4 ms·
This article, and especially its title, is extremely misleading. Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla fighter AGAINST the Japanese in northern China, winning accolades
by awl130 11y ago
This article, and especially its title, is extremely misleading. Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla fighter AGAINST the Japanese in northern China, winning accolades as a part of the Chinese communist army before taking over north Korea. Leaders of North Korea in the early days were chosen based on their loyalty to the communist party.
It may be true that the DPRK copied items of propaganda from Japan. But to say that the DPRK was based on imperial Japan is like saying the Nazi party was based on the Roman Empire (from which it lifted the eagle symbol), or worse yet, the Indo-European civilization (from which it took the swastika). Certain design elements and terminology were probably copied, but they were taken for practical purposes and had little to do with ideology.
- mc32 11y agoYeah, Vox is losing credibility. This explanation sounds very forced in the face of how communism coöpted the tools of worship to retrain them on the secular state and to some degree the cult of personality. So, it's like they, vox, want to make this explanation work, because it's plausible. I imagine if they put some effort into it, could find another half dozen plausible explanations.
- MrZongle2 11y ago"Yeah, Vox is losing credibility." Serious question: did they ever have credibility? Other than being able to apparently fund a site and pay (?) writers, is there something else there I just wasn't aware of?
- OopsCriticality 11y agoThey have none in my eyes. I used to email them pointing out simple factual errors in their articles (i.e., stuff that a quick Google or Wiki search would find). Never once received a response back. Almost always, there would be silent updates to their articles correcting the errors... I refuse to succumb to Gell-Mann Amnesia: if Vox's quality control is crap on issues that are the small set I am informed on, then I am forced to conclude it's crap in other areas too. Aside from the QC failures, failing to clearly disclose the corrections strikes me as difficult to defend journalistically.
- xlm1717 11y agoI think that may have been what the article was trying to claim. The Koreans learned from the Japanese, and the Soviets simply recruited these Koreans to set up the cult of personality around the Kim family. It doesn't matter that Kim Il Sung fought against the Japanese, the Soviets installed many of the same high-ranking Koreans that were previously doing propaganda for Japan, except they were doing propaganda for the Soviet puppet regime.
- georgecmu 11y agoThat's what the article may try to claim, but it's factually not true. See my comment above.
- georgecmu 11y agoThis article's claims are true -- but only for South Korea. Between the end of WW2 and the start of Korean war, the North has seen an exodus of landowners, former government officials, and other beneficiaries of the Japanese occupation: they left the North for the far more tolerant South. The new government, press and education cadres for the most part consisted of ethnic Koreans from China, Manchuria, and the Soviet Union, and relatively few came from Korean resistance fighters that stayed in the Korea proper. Kim Il Sung himself fought in Manchuria in 1930s and entered Korea in 1945 as a captain in the Red Army. The politics and ideology were built on Soviet blueprints under Soviet supervision [1]. Soviet influence can still be seen in the Party jargon and the formal political language [2]. It wasn't until the late 50s that Kim Il Sung won the political infighting and secured his hold on power, simultaneously breaking out from under Soviet and Chinese control and introducing the ideology of self-reliance and isolationism. In South Korea, however, Rhee Syngman did not have the choice of importing unsullied cadres (e.g. a vanishingly small percentage of American Koreans in 1940s had higher education), and so did had not much choice but to rely on the Korean collaborators [3]: Rhee himself had been an independence activist, and his relations with the Chinilpa Korean elites who had collaborated with the Japanese were in the words of the South Korean historian Kyung Moon Hwang often "contentious", but in the end an understanding was reached, whereas in exchange for their support, Rhee would not purge the elites. In particular, the Koreans who had served in the colonial-era National Police, whom the Americans had retained after August 1945 were promised by Rhee that their jobs would not be threatened by him. Upon independence in 1948, 53% of South Korean police officers were men who had served in the National Police during the Japanese occupation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terentii_Shtykov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terentii_Shtykov [2] http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-dialect-as-a-soviet-russian-translation/ http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-dialect-as-a-sovi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee
- qsymmachus 11y agoIt does not follow that because Kim Il Sung fought against the Japanese, he was not influenced by Japanese ideology. Before you dismiss the article's argument out of hand, take a look at "The Cleanest Race" by B. R. Myers, which is a much more informed articulation of the same thesis (and a very interesting read to boot).
- awl130 11y agoTrue. But the article is not stating that he was influenced by Japanese ideology, it is stating that he based his ideology on it. Which is a radical idea. I have not read BR Meyers but I have read Lankov, Cumings and other more well-known and experienced scholars of DPRK who differ significantly with Meyers. It is an interesting theory and I'm sure it will sell books but not the accepted theory by any large group in ROK, Japan, US and certainly not DPRK.
- stcredzero 11y agoWhat I understand about the Juche ideology, is that the exceptionalism of the Korean nation/race is a fundamental part of it. Much as it was in Japan, "racial purity" was actually a traditional component of status in Korea. Such ideas are found in fascism, but I think basically everyone had such ideas in their culture/society as a matter of course. I was born in the US, but my mom's side of the family is actually from North Korea. My grandfather somehow managed to prosper as a Korean, even in the Japanese occupation educational system, and became a doctor. He was even an entrepreneur, making money off of what we'd now call "micro-lending". So when the communists came to power, grandfather could easily predict that the communists weren't going to like him very much. (My mom and her younger brother were smuggled south in a freighter in a pitch black compartment.) When you next watch "Game of Thrones" keep this in mind: The morality portrayed was basically the morality of the real world up until the 1700s, and then it only slowly started to improve. It's going to be a long process. We're still at it.
- oxryly1 11y agoAlso applies to all of Star Wars, which I struggle to reconcile with how much I enjoy (most of) the movies.
- stcredzero 11y agoAlso applies to all of Star Wars Well, basically, Star Wars is a "futuristic" themed fantasy. So no wonder the morality portrayed in Star Wars is that of a Fantasy story.
- oxryly1 11y agoI know... it chafes me to see pre-enlightenment values amongst spaceships and space travel and sci-fi-like environments.