"Mostly Propaganda in Nature:" Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology, and ...

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"Mostly Propaganda in Nature:" Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology, and the Second Korean War NKIDP Working Paper #3 launching "continuous attempts" to infiltrate South Korea with commandos. 70 In April 1968, an ambush of a United Nations Command (UNC) truck along the DMZ left four UNC soldiers dead. A few months later, the Polish Ambassador to the DPRK reported that armed clashes over the preceding six weeks had resulted in an estimated 30 deaths along the southern side of the DMZ. 71 In October, the North landed approximately 120 soldiers at different locations along the east coast of South Korea, between the towns of Uljin and Samcheok, sparking a series of fights that left 63 Southerners and many more Northerners dead. The violence had reached levels not seen since the end of Korean War in 1953, and there seemed no end in sight. "The recurrence of similar events can be expected," predicted the East German Ambassador to the DPRK. "Thus the tensions, which are also created by other factors, will certainly not diminish but rather will increase." 72 This dire prediction, however, soon proved erroneous. North Korea began to reverse course in 1969, and tensions returned to the level of the years that had preceded the Second Korean War. Military incidents still occurred occasionally, most notably the DPRK shoot-down of an American EC-121 reconnaissance plane that had been conducting aerial intelligence collection operations about 70 miles southeast of Cheongjin, killing all 31 Americans on board. Still, Northern bellicosity was clearly on the wane. The number of firefights along the DMZ fell from 236 in 1968 to 39 in 1969, and the number of South Korean soldiers killed in action fell from 145 to 1 in the same period. 73 The Pueblo men came home, and within a few years the Nixon administration began publicly discussing the possibility of removing most American 70 "Note on a conversation with the Polish Ambassador, Comrade Naperei, on 26 January 1968, in the Polish Embassy," p.1. [Document 8] 71 "Note on the Farewell Visit of the Polish Ambassador to the DPRK, Comrade Naperei, with Comrade Jarck on 26 July 1968, between 11:00 and 12:30 hours ," GDR Embassy to DPRK, July 29, 1968, PolA AA, MfAA, G-A 360, p. 2. 72 "Excerpt from a Personal Letter of the Acting Ambassador of the GDR in Pyongyang, Comrade Jarck," p. 1. 73 Bolger, Scenes from an Unfinished War. www.wilsoncenter.org/nkidp 24
Mitchell Lerner NKIDP Working Paper #3 December 2010 troops from South Korea. Even the EC-121 attack appears to have likely been the result of a command-and-control failure between DPRK local commanders and the fighter pilot, done without the approval of higher authorities. Still, the period of the Second Korean War stand as one of the most dangerous times on the Korean peninsula since 1953. And the key question remains: "Why did they do it?" The Sources of North Korean Conduct Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain DPRK behavior in this critical period. They posit a multitude of different factors, ranging from Vietnam to South Korea, from scaring away Western investment in the South to encouraging increased Communist aid to the North, from Kim's need to placate a growing military faction within his government to his desire to impress the Third World, among other explanations. This paper does not deny the impact of any of these factors. No doubt all of them played some role in the events of this critical period. History is rarely uni-casual. However, the materials that have emerged from the communist bloc archives over the past few years suggest that DPRK behavior cannot be understood by looking at these immediate factors unless they are placed within a larger framework that ties these short- term stimuli to more deeply-rooted structural forces embedded in North Korea's defining ideological paradigm. Specifically, this argument suggests, Kim manufactured the Second Korean War for two primary and related reasons: first, to ensure that he had a scapegoat for his obvious failures in the vital economic (jarip) and political (jaju) realms of Juche; and second, to demonstrate to his domestic audience that he remained true to Juche principles and traditions in the arena of defense and foreign affairs (jawi). Kim, to put it simply, was compensating for internal failures by generating external crises that would help him offset any potential threat to his control largely by using these crises as a platform to demonstrate his adherence to the nation's www.wilsoncenter.org/nkidp 25
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