begin quote from:
Why North Korea Needs an Enemy Like America to Survive | History ...
www.smithsonianmag.com/.../why-north-korea-needs-enemy-america-survive-18096...
1 day ago - Why North Korea Needs an Enemy Like America to Survive. The nation's complicated history hinges on three words that explain the totalitarian ...
North Korea isn't crazy. It's insecure, poor, and extremely dangerous ...
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/5/15922446/north-korea-nuclear-war-casualties
Jul 5, 2017 - While Americans were busy enjoying the July Fourth holiday, news broke that ... North Korean regime is deeply insecure, so worried about its own survival that it is ... To understand why North Korea is so unstable, we need to start with ... The North will do something that it knows will infuriate its enemies, like ...
How to Deal With North Korea - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst...on.../528717/
Why North Korea Needs an Enemy Like America to Survive
The nation’s complicated history hinges on three words that explain the totalitarian regime’s behavior
smithsonian.com
All summer long, North Korea has tested one weapon after another, the most recent being a ballistic missile this Friday.
And with each new act of belligerence, experts and the media have
scrambled to make sense of what comes next. “What is North Korea Trying
to Hit?” asked the Washington Post, while Bloomberg
went straight for the gut-punch with “Scared About North Korea? You
Aren’t Scared Enough.” For the more levelheaded readers (like Alaskans,
the Americans who live within closest range of a North Korean missle,
but are more concerned about bears and moose), the real question might be, why do North Koreans hate us so much? After all, the Korean War—as horrifically destructive as it was—ended
more than 60 years ago. The United States hasn’t attacked North Korea
once since that armistice was signed, but the little country has
remained a belligerent—and since 2006, nuclear-armed—thorn in the world’s side.
Part of this perpetual aggression has
to do with the personal experiences of North Korea’s founding father,
dictator Kim Il-sung. Born in Japanese-occupied Korea in 1912, Kim
Il-sung spent most of his childhood in China, eventually joining the
Chinese Communist Party and leading a renowned band of guerrilla
fighters that took on Japanese forces
in northeast China and Korea (a region then called Manchuria). But when
other members of the Chinese Communist Party accused Kim of conspiring
with the Japanese, he learned that loyalty wasn’t always returned. In
the 1930s, Kim also knew the Soviet Union was deporting ethnic Koreans
from the Soviet Far East back to Korea, because the Soviets, too, feared
Koreans would support Japan in the latter’s expansion across Asia. Even
the countries that should have ostensibly been Kim’s allies from the
start of his military career didn’t seem to have his home nation’s best
interests at heart.
From there, things only got worse. Having joined
the Soviet Red Army in 1940, Kim Il-sung was perfectly positioned for a
fortuitous appointment—Stalin made him the head of the North Korean
Temporary People’s Committee in 1946, and when North Korea officially
became a country in 1948, Kim was declared its prime minister (at that
point Russia and the U.S. had succeeded in defeating Japan and divided the Korean peninsula into two countries, with the border drawn so that the U.S. would administer over Seoul).
In 1950, Kim Il-sung convinced Soviet Premier
Josef Stalin to provide tanks for a war that would reunify North and
South Korea. Kim nearly succeeded, advancing his troops down to the
southern edge of the peninsula to take almost the entirety of South
Korea. But then American forces led by General Douglas MacArthur pushed
the North Koreans all the way back up to their shared border with China.
When Kim begged Stalin for help, the Soviet dictator said no. And
Chairman Mao Zedong of China waited two days before agreeing to assist
the North Koreans.
“Imagine how one would feel knowing that you
lost your country for those two days,” says James Person, director of
the Center for Korean History and Public Policy at the Wilson Center.
“The historical experience and Kim’s own personal experience shaped the
way that the Korean leadership saw the world”—as a hostile place with no
reliable allies.
After three years of fighting, the war ended in
1953. Even then only an armistice was signed—not a formal peace
agreement. A new border was drawn that gave South Korea slightly more
territory and created the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, between the two
nations. The U.S. continued assisting South Korea in its development,
and China and the Soviet Union remained nominal allies of North Korea.
North Korea’s idiosyncratic foreign policy since then can be traced in the history of three words: juche, songun and byungjin.
Each has taken its turn as a central tenant for every new Kim in the
North Korean dynasty. Each has colored the totalitarian regime’s
reaction to the rest of the world—and especially its relationship to the
U.S.
Juche (Going It Alone)
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-north-korea-needs-enemy-america-survive-180964168/#hZQb2vXagC0YZDd7.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment