"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 eligible for combat pay, as well as for the Combat Infantryman Badge and Combat Medical Badge. Nor was the West the only side concerned by what some would call the "Second Korean War." "Never," wrote the East German Ambassador to North Korea as 1967 drew to a close, "since the end of the Korean War, have there been so many and such severe incidents at the armistice line as in 1967." 4 Long overshadowed by the Vietnam War, the Korean crisis of the late 1960s has only belatedly attracted the attention of scholars. A number of works over the past decade have examined the situation in some detail, but because of source limitations, they have generally focused on the American side of the story. 5 Only in the last few years have scholars been able to open a window into the North Korean side of the conflict, largely by examining the relevant records of the DPRK's allies, most of which have been obtained and organized by the Cold War International History Project in Washington D.C. 6 What follows here is an attempt, based primarily on these new materials, to do four things: 1) to chronicle the events of the "Second Korean War"; 2) to offer some details about North Korean relations within the communist bloc, particularly with regard to the two communist superpowers; 3) to provide a more extensive examination of changing internal DPRK circumstances in the 1960s; and 4) to draw some larger 4 Letter from GDR Ambassador to DPRK, December 8, 1967, to State Secretary and First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ministerium fur Auswärtige Angelegenheiten der DDR [Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the GDR (henceforth: MfAA), G-A 320. [Document 5] 5 See for example Richard Mobley, Flash Point North Korea (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2003); Daniel Bolger, Scenes from an Unfinished War, Leavenworth Papers #19 (Combat Studies Institute, Ft. Leavenworth Kansas), 1991, on line at: http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/resources/csi/Bolger/bolger.asp (last accessed February 16, 2010); Mitchell Lerner, The Pueblo Incident (University Press of Kansas, 2002); and Nicholas E. Sarantakes, "The Quiet War," Journal of Military History, April 2000, volume 64, p. 439-58. 6 See for example, Berndt Schaefer, North Korean ‘Adventurism’ and China’s Long Shadow, 1966-1972 (CWIHP Working Paper # 44, 2004), on line at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/swp44.pdf (last accessed, December 12, 2009); Mitchell Lerner, "A Dangerous Miscalculation: New Evidence from Communist-Bloc Archives about North Korea and the Crisis of 1968," Journal of Cold War Studies, volume 6, winter 2004, p. 3-21; and Sergei Radchenko, The Soviet Union and the North Korean Seizure of the USS Pueblo: Evidence from Russian Archives, (CWIHP Working Paper #47, 2004), on line at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/CWIHP_WP_47.pdf (last accessed December 12, 2010). www.wilsoncenter.org/nkidp 2
Mitchell Lerner NKIDP Working Paper #3 December 2010 conclusions about the making of North Korean foreign policy during this period and the ideological roots that underlay it. Historians and Historiography The new materials contribute to our understanding of the Korean crisis in many specific areas. They provide, for example, fresh details about the hostility between North Korea and China during this critical decade. The schism between the two nations, of course, is not a new revelation. However, the new documents flesh out the depth of this animosity by providing some previously unknown details. Similarly, these materials help to better track the relationship between the DPRK and the Soviet Union, a relationship that evolved from a low point in the early 1960s to a much more stable connection by the later years of the decade. Still, the documents suggest that despite a superficial friendship between the two, this alliance remained fraught with tension, perhaps to a greater extent than has been generally recognized. The communist-bloc materials also demonstrate convincingly that Kim actively shaped relations between the DPRK and its communist superpower patrons, rather than, as some have alleged, being a passive actor largely reacting to the whims of the greater powers. 7 They also reveal the extent to which Kim sought to establish close relations with the emerging Communist states, notably Cuba and North Vietnam, likely with an eye towards creating a bloc of smaller communist nations, with North Korea at the head, that might someday be better positioned to influence larger bloc policy. 7 See, for example, Helen Louise Hunter's "North Korea and the Myth of Equidistance," in Tae-Hwan Kwak (ed.) The Two Koreas in World Politics (Westview Press, 1985), which claims that, "It has been the Soviets and the Chinese who have taken the initiative in changing relations. Kim has had little—if any—leverage over either" (p. 207). www.wilsoncenter.org/nkidp 3
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