Perspectives on Korean War

By Michael Breen

Sixty years ago today, when North Korean tanks began rumbling through the now DMZ it was the start of the Korean War. Back then the main actors in the bloody drama that unfolded understood events in different ways.

``Free Korea," as the South was known, considered itself invaded. Indeed it had been. Ill-equipped and unprepared, its forces were helpless to prevent the North Koreans from taking Seoul and pummeling their way through the country with astonishing speed.

The fact that ceremonies this week commemorating the June 25 invasion are greater in scale and significance than any events marking the July 27 armistice underscores South Korea's perception of itself as the victim.

The North Koreans, on the other hand, saw themselves as landing the big punch in a fight that had already started. With reference to that fight, they also considered themselves victims. The country had been divided against its will and the two sides were in a deadly rivalry. Kim Il-sung, the country's leader, wanted to reunify the Korean nation and was convinced that the people in the South would rise up and welcome his forces as their liberators.

That never happened. Instead, his horrendous miscalculation achieved the opposite, sealing in blood a division that continues to this day. After two generations of hatred, the two Korean states have gone their separate ways and, reading between the lines of their policies, wish to avoid reunification.

Within months of the invasion, Kim's forces were wrecked by American and allied intervention and were only saved by the intervention of China. Since the war, the North has always denied that it invaded, claiming instead it was responding to an American attack. At its heart this is a lie, but one that North Koreans now believe to be true.

In a lie of another sort, Pyongyang denies its own people access to the embarrassing fact that they were saved by the Chinese. Even more buried is the fact that the Soviet Military Advisory Corps in Pyongyang wrote the plan for the attack on South Korea.

The Americans and their allies did not know this fact, but were close: they suspected that international communism had made its move and that Kim Il-sung was Stalin's puppet. The previous year, Mao Zedong's communist forces had taken China. The fear was that if South Korea fell, others would follow.

This view was discredited later in the mid-1970s when American scholars were given access to documents seized from Pyongyang during the war. New books interpreted the war as civil and suggested that American intervention should not have happened.

This revisionist perspective, as it is known, was influenced by popular opposition to a similar war in Vietnam, where American failed to prevent the fall of its ally, the South, to communism. But the revisionists were wrong in seeing the fear of communism as a delusion. They failed to appreciate the sense in free democratic nations that communism represented the greatest threat to civilization the modern world had known. The Soviet gulag, the vicious repression in North Korea, and the killing fields of Cambodia were all justified by the class war tenets of this new global faith and lay in store for nations that fell to its promise of justice.

For Koreans on both sides, the war ended the fiction of brotherhood. It also ended the fuzziness about what separated them into two camps. Although we talk of ``left" and ``right," ideology played a very small role in the way Koreans found themselves on different sides. Now, family connections with the other side were enough for people on both sides to be denied education, good jobs, or worse.

While many educated people in the South in the pre-war years were inclined to socialist notions of justice and equality, the war changed any consideration of ideas that were favored by the enemy. Thus then-President Syngman Rhee favored living off American aid rather than develop structured economic planning because the latter seemed like something for "the Reds," as communists were called.

For decades in South Korea, authorities treated even mild-mannered socialism with brutal force. Anyone who had expressed curiosity about North Korea risked torture and prison. In the 1950s, a political leader was executed for proposing North-South talks.

Now more Nazi than communist, given its race-based nationalism, the North is still worse in terms of basic rights than the rightist South of the 1950s.

Such differences aside, the common self-perception of Koreans on both sides as victims of greater powers blinds many even today to a simple truth about the war. That is that regardless of whether Stalin wrote the plan and Mao saved the North and regardless of whether the United Nations saved the South, the war was very much an attack by Koreans on Koreans and therein lies the reason that the two countries remain divided today.

Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.