SEOUL — North Korea ended the 1950-1953 Korean conflict bombed to smithereens, its land scattered with countless dead, and its key war aim — the unification of the peninsula under its leader Kim Il Sung — thwarted by the U.S. military and its allies.
But on Thursday — the 70th anniversary of the armistice which ended the fighting on July 27, 1953 — the isolated state will celebrate “Victory Day” in the “Great Fatherland Liberation War.”
It’s a paradox that explains much about North Korea and the hold the regime has on its people that a state that endured such bloody devastation can portray it as a triumph seven decades later.
Practically, state control — entrenched for decades and overseen today by Kim’s grandson, Kim Jong Un — maintains an information monopoly. Emotionally, the unchallenged official narrative preaches patriotic, revolutionary resistance against diabolical foreign villains.
While the 70th anniversary of the war’s end has spawned a sew of books and symposia in Seoul and Washington on the state of the bilateral alliance, in Pyongyang the regime looks set to further buffer its official narrative during Thursday’s official commemorations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Shoigu arrived late Tuesday, greeted by cheering soldiers lining the streets as he and his entourage drove from the airport into Pyongyang. A Chinese delegation led by a lower-level official, Li Hongzhong, vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the Peoples Congress, is also expected to attend.
North Korea watchers question if the VIP visits herald the end of the border closures North Korea initiated against COVID-19 in three years ago. They will also be watching to see whether North Korea seeks closer ties with its wartime allies, both of whom have complicated, sometimes conflicted relations with the mercurial Kim regime.
To judge just from North Korea‘s own hyperactive propaganda machine, patriotic fervor is building to mark the anniversary.
Cheery old veterans of both sexes, dressed in uniforms dripping in medals, arrive by plane and train in the capital Pyongyang, and present to schools and unions. Visitors at a gallery gaze upon a huge oil portrait of a beaming Kim Il Sung, surrounded by worshipful officers.
Kim Jong Un, dressed in a black suit and backed by bemedaled officers in a military cemetery, laid a flower on a draped coffin topped with a submachine gun.
The festivities are likely to be capped by yet another giant military parade through Pyongyang, a ritual which in the past has allowed Mr. Kim to showcase his most powerful new weapons as a threat and a warning to both Seoul and Washington.
Even a 70th-anniversary coin has been minted. Its front face shows an armed soldier fiercely gesticulating under a flowing banner. He may be defying the enemy — or the enemy’s historiography of how the war and its aftermath have played out.
Western narrative, Eastern narrative
The Western narrative is that after 35 years of Japanese imperial rule, the Korean peninsula was divided by the great powers at World War II’s end. The Soviets occupied the north, the Americans the south. Separate states arose in 1948.
In the south, leftist insurgencies faced brutal counterinsurgencies. Along the frontier, the 38th Parallel, skirmishes and incursions flared.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an all-out invasion, spearheaded by Russian armor. It was halted in the southeast, as South Korean, U.S. and troops of allied nations rallied. In September, an audacious Marine landing at Inchon turned the tide. Kim’s defeated men fled.
In October, U.S.-led forces stormed north. As winter fell, they were countered by massed Chinese forces, and in a world-shocking turnaround, were comprehensively defeated. Battle surged south.
Peace talks began in the summer of 1951, with Russian leader Josef Stalin secretly urging Kim and China’s Mao Zedong to continue fighting. Only after Stalin’s March 1953 death was the July armistice possible.
Pyongyang’s narrative differs. In North Korean accounts, it is the American GIs who started the war, even though U.S. occupation troops had largely withdrawn from Korea then.
“They portray [their 1950 invasion] as a counteroffensive, a preventative war,” said Daniel Pinkston, an international relations scholar at Troy University and Korean speaker who studies state propaganda. “They claim that despite an element of surprise, their great military was able to repel it and keep going all the way” — to the distant southeast.
Aerial bombardment is portrayed in North Korea as horrific, though official accounts focus heavily on brilliant counter-strategies of digging in deep and existing underground, said Tony Michel, a Briton who has done business in the country.
“Their point is that, if Americans hone apocalyptic rhetoric that there will be nothing left standing [in a potential future conflict], they know it has happened before,” he said.
By mid-1953, just two buildings survived in Pyongyang. The capital’s central landmark, Kim Il Sung Square, scene of military parades, was formed from the capital’s bulldozed rubble.
Pyongyang also clings to a claim Beijing and Moscow quietly dropped — that Washington waged biological warfare during the three-year war.
The country’s Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Memorial displays alleged bio-war containers and images of disease-carrying insects in snow. In reality they would not have survived icy temperatures, Mr. Pinkston maintained.
Further evidence has largely eroded Pyongyang’s claims, but North Koreans, and some leftists globally, remain convinced.
Official narratives are disseminated via school. Visitors to the northern town of Sinuiju have been treated to kindergarten theatrical performances in which villainous GIs sport rat’s tails.
“I believe every school child understands that the end of the war was a victory, as they say they are the only country that has won against America,” said Mr. Michel.
Culture wars
Popular culture reinforces the narrative. Famed mass placard displays in stadiums often feature wartime imagery, and foreign tourists can buy posters and embroideries of soldiers and partisans in Pyongyang.
War film themes are not radically different from Hollywood’s — though with heavier-handed messaging.
“Boy Partisans” (1951) features heroic lads who form a guerilla unit to resist Americans in captured territory. ‘Wolmi Island” (1982) covers a unit’s hopeless fight at Inchon. “From 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.” (1990) is about a high-risk, time-constrained mission.” An Unattached Unit” (1993) sees soldiers on leave forming an ad hoc unit to resist a breakthrough.
Anime “Time Bomb (1967) covers a boy’s efforts to help his sick sister amid U.S. occupation. As elsewhere in Asia, comics are popular among youth.
“Not a lot of North Korean comics are set in the present, so it is common to have a Korean War setting, which gives four popular characters that teach the [North Korean] world view,” said Jacco Zwetsloot, a Dutch podcaster with specialist media NKNews. “They are the doughty, brave North Korean; the venal and cowardly South Korean, the evil American; and the even more evil Japanese.”
A common plotline, Mr. Zwetsloot says, is imperialist Japanese returning to Korea to assist Americans by reactivating traitorous spy nets.
Notions of continuous villainy and a siege mentality are promoted.
“They view themselves as innocent, rural people who have no malign intent, but then imperialist powers start encroaching with a desire to enslave the Korean people,” said Mr. Pinkston. “It is the class structure of Marxist-Leninism, plus ethnic nationalism.”
Still, some flexibility exists.
The most hardcore anti-American propaganda inhabits a museum in Sinchon, southwest of Pyongyang. There, disturbing, grisly paintings depict rampaging GIs sadistically torturing civilians with pliers, axes and heated tongs.
The museum was closed to foreign visitors in 2018 as North Korea‘s Mr. Kim struck up an unlikely personal diplomacy with then-President Donald Trump. Mr. Zwetsloot, who believes the reality behind Sinchon was bitter intra-Korean atrocities that were later blamed on the Americans, said it is unclear if the site has — or will — reopen.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.