Alright, so let’s start with WWII, because – let’s face it – you can never go wrong starting with a World War. The entirety of the Korean peninsula was under military occupation by the Japanese Empire, and in fact had been since the early 1910’s. The occupation was brutal, Koreans were treated as slaves (sexual and otherwise), and Japan did a helluva job in trying to extinguish Korean culture altogether. But that’s for another post.
At the conclusion of the war, the Korean peninsula was divided – much like Germany – into two zones of control; the southern half would be put under the supervision of the nascent United Nation (and de facto NATO control), while the northern half was occupied by the Soviet Union. This came about because of quite a few reasons that are complicated and don't really factor into what I'm talking about... there's a more detailed explanation is in the below comments. There was initially a hope of a peaceful reunification into a single Korean nation, but… y’know… then there was the Cold War, and that went out the window. Enter Stage Left: Kim Il Sung. With the backing of the Soviet general Terentii Shtykov, Kim was made the chairman of the Provisional People’s Committee for North Korea (Bukjoseon Inmin Wiwonhoe) in February 1946.
Under Soviet control, the feudal landlord system that had been “the norm” in the Joseon Kingdom as well as during the Japanese Occupation was ended, with most of the upper classes/landlord and people with ties to Japan fleeing south. Under Shtykov’s direction, key industries were nationalized. But from the outset, Kim Il-sung was positioning himself to be the ultimate power in North Korea once the Soviets inevitably departed back to Moscow (which would occur some 2 years later in 1948.) From Cummings:
Kim became the top leader when he chaired the North Korean Interim People’s Committee in February 1946, and he held on to maximum power until he died. Within months of his accession to power, the evidence of a hagiographic and grandiose style was almost as palpable as it is today. Agents making forays into North Korea in 1946 reported that pictures and posters of Kim festooned telephone poles and the like with tales of how “wise, clear-sighted, spirited, and wonderful” Kim Il-sung was. At the same time, articles appeared describing him as “the Sun of the Nation,” “a beautiful new red star in the sky,” wisely guiding everything with his “brilliant, scientific” methods.
A further example of this early deification can be found from Kim’s own personal biographer – which remains the “official state history” in North Korea even today. The author, an unknown member of the guerrilla unit he had commanded during the resistance to Japanese occupation, wrote:
This sort of person naturally has an extremely strong power of attraction to others […] And it goes without saying that a guerrilla organization with such a person at the center is incomparably strong. The sublime good fortune of our guerrilla detachment was to have at our center The Great Sun. Our general commander, great leader, sagacious teacher, and intimate friend was none other than General Kim Il Sung. Our unit was an unshakeable one, following General Kim and having General Kim as the nucleus. The General’s embrace and love are like the Sun’s, and when our fighters look up to and receive the General, their trust, self-sacrifice and devotion are such that they will gladly die for him.
It’s rather interesting the language that this author uses to describe the General. It’s all highly moralistic – and all very Confucian in nature. Kim embodies benevolence and love, and inspires in others trust, obedience, and respect. This is a particularly resonant choice in a traditionally Confucian culture like Korea (and China, for that matter) because it is the very embodiment of the ideal relationship of not only Ruler and Ruled, but also of Father and Son; both are encapsulated in the most important of Confucian ethics – filial piety.
Cummings expands on this particular philosophy as it emerged in the swiftly-developing cult of Kim:
And eleventh-century Song scholar, Fan Ziyu, said that “order and disorder in the world all depend on the heart-and-mind of the ruler. If his heart-and-mind are correct, than the myriad affairs of the court will not be incorrect.” The formula is virtuous-mind-become-master-of-the-body. Now let the body be the body politic, and presto, the virtuous king becomes its master. […] Precisely by decades of reading the classics and tutoring by the philosophers […] the king then becomes a perfected being, “the supreme mind of the nation,” and woe to the person who challenges his authority or denies that he can walk on water.”
Cummings points out that, in spite of the Soviet trappings, the North Korean state that emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War was far closer to a Neo-Confucian kingdom like the Song or Ming Dynasties of Imperial China, than of a truly Stalinist-Soviet state. “With its absurdly inflated hero worship and its nauseating repetition, the North Korean political rhetoric seems to know no bounds; to a person accustomed to a liberal political system it is instinctively repellent. But it had been there from the beginning.” And indeed, it was the dominant political ideology across East Asia for millennia. The Chinese emperors were the literal Sons of Heaven, so too the Japanese Emperor being a literal embodiment of the Sun God, or even the Mongolian Khans claiming the mandate of Tengri – the Child of the Blue Sky. Koreans had been wholehearted followers of this philosophy of governance for thousands of years, that its was natural and right that there would, in essence, be a divine Mandate of Heaven conferred onto a single and singular individual who would embody the entire collective wisdom, righteousness, and morality of the whole nation and people. Once you understand where that idea comes from – and how long it dominated not just the Korean peninsula, but East Asia as a whole – its adoption by someone like Kim Il Sung, and its acceptance by the People of North Korea – doesn’t seem so far fetched. If anything, its ultimately rejection by all of its neighbors in their own political systems – South Korea, China, and Japan – was something of a miracle in itself. The PRC still operated under effectively the Great Man Personality Cult of Mao Zedong until his death in 1978, South Korea. Japan had their Confucian-inspired “ruled by the Sun God” political system forcibly overthrown by an outside power in 1945, and even South Korea was under the military thumb of Park Chung-hee until his assassination in 1979… and even now his daughter, Park Geun-hye, is the current president of South Korea. East Asia hasn’t divorced itself as completely from the Confucian-dynastic style of rule as one might initially think…
#The Korean War
In September 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was officially declared with Soviet backing (and tacit understanding that they held legal sovereignty over the entire peninsula, not just the northern half). Kim was, of course, at the helm as Party Chairman. Nevertheless, there’s quite a bit of evidence showing that both the USSR and China only actually backed Kim’s push toward “re”conquest of the South with extreme reluctance. Mao, for instance, only approved of the invasion once Kim had assured him that he’d already gotten Ol’ Papa Joe’s approval. Weatherby writes:
In the spring of 1950 Stalin’s policy toward Korea took an abrupt turn. During meetings with Kim Il Sung in Moscow in April,66 Stalin approved Kim’s plan to reunify the country by military means and agreed to provide the necessary supplies and equipment for the operation. The plan to launch the assault on South Korea was Kim’s initiative, not Stalin’s. The Soviet leader finally agreed to support the undertaking only after repeated requests from Kim. Furthermore, Stalin’s purpose was not to test American resolve; on the contrary, he approved the plan only after having been assured that the United States would not intervene.
This, of course, didn’t exactly go as planned. The US and NATO the UN did indeed intervene, and rather than rolling over the South, the North Koreans themselves got rolled all the way back up to their northern border before the PRC’s PLA at last stepped in and ground the whole conflict into a stalemate that – as each and every article on the Korean War and/or North Korea simply must reiterate (as so who am I to break tradition?) – technically is still ongoing.
(Part 2 Below)
Follow up- when was it determined that Kim Jong il would succeed Kim il sung and how did the country not fall into civil war?
Hello everyone,
In this thread, there have been a number of "where are the comments?" comments. Well, here you go. Those are the comments. They were all removed because, in fact, the comments are all wondering where the comments are. Funny how that works out, right?
Please, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind our rules concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed. And because of these standards, sometimes it takes a little patience.
Additionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!