unity on the kind that Hitler preached in the 1930s, but this claim really doesn’t hold up in any way when doing the research.

First off, it would make little sense for the Kim family to adopt Nazism given their history, Kim Il-Sung spent his time fighting against the Axis aligned Japanese Empire during World War II, alongside Mao’s Chinese Communists and Stalin’s Soviets, direct enemies of Fascism and pretty much as Far-Left as you can get.

Secondly, the Korean Worker’s Party still aligns itself with Communist Parties on the world stage and makes frequent references to Socialism as its ideology. Now, sure, you could point out that Nazism also referenced Socialism, after all Nazism is short for “National Socialism”, but Hitler also openly admitted that his ideal of Socialism had nothing to do with the Socialist values on the Left, in other words, actual Socialism, and maintained close relations with Capitalists who provided funding for the Nazi Party, he also made sure to purge any left wingers remaining in the party after he gained control of it, and sent them to the concentration camps along with any other perceived enemies of the state.

As for the accusations of militarism, they’re fair, the DPRK has a strong focus on its armed forces, but having a large, active military is hardly proof of Nazism, all the major powers in World War II fought a total war and put everything into their militaries, does that mean it was really just a war between 2 different groups of Nazis? I don’t think so. Besides, it’s pretty well known which country has the biggest, most heavily funded military in the world right now, taking part in dozens of conflicts across the world, and it’s definitely not North Korea, so should we be treating America as a Nazi state as well?

Of course, the one thing that makes people assume North Korea is Fascist the most is just simple authoritarianism, if there’s one thing everyone would probably say they know about North Korea when asked is that it’s an authoritarian country, one party, one leader, but Authoritarianism isn’t Fascism.

Of course, all Fascists are Authoritarians, but not all Authoritarians are Fascists by any means, the corporatist, the pro private ownership economics of Fascism doesn’t exist in North Korea, the expansionist, Imperialist attitude of Fascism doesn’t exist in North Korea, the strong Anti-Communist, Anti-Marxist attitude of Fascism doesn’t exist in North Korea, these are key aspects of Fascism that don’t apply to the country at all.

And lastly, the accusations of Ethno-Nationalism, both Koreas are essentially ethnically homogeneous, with the South’s population being 96% ethnically Korean and the North’s around 99%, so this near total lack of diversity means theories of “pure blood” and ethnic identity appear in interpreations of Korea’s national identity, what makes Koreans Korean, but this kind of nationalism was more commonly used by the South than by the North, where the idea of Korean racial superiority and racism has been specifically rejected as “reactionary” by top leaders, if ethnic superiority was top of the agenda for North Korea’s ideology, it wouldn’t really fit the system for the man in charge of it all to openly, specifically deny it in his writing.

Besides, the country’s focus on internationalism really makes it incompatible with racial ideology, you wouldn’t really ally yourselves with groups like the Black Panthers and encourage them to adopt your ideology if that ideology relied on Korean ethnic supremacy as a foundation.

2b. Coming and Going

#

One of the big misconceptions about the DPRK is that no one is allowed to leave and no one is allowed to enter, that foreign tourists are not welcome, or if they are they can only go to select places while everything else is off limits because the authorities are scared of people seeing things they’re not supposed to. This is a half truth, while it’s true that you can’t just show up there and go where-ever you want in the country, almost everyone can visit if they want to.

Only 2 nationalities are outright banned from the country. Americans, who aren’t banned by the DPRK but are blocked from travelling there by their own government, and South Koreans, unlike the rest of the world the two Korea’s still don’t officially recognise each other, both still claim to be the legitimate government of the whole peninsula, which means that to the North a South Korean passport might as well be fake, South Koreans can and have visited the DPRK before, but almost always need to use a passport from another country to do so.

As for the tours being extremely restricted, there are several different tour companies that go to the country and most of them offer independent tours, where the tourist decides the itinerary with the help of the company, they say where they want to go, what they want to do, how much they want to see and when they want to see it. On top of this, all 9 regions of the country can be visited for tour activities¹¹, and group tours have plenty of variation in locations and activities too, much more than just Pyongyang or the DMZ, which is all you see in almost all tourist videos and news reports about the DPRK.

So just how did these rumours about tourism come about? If there’s so much to see across the country, why do people think no one is ever allowed in? Well, the answer is simple, journalists.

Since basically every documentary or video series you can find on North Korea doesn’t fall in line with the image its government wants to project, they tend to only allow journalists in on special occasions for heavily regulated tours, because of this you’ll find cases where journalists will try to get in, get rejected or sent on a very strict itinerary, then get the false impression that that just happens to everyone who tries to visit, they report that impression to the world and it spreads and becomes the dominant idea.

As for letting people out of the country, while it’s true that citizens of the DPRK are greatly restricted in their travel and certainly can’t just take a trip abroad one day if they feel like it, there are many North Koreans who go outside their country for work or study, countries like Russia and China are the main places for this, but they’ve also been known to go to other Asian countries like Myanmar and Mongolia and African countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique. However, because of the pressure put on the DPRK across the world, many foreign countries have been pressured to stop its citizens from visiting, leading to waves of deportations and repatriations in the late 2010s.

2c. North Korea is mad and about to collapse!

#

While it’s fair to say North Korea’s system is very strict and far removed from other political systems across the world, its leaders are far from crazy, these are people who’ve been in power for many, many years and know how to hold on to it, they’ve kept things going when most would’ve failed decades ago, even under maximum pressure from foreign nations the North Korean state is still running, as it has done for the last 70 years, if the country’s leaders were the kind of cartoonish maniacs the media painted them as, the pressure would’ve dissolved the country long ago.

The idea of the leaders being mad is frequently pushed by nearly endless news reports of executions in the country, we always hear tales of top members of the government, their families or even pop stars being executed for trivial crimes thanks to harsh purges, the problem with these stories is that they often happen to be based on nothing credible, people who are murdered turn up after their supposed deaths, alive and well, reports of suspected power struggles are seriously brought into question or revealed to be greatly exaggerated.

This kind of propaganda misinformation even extends to Kim Jong-Un himself, who has been reported dead, overthrown, or demoted to figurehead time and time again only to show up again a little later alive and well and clearly in control, even though the country has had the same leadership for the last 7 decades, which has survived some of the most intense pressure the international community can dish out, some people still have a habit of reporting about the country as if it’ll collapse any moment.

2d. North Korea is a major threat to the world

#

Alongside the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, the media loves to play up the conventional military threat of the country, painting the DPRK as a nation primed for war, routinely making threats and doing elaborate posturing towards its neighbours, spending billions on tanks while its people are still suffering. Now, North Korea have a big focus on their military, following a policy of Songun or “Military Line” politics and it does have one of the largest armies in the world with high military spending, but a lot of those troops aren’t conventional soldiers, they focus on economic work like construction projects, essentially being mobilised as a large boost to the existing workforce.

And while the country does make itself busy staging drills and shows of army activity for the media, and the South does this fairly often too, they hold big, explosive drills of their own of a much larger magnitude and have a much bigger army budget than the North, as do their other neighbours: Japan, Russia and China. So is it much of a surprise that the DPRK keeps maintaining a billion dollar army when there are others just next door, far from on the best terms with them, doing the same?

The reality is that the North Korean Army has no appetite for another conflict and exists for self-defence, not to attack others, their rhetoric about war usually boils down to “if we’re provoked, we’ll retaliate”, which is exactly the same kind of message the US and the South routinely send back. The reality is that these war threats are treated to show when the issues on the Korean peninsula are tense, when things are bad the North will talk about war readiness, when they’re good they’ll talk about peace, neither side is seriously plotting to invade the other, because everyone knows how much of a disaster that would be.

2e. North Korea is a country of mass secrecy

#

So, here’s the last big rumour I want to talk about, and it’s a pretty interesting one because… It’s totally true! Throughout this video I’m guessing I’ve mentioned a decent amount of stuff that you had no idea about, points that might go against what you already thought about the DPRK, and that’s totally understandable, because the media whirlwind prints misinformation all the time, and this rumour explains exactly why.

You see, North Korea is subject to what’s often called an “information black hole”, because the international media usually can’t operate in the country, and when they can it’s under very tight restrictions, the only consistent source for North Korean news is the state media, which is obviously going to be very biased towards positive coverage of the leadership and the conditions of the country in its reporting, this means that the kind of stories Western journalists are interested in are very very hard to do proper research on. and nobody really knows for sure what goes on in the country, not even the world’s top intelligence agencies!

The result of this black hole is that fact checked reporting is essentially impossible, and because there’s no real stories to fill the hole, sensationalist, cartoonish, and propagandistic tales fill the void to keep up with public demand for exciting, crazy sounding reports about the DPRK. What this means in the long run is that almost everything most people will hear about the DPRK from the mainstream is based on practically nothing, and the sources for them range from overworked South Korean journalists, satirists and defectors acting under pressure or looking to make a quick buck when they’re down on their luck, to even South Korean’s intelligence agencies, parody Twitter accounts, or just plain old thin air. When it comes to any other country, reporting of this kind would be laughed off as pathetic journalism, but when it comes to North Korea, it’s the accepted norm, this is for two reasons:

The first is that because of the information black hole, it’s hard, or just flat out impossible, to do fact checking on the DPRK, which means most just journalists don’t even bother, throw out the rule book and report whatever nonsense makes their audiences happy, even if the truth is nowhere near what they’re putting out, because it’s a simpler, easier job than wasting time trying to do research and coming up short.

