What the North Koreans are taught about the second world war

by Cenodoxus

We actually don't have to speculate too much about it. While we don't have access to everything that's been written or published within North Korea, South Korea has a ministry that collects North Korean publications and media, and both Korean and Western scholars have been able to establish what the dominant narrative in North Korean culture has become. While it's frustrating not to have every detail, it's fairly obvious how and why that narrative has come to exist.

What the North Koreans are told: Kim il-Sung and his band of freedom fighters bravely forced the Japanese to relinquish the Korean peninsula, conducting brilliant attacks from a secret base on the sacred Mount Paektu. During the struggle, the future Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il was born, and he fired at retreating Japanese as early as age three. Sometime in the middle of all this, the freedom fighters also found the time to carve predictions of Kim il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il's eventual greatness into 13,000 trees in the forest surrounding Paektu. The secret base, chairs, cups, and trenches used by Kim il-Sung were miraculously preserved and are available for tour by appointment. When he had time off from slaughtering the Japanese, Kim also wrote several revolutionary operas that are performed in North Korean theaters to this day.

Foreign visitors tend to have problems keeping a straight face on the rare occasions when they're taken to these sites. Some of the more obvious "slogan trees" referenced above were also quietly removed in the late 1990s when a visiting Japanese arborist asked how it was possible for 60-year old carvings to exist on 30-year old trees.

What actually happened: This narrative is really only accurate in the sense that Kim il-Sung fought against the Japanese, but I have yet to find any historian -- Korean, Russian, Chinese, or otherwise -- who's argued that he was anything other than a fairly minor figure in a widespread anti-colonial struggle. In fact, he didn't fight in Korea at all, but rather Jiandao province in Manchuria (the northeast portion of China that has a sizable Korean-speaking minority), leading companies and battalions of the Second Corps in what became known as the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. While not the highest-ranked officer in the Corps, he seems to have been competent, and by 1935 the Japanese had put a price on this head. At that point he'd been harassing them for about 4-5 years, and he lasted another 4-5 before things got too hot and he had to run for it. He sat out World War II and the rest of the fight against the Japanese occupation in a Red Army camp in Siberia. Kim Jong-Il was actually born there in 1942, and not in Korea at all.

Small interjection: Most of what we know of this period has been constructed from old Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese records, and Kim wasn't sufficiently important to merit mention at every turn. By necessity, there's some guesswork involved, and we don't have as much information as we'd like about Kim's actual record in (X) battle, or when Kim left Manchuria, etc.

By the time Kim returned to Korea with the Red Army in 1945, he'd been out of the country for something like 20 years and spoke Chinese much better than Korean. He was tasked with giving a speech in Pyongyang -- the Soviets were on the lookout for someone they could install in local government to help control the peninsula, and he seemed like a good prospect because he took orders well and had credibility as an anti-Japanese fighter -- and Soviet Koreans not only wrote the speech for him but had to coach him on pronunciation. This was only the first of many speeches he gave, and both these and the initial run of propaganda (again, largely written by other Soviet Koreans) were heavy on gratitude to the Soviets for their assistance in driving the Japanese off the peninsula and the Chinese for having supported the anti-colonial movement.

How and when this changed (i.e., we have always been at war with Eurasia): Now, the most interesting thing about North Korean propaganda is tracing how and when it changes (subtly or otherwise) to reflect contemporary political needs. As far as the NK government is concerned, their history is flexible and can be made to serve whatever ideology they need to push at a given time. This has even extended to archaeologists going on the hunt for ancient tombs in central Pyongyang in order to prove the city's classical importance. But that's not really what you're asking about.

Anyway:

• During the early 1960s and Khrushchev's tenure in Moscow, references to Soviet aid before and during World War II start to vanish from both North Korean history books and records of Kim's speeches. Why? Because Khrushchev was trying to reform both the Soviet Union and its client states away from the Stalinist model (something to which North Korea was heavily wedded), and he also ridiculed both Mao and Kim's personality cults. While Kim had always been the figure of primary importance in the North Korean narrative concerning World War II, he changed from being the beneficiary of Soviet generosity who used resources wisely to being someone who struggled without any serious help from other nations.
• References to Chinese aid wax and wane too. To the best of my knowledge, they, too, have largely vanished from the North Korean narrative of World War II, and they are definitely not acknowledged as the people who were really running the army in which Kim was an officer.
• Nothing is said of American or Allied involvement in the fight against Japan in the Pacific. Unfortunately, I don't know what, if anything, is said about the European theater.
• References to the juche doctrine start appearing in Kim il-Sung's speeches about 15-20 years after they were actually given. IIRC, Kim's actual mention of the doctrine dates to 1961 at the earliest, but juche starts showing up everywhere in the mid-1960s to early 1970s. Why? Because Kim Jong-Il was starting to build a power base for himself in the government, and needed a concrete contribution with which to be identified; they couldn't really pass him off as a major freedom fighter when he'd been all of 3 as the war ended. So juche was it. The actual architect of the policy was Hwang Jang-Yop, who defected to South Korea in 1997, but Kim Jong-Il expanded on it, wrote papers, essays, and books (or, just as likely, had someone write them for him), and juchemysteriously started being peppered in speeches Kim il-Sung had given two decades earlier in order to establish an unbroken line of thought concerning North Korea's need for economic self-reliance.Juche is not the only idea to have been given this treatment; in fact, scholars "mined" Kim il-Sung's speeches for pro-capitalist sentiments when the government needed a way to justify its tolerance of private markets in the 1990s and 2000s.

I'm trying and failing to remember if there's anything else that jumps out about North Korean education on World War II, but I think that addresses the most important stuff.