SEOUL, South Korea — 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.
On Thursday, the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting on July 27, 1953, the isolated state will celebrate “Victory Day” in the “Great Fatherland Liberation War.”
The paradox explains much about North Korea and the regime’s hold on its people: that a state can portray bloody devastation as a triumph seven decades later.
State control, entrenched for decades and overseen today by Kim’s grandson Kim Jong-un, practically maintains an information monopoly. The unchallenged official narrative preaches patriotic, revolutionary resistance against diabolical foreign villains.
The 70th anniversary of the war’s end has spawned a slew of books and symposiums in Seoul and Washington on the state of the bilateral alliance, but the regime in Pyongyang looks set to further buffer its official narrative during official commemorations.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu arrived late Tuesday. Cheering soldiers lined 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 People’s Congress, was also expected to attend.
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North Korea watchers question whether the VIP visits herald the end of the border closures that Pyongyang initiated against COVID-19 three years ago. They will also be watching to see whether North Korea seeks closer ties with its wartime allies, both of which have complicated, sometimes conflicted relations with the mercurial Kim regime.
To judge just from North Korea’s hyperactive propaganda machine, patriotic fervor was building to mark the anniversary.
Cheery old veterans of both sexes, dressed in uniforms dripping in medals, arrived by plane and train in the capital and spoke to schools and unions. Visitors at a gallery gazed at 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 were expected to be capped by yet another giant military parade through Pyongyang. The ritual has allowed Mr. Kim to showcase his most powerful new weapons as a threat and a warning to 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 played out.
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Western narrative, Eastern narrative
The Western narrative is that the great powers divided the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II after 35 years of Japanese imperial rule. The Soviets occupied the north and the Americans the south. Separate states arose in 1948.
In the south, leftist insurgencies faced brutal counterinsurgencies. Skirmishes and incursions flared along the border, the 38th parallel.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an all-out invasion spearheaded by Russian armor. The incursion halted in the southeast as troops from South Korea, the U.S. and allied nations rallied. In September, an audacious Marine landing at Inchon turned the tide. Kim’s defeated men fled.
U.S.-led forces stormed north in October. As winter fell, they were countered by massed Chinese forces. In a world-shocking turnaround, they were comprehensively defeated. The 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 death in March 1953 was the July armistice possible.
In North Korean accounts, American GIs started the war, even though U.S. occupation troops had largely withdrawn from the peninsula.
“They portray [their 1950 invasion] as a counteroffensive, a preventative war,” said Daniel Pinkston, an international relations scholar at Troy University and a 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.
North Korea portrays aerial bombardment as horrific, though official accounts focus heavily on brilliant counterstrategies of digging in deep and existing underground, said Tony Michell, 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 [after a 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, a scene of military parades, was formed from the capital’s bulldozed rubble.
Pyongyang also clings to a claim that Beijing and Moscow have quietly dropped — that Washington waged biological warfare during the three-year war.
The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Memorial displays alleged bioweapons containers and images of disease-carrying insects in snow. In reality, they would not have survived icy temperatures, Mr. Pinkston said.
Further evidence has largely eroded Pyongyang’s claims, but North Koreans and some leftists globally remain convinced.
Official narratives are disseminated in school. Visitors to the northern town of Sinuiju have been treated to kindergarten theatrical performances in which villainous GIs sport rat tails.
“I believe every schoolchild understands that the end of the war was a victory, as they say they are the only country that has won against America,” Mr. Michel said.
Culture wars
Popular culture reinforces the narrative. 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 guerrilla 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) shows 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 during a U.S. occupation. As elsewhere in Asia, comics are popular among youths.
“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] worldview,” said Jacco Zwetsloot, a Dutch podcaster with specialist media NK News. “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 said, is imperialist Japanese returning to Korea to assist Americans by reactivating traitorous spy nets.
It promotes notions of continuous villainy and a siege mentality.
“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 hard-core anti-American propaganda inhabits a museum in Sinchon, southwest of Pyongyang. Disturbingly grisly paintings depict rampaging GIs sadistically torturing civilians with pliers, axes and heated tongs.
The museum was closed to foreign visitors in 2018 as Mr. Kim struck up an unlikely personal diplomacy with President Trump. Mr. Zwetsloot thinks the reality behind Sinchon was bitter intra-Korean atrocities that were later blamed on the Americans. He said it is unclear whether the site has or will reopen.
* Corrections: Sergei Shoigu’s position was misstated in the original article — he is Russia’s defense minister. And Tony Michell’s name was misspelled in the original version of this story and has been corrected.
Hear Andrew Salmon and Guy Taylor on the marking of the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice:
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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