Chapter 1
KU KLUX KOREA
America Creates a Renegade Nation People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
—Dan Quayle, former American vice president
North Korea insults us. Its very existence is an affront to our sense of decency, perhaps even to the idea of human progress. At a fundamental level it challenges our notions of politics, economics, and social theory. The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea—or DPRK as it calls itself—is not only different, but abhorrent.
We abhor something we do not understand. The nation ruled from Pyongyang is seemingly impenetrable; natural and artificial barriers wall it off. Yet the biggest impediment to comprehending North Korea is its very nature: the country defies conventional characterization. We call it communist—but it hardly resembles the other four nations sharing that label. After all, communism, which claims to be the wave of the future, implies modernity. North Korea, on the other hand, is not just backward, it is essentially feudal, even medieval. Many say that the nation is Stalinist, but thats true only in the broadest sense of the term. Joseph Stalin himself would have been uncomfortable had he ever visited Pyongyang. The regime founded by Kim Il Sung is a cult possessing instruments of a nation-state, a militant clan with embassies and weapons of mass destruction. Kim, unrestrained by normal standards of conduct, created an aberrant society of almost unimaginable cruelty. North Korea is in a category by itself.
It is, from almost any perspective, the worst country in the world. The University of Chicagos Bruce Cumings, known for nuanced views, calls the nation “repellent,” and American analyst Selig Harrison, always sympathetic toward Pyongyang, admits its “Orwellian.” Even leftist Noam Chomsky notes the country is “a pretty crazy place.” How could any nation go so wrong?
The Unfortunate Peninsula
It took centuries of tragedy to produce todays Koreans, who have endured five major occupations and about nine hundred invasions during their history. Unfortunately for them, the Korean peninsula is where China, Japan, and Russia meet, and so their nation has historically been a prize for powerful neighbors. Yet as painful as its story has been, the last century and a half has been particularly harsh for “the shrimp among whales,” as the people of Korea call their homeland. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this is also the period since the United States became involved in Korean affairs.
Americas first contact with the Hermit Kingdom was a memorable occasion, at least for the hermits. In 1866 the General Sherman, a steam schooner, chugged up the Taedong River toward Pyongyang. After ignoring warnings to turn back from the locals, who were not interested in either American trade or Christian religion, the ship was torched and the crew killed and dismembered.
Despite the unpleasantness in the Taedong River, the Koreans eventually found some use for Americans. In 1882 they signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Washington. This pact, their first with a Western nation, was intended as a defensive measure to ward off Koreas more immediately threatening neighbors.
The Korean king danced with joy on the arrival of the first American envoy, but that was premature: in a few years Washington would sell out their newfound Korean friends. The Japanese and the Russians were both interested in controlling Korea, and Tokyo proposed dividing the peninsula into spheres of influence along the 38th parallel. The tsar refused. These two powers could not peacefully reconcile their expansionist ambitions. The Japanese humiliated Moscows forces in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the first defeat of a European power by an Asian one in modern history. President Theodore Roosevelt brokered the peace, which confirmed Japanese control over Korea. As part of the deal, Washington secretly obtained Tokyos assurance that it would not challenge its control of the Philippines. Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
An American won the award, and Korea paid the price. As a result of Roosevelts peace, Japan occupied Korea in 1905 and annexed the place outright five years later. In obliterating the Korean nation, the Japanese brought an end to one of the longest imperial reigns in Asian history, the Choson Dynasty, founded in 1392. Japans occupation was especially cruel: the peninsulas new masters tried to kill off the concept of Korea. They forced their subjects to take Japanese names and tried to expunge the Korean language. Japan imported Shinto, its religion, and taught a new history to schoolchildren. Millions of Korean men and women were impressed into the Japanese war effort, many taken from their homeland. Koreans had to swear loyalty to the emperor in Tokyo.
