Study of North Korea Korean War Origins and Challenges to Kim\'s Leadership

North Korea

In the film Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), Korea is portrayed as the naive and innocent victim of foreign imperialists and ideologies that divide the country in half and then destroy it. Symbolically, the village of Dongmakgol high up in the mountains is Korea, and is populated by simply, friendly, humane people who are not even aware who Kim Il Sung is or that the country has been divided and a war has started. Most of them do not even know what airplanes or rifles are, although they seem to be aware that Korea has been invaded and occupied in the past by China and Japan -- and they refer to these countries in very disparaging terms. The time is September 1950 and the Americans have just landed at Incheon, driving the North Koreans back, while the Americans are bombing them heavily, and also destroying many civilian targets like Dongmakgol. Although the film has been criticized as pro-Communist or sympathetic to North Korea, it would be more proper to call it nationalist and a plea for all Koreans to be given a chance to work out their own destiny, independent of interference from imperial powers. Only one of the North Koreans is portrayed as unsympathetic, and he is the Commissar of the unit who is the most ideological and is always warning the High Comrade in command that he must obey orders from headquarters. The commander is not in favor of killing the wounded, though, and is about to shoot the Commissar when they are attacked by a South Korean unit, which is dressed in American uniforms and takes no prisoners. If Kim Il Sung appears at all in the film, even symbolically, it is only as this ruthless and fanatical Commissar dressed in a Chinese-style uniform, threatening the others with death if they do not obey.

Scholars have been attempting to assign blame for the Korean War since the 1950s, theorizing whether it was a civil war or an international war, and if Korea was a victim of imperialist machinations, which of the great powers bore the greatest share of the responsibility. Basing his thesis of declassified U.S. government documents, Bruce Cumings argued that it was a civil war, and that the socialist state established in North Korea had considerable popular support at the time. Industry had been nationalized, land redistributed, and public education expanded to the workers and peasants, while the regime placed women and lower class men into positions of leadership (Cumings 427). In many ways, the Soviet occupation of the North was far more successful than that of the Americans in the South, who were constantly best by revolts and uprisings, with the Soviets had only to reinforce "leftist control of the bureaucracy, replacing unreliable or untrustworthy Koreans, in the arrangements of the top" and then train and educate Korean cadres to run the country on the local and regional levels, all of which was accomplished by the end of 1946 (Cumings 437). Kim Il Sung and the other Communist leaders "sought unification and revolution in the south," and supported a series of popular uprisings there (Cumings 437). Only when the U.S. And its South Korean allies had defeated these did Kim turn to Stalin and Mao for support of a direct military attack. Indeed, there has always been a strong tendency in the U.S. To regard the Korean War as a kind of civil war and ideological conflict between Left and Right, with the U.S. Of course backing the Right-wing side, even if rather ineptly.

Youngho Kim did not doubt that Kim Il Sung had appealed to Stalin and Mao for assistance in attacking South Korea, although Nitika Khrushchev recalled Stain being skeptical about whether the war would be won as quickly as Kim promised and did not want to become involved in a major conflict with the West. Kim sees Stalin as becoming more aggressive and overconfident by 1949-50, though, encouraged to go on the offensive in the Cold War by the successful test of the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 and by the success of the Chinese Revolution that same year. Kim Il Sung "did not have the means to achieve his goal without Stalin's assistance," which he finally got in January 1950 (Kim 137). Stalin even sent one of his top generals, Vasiliev, "to prepare the invasion plan just after he decided to approve the invasion plan," along with the tanks, planes and heavy artillery that Kim Il Sung needed (Kim 134).

Looking at the internal politics of North Korea, Dae-Sook Suh sees Kim Il Sung as a tough, cunning and manipulative leader who was very adept at survival even after his failure to reunite the country. He had indeed inveigled the Chinese and Soviets to support his bid for military conquest of the South in 1950, after the popular uprisings were defeated, and neither Stalin nor Mao was pleased with the results. No real coalition ever formed in North Korea to remove him from power, however, and "the challenge of Kim's opponents was no match for his talent for survival" (Suh 157). No one was better aware that he owed the survival of his regime to Chinese intervention at the end of 1950, and adjusted quickly and adroitly by becoming Mao's loyal ally and expelling, purging or executing the pro-Soviet faction among the North Koreans. In any event, he felt more "at ease with the Chinese" since he could speak the language and agreed with Mao's theories that the peasants were the real backbone of the revolutionary state (Suh 126). His son and grandson eventually succeeded him as Supreme Leader and the regime has had an unexpectedly long life expectancy, while the alliance with China even survived the demise of the Soviet Union.