North Korea's National Day
On the 9th of September, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) celebrates its national day, but what do we know about this mysterious, troubled country? Max Fischer of The Washington Post has written that "almost any story [on North Korea] is treated as broadly credible, no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced", but we'll try seperate the fact from fiction in this post.
Following the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, Korea was split in two, the two zones being the North and South. However, the divide was not only geographical but ideological too, with the Soviets and their communism taking the north, while the US held the south, spreading the ideas of capitalism. These divides eventually escalated into a three-year proxy war between the US and Soviet superpowers using the Koreans as pawns. Following the war and up until the 1980’s, North Korea actually fared a lot better than its southern counterpart, but by the 1990’s its ‘Juche’ (self-reliance) policy began to hinder rather than help the country and its people.
Not much can be said about North Korea without mentioning the Kim family. Supported by the Soviet Union, Kim Il-Sung became the first supreme leader following the creation of North Korea, and with his government he used his popularity to create a cult of personality around the Kim dynasty. Kim Sung-Il cleverly made North Korea an atheist country and supressed all religion, instead promoting far-fetched, overtly flattering propaganda to indoctrinate the masses; examples include that the Kim family ‘do not defecate or urinate’ and that Kim Il-Sung forced the Japanese out and guided the DPRK through the Korean war almost single-handedly. There are severe penalties for those who criticize or do not show ‘enough respect’ for the Kim regime.
Another ideology promoted by the Kim regime is that of ‘Juche’. This principle, and the ideas of the individual being ‘the master of his destiny’ and that the masses are “masters of the revolution and construction”. These principles were seen by those outside of North Korea as thinly-veiled mechanisms for sustaining the regime and its heavy-handed oppression of its people (North Korea regularly endures crop failures and famines, relying on foreign aid to help). Eventually in the 1990’s this gave way to the Songun or ‘military-first’ policy, and as an outcome of this we see North Korea as we do now – aggressive, nuclear-hungry, oppressive, and unfortunately, tactically-astute. The Kim regime have worked themselves into a place where there is no easy answer to the North Korea question.