It took Japans defeat in World War II to end the occupation. Although Japanese troops went home, Korea, which technically did not exist during the fighting, was the Second World Wars big loser. The Cairo Declaration of 1943 stated that “in due course, Korea shall become free and independent,” but events—and the Allies themselves—conspired against the Korean people. America, concerned about the casualties resulting from a potential invasion of the Japanese homeland, persuaded the Soviet Union to declare war against Tokyo, which it finally did on August 8, 1945, just seven days before the emperor capitulated. Washington slammed the door on a Soviet occupation of Japan but permitted Moscow a slice of Korea. The Red Army, without firing a shot, invaded the northern part of the Korean peninsula on August 9.
Washington had given no thought in the closing days of the war about what to do with Korea. There were no American troops there, and to avoid a Soviet takeover of the whole peninsula the United States hastily proposed its division. As August 10 became the 11th in the American capital, two junior American Army officers, consulting a National Geographic map, picked the 38th parallel as the border for “temporary” occupation zones. By selecting a line with historical significance, Lieutenant Colonel Dean Rusk, later to become secretary of state, and his colleague inadvertently signaled to Moscow that the United States recognized the tsars old claim to the northern portion of Korea. Whatever the Soviets thought, they accepted, and honored, the proposed dividing line. Korea, which had been unified for more than a millennium, was severed.
Koreas division was an afterthought. There was no justification for the act—if any country deserved dismemberment, it was Japan. In different times, there might have been no consequence to the last-minute decision to split the peninsula into two. In the global competition developing between Moscow and Washington, however, the stopgap measure took on significance. As every business consultant knows, there is nothing as permanent as a temporary solution, and Korea proved this proposition. National elections, to be sponsored by the United Nations, were never held. Eventually each side established its own client state. The American-backed Republic of Korea was officially proclaimed on August 15, 1948, and the Soviet-supported Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea was officially born less than a month later.
The new arrangement was in trouble from the beginning. Each of the two states claimed to be the sole representative of the Korean people, and both of them were raring for a fight. Neither big-power sponsor stayed around long to restrain its young ward. Soviet troops were off the Korean peninsula by late 1948, and the Americans decamped by June 1949. Two jealous children were left to settle their fate in zero-sum fashion. Both sides conducted guerrilla raids and battalion-size incursions across the 38th parallel.
On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung, the Norths leader, initiated full-scale war by sending his tanks and troops south. President Harry Truman intervened immediately to stop what he perceived to be a Soviet test of Western resolve. The United Nations, prompted by Washington, showed remarkable resolve of its own: for the first time in history a world organization decided, in the words of historian David McCullough, “to use armed force to stop armed force.”
Despite the unified response of the West, Kims reunification policy almost succeeded. The North Koreans took Seoul in less than a week and had almost the entire peninsula under their control in a little over a month. Kims forces were then beaten back almost to the Chinese border by troops from seventeen countries under the United Nations command led by General Douglas MacArthur. Chinese “volunteers” crossed the Yalu River into North Korea beginning in late October and pushed the American-led coalition south of Seoul by the end of 1950. During the remainder of the war the United Nations forces—primarily Americans—advanced only slightly northward during a period of essentially stalemated conflict.
The fighting during the “Great Fatherland Liberation War,” as the North Koreans call it, lasted for three years and one month. Negotiations went on almost as long: they continued for two years and nineteen days. There were 158 plenary sessions before the parties could agree, and even then they only arrived at an interim arrangement, a cease-fire. To this day there has been no treaty formally ending the conflict, so the war technically continues.
Although South Korea ended up with slightly more territory than it started with, Seoul did not sign the armistice. Its leader, Syngman Rhee, wanted to keep marching northward. At the time, he looked like a warmonger. In retrospect, Rhee was right: America could have avoided more than a half century of suffering and turmoil caused by North Korea.
The failure to prevail in the early 1950s profoundly shapes Korean politics today. “Death solves all problems,” Stalin once said, but in Korea it only exacerbated them. Blood spilled in war hardened differences, and a division that was seen as temporary has, with the passage of more than five decades, taken on an air of permanence. During the conflict China is thought to have lost somewhere between 900,000 and a million soldiers, including Mao Zedongs son. Almost 40,000 foreign troops fighting under the United Nations banner perished in Korea. And three million Korean civilians died along with over a half million soldiers from both halves of the peninsula.