The second is that these kinds of insane, propagandistic tales actually benefit Western governments greatly, their maximum pressure campaigns against the DPRK have done serious damage to people’s lives with no real benefit for us, and normally that would be something to provoke international condemnation and calls for major policy changes, but because the DPRK is swept up in the propaganda whirlwind, reports about UN sanctions causing shortages are buried by the fanatical tales about, invisible phones, unicorn lairs and other piles of unfounded garbage that, if given a little proper investigation, would prove to be completely baseless, the wacky, cartoony version of North Korea dominating the headlines means that the inconvenient reality surrounding genuine issues with the country, the kind of things that people should be paying attention to, are lost and forgotten in the midst of a wave of clickbait.

Conclusion

#

So, the moral of this long, drawn out story I’ve tried to tell? Don’t just blindly believe what you read about North Korea, if you read stories on the DPRK and really want to know all about its goings on, past and present, make sure to dig deep with research before you make your mind up about things.

What I’m saying is that things are far from black and white when it comes to the two Koreas, rather than going off of dramatic headlines and tweets like most of us do, it would be better if we tried to go for a little more accuracy and realism when we think about the DPRK, because at the end of the day North Koreans are honest, hard working, real life human beings, just like you and me, they aren’t all brainwashed, they don’t have every inch of their lives under regulation, they aren’t all playing a make believe pantomime to try and impress tourists, and they don’t deserve to be hated, or manipulated for propaganda, or subjected to constant mockery from the media circus, they’re entitled to dignity and fairness just like everyone else in the world is, something that it seems they’ve been denied for a very long time.

---

Retrospective

#

Looking back, the structuring of this script is flawed and like I wrote at the start a lot of the sourcing was amateurish linking to Wikipedia pages, it also lacks a kind of purpose, it goes in detail on its topics but doesn’t really explain why anyone should care about them.

In the MEGA documentary we explained what kind of impacts the misconceptions around North Korea have: Tilting politicians towards extremely harmful policies like the embargo, hurting some 26 million people for nothing, and pushing populations from the countries carrying out the sanctions into passively accepting these policies, when we turn North Korea into an evil cartoon land instead of a real place we don’t have to look at what our governments are doing to their people.

This script doesn’t have any of that commentary, it feels like I wrote about the topic for the sake of wanting to write about it, which is fine but if you want an audience to care and pay attention, you have to do better.

That being said, I still find this to be quite an interesting read looking back, it’s kind of a shame that some of the content here was lost, especially the story of how Kim Suk-Won, the commander of the Japanese forces hunting Kim Il-Sung during the 1930s, went on to become the South Korean General commanding forces at the 38th Parallel in the 1940s, launching the border skirmishes against the North before the war broke out, its fascinating that the Korean War was, in a way, a settling of old scores.

The story of the South Korean struggle for democracy was also a powerful one, and the grim history of how South Korea’s superpower ally the US abetted its violent martial rulers is something more should know about.

The background on the People’s Republic of Korea is another bit of detail that was partly lost, although it was mentioned in the MEGA doc this script goes into more detail about it, like explaining the manifesto goals of the country and mentioning the Founding Alliance and CPKI by name, its extremely sad that leftists and rightists in Korea were actually working together, planning to build a democracy that would bring property stolen by the Japanese Empire back to the Korean people, a country that could rebuild peacefully working together with the Eastern and Western worlds, but that dream was stolen from them by the superpowers.

It’s horrifying to know that the entire division of Korea was totally unnecessary, and that almost no one even knows about this, most people assume Korea went straight from Japanese occupation to the North-South split, I’ve never seen any modern outlets (other than Historical.ly) even mention the PRK’s existence, given that the Korean War was a major early flashpoint for the Cold War as a whole it feels like this is a part of history more should know about.

But, at the same time, I can see why these topics didn’t make it into the MEGA episode. The MEGA episode was focused primarily on the media environment surrounding North Korea, from celebrity defectors to dodgy reporting, the history section was more about correcting the record that this unreliable reporting had created.

In this “Truth of North Korea” script the framing was the opposite way round, the focus was on the history, with the history section taking up around 2/3rds of the script, and the media environment section was more about the narratives spread about the country rather than the media itself, defectors are only even mentioned once at the very end of the script, while in the MEGA episode the topic of defector testimonies comes up all the time, being the common thread of the video’s topics.

Put simply, this script and the MEGA episode are 2 different scripts, this script wasn’t a first draft for MEGA: Yeonmi and North Korea, it was something totally different and it’s a project I abandoned, it just so happens that I put a lot of my knowledge gained from making this script to use when writing for MEGA.

Maybe someday these topics could deserve their own video or videos, or maybe releasing this article is enough, I’m not sure, but anyhow if you made it this far, thanks for reading and I hope you found it educational!

Changelog

#

Edit 1 - 07/03/24 - Changed date to when the script was finished (as opposed to when it was first released publicly), added release date disclaimer between the introduction and the actual script

Edit 2 - 15/03/24 - Converted sources with extra notes (time notes or page numbers) and some notes into footnotes, added divider between script and retrospective, updated “What is this?” section to mention this

Edit 3 - 20/03/24 - Minor typo fixes

Footnotes

#