For many Korean families the war is still a sharp memory. In the broader context of things, the conflict is another unhappy chapter in the countrys turbulent history. But the conflict, as horrible as it was, became the defining moment of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and for its founder, Kim Il Sung. Where we see stalemate, North Koreans perceive victory. The North Korean state is built on lies, distortions, and untruths of all sorts, but the most important of them says that Americans started the war and that Kim Il Sung beat back the aggression.
Americans, of course, do not subscribe to the DPRKs version of history, yet Kims fabrication, like all good ones, was formed around a tidbit of truth. The Korean was correct in believing he had dealt a setback to the United States in the war. He had, after all, managed to do something that even Uncle Joe Stalin had not accomplished: at the height of the power of the United States he had dented, if not destroyed, the aura of American military superiority. After a magnificent show of determination in Europe during the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1949, American resolve failed in the mountains of Korea in 1950 to 1953. Stalin got it right when he noted that the Americans, armed with “stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise,” could not subdue “little Korea.” “What kind of strength is that?” he asked.
Defeating Kim Il Sung and his Chinese allies would have been expensive, time-consuming, and bloody, but the United States, with the worlds strongest military, could have prevailed. Washington believed that any American escalation of the fighting would have been matched by Moscow, but that was a misconception of the highest order. Contrary to American belief, the Korean War was not authored in the Soviet capital and Kim Il Sung was not Stalins puppet. The war was Kims idea, to bring about reunification of his peninsula. It is true that the Korean leader sought and obtained Moscows and Beijings approval to start hostilities, but it was his war nonetheless. China, which had the desire to fight, did not have the capacity to defeat the United States; the Soviet Union, which had a superb army, lacked the incentive. Washington simply underestimated its ability to win.
The West floundered many times during the Cold War, but, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of those mistakes no longer mattered. Yet it is still too early to predict that the Allies will escape the consequences of their misadventure in Korea five decades ago. The war has yet to be concluded by treaty, Pyongyang still poses a major threat to world security, and despite appearances of cooperation today, the contest between the two Koreas continues because Kim Jong Il has yet to give up his familys goal of ruling the entire peninsula.
It is too harsh to call the Wests involvement in the Korean War a defeat, but it has many of defeats trappings. Americans, for example, are embarrassed by the conflict and sometimes call it the Forgotten War. In 2003 Time picked eighty days that changed the world in its eighty years of publication. Not one event from the Korean War was considered worthy enough to be selected. The debut of Star Wars made the grade in Times list, but none of the moments of a real war. From the American perspective of the twenty-first century, more than four million people died for nothing.
Yet as much as Americans may want to forget, no person in North Korea does. By now, the people of the United States should have learned the value of listening to those who wish them harm. They neglected terrorist incidents until the morning of September 11; as pundits say, Islamic militants were at war with them but they were not at war with the militants. Perhaps Americans had an excuse for being out of touch with al-Qaeda then, but that is not the case with the DPRK now. Pyongyang publicly threatens to incinerate the United States every so often.
So whats North Koreas beef with America? Kim Il Sung, in his closed nation, was able to build a mythology upon the foundation of the Korean War, and it is hatred of the United States, the basis of that mythology, that sustains the regime today. The Kim family continues to call America the enemy, and America remains unaware.
God under Glass
At least we cant accuse David Letterman of forgetting about North Korea. “Are you familiar with Kim Jong Il?” he asked one night. “Maybe you remember his father, Men Ta Lee Il.” The current rulers father was born near Pyongyang to Christian and middle-class parents on the day the Titanic sank, April 15, 1912. Then, the little boy was known as Kim Song Ju—he later appropriated the name of a legendary Korean patriot, Kim Il Sung. His family moved to the Manchurian region of China when he was seven, and he stayed there during most of his formative years.