North Korea celebrates the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27th, naming it ‘Victory Day’. ‘Victory Day’ is an abbreviation for ‘Victory Memorial Day in the Fatherland Liberation War’. They claim that they won the Korean War that broke out in June 1950.
North Korean history textbooks roughly explain it this way: “South Korea was incited by the U.S. imperialist war maneuvers and first launched a surprise attack against North Korea, but the North Korean People’s Army repelled it and pushed it all the way to the south. The unexpected invasion of the Korean Peninsula by the U.S. Empire (the U.S. dispatch of troops to the Korean Peninsula and the September 15 Incheon Landing Operation) placed the country in a national crisis.
However, under the leadership of Leader Kim Il-sung, we successfully prevented this and won the war in self-defense.” This explanation is nothing more than a one-sided assertion and a distortion of history. This is because it is widely accepted fact revealed by the release of ‘former Soviet Union confidential documents’ that the Korean War was a ‘war of surprise southern invasion’ launched by Kim Il Sung with the support of the Soviet Union (Stalin) and China (Mao Zedong).
This is apparent from the fact that North Korean forces entered the South Korean capital of Seoul just three days after the war began. In the history of world warfare, there has never been a case where a country that started a war kept retreating and then its capital fell after three days. Therefore, it is clear that the so-called “South Korean invasion of North Korea” theory is a fiction.
The three resolutions on the Korean War adopted by the UN Security Council in 1950 also made it clear that it was North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and characterized it as a “breach of peace”. The expression “Fatherland Liberation War” is also inappropriate. This is just part of the terminological confusion tactics designed to mislead the world about the invasion war launched by North Korea to unify the Korean Peninsula in red. Furthermore, the Korean War was practically tied up in knots with the signing of the armistice in 1953, with neither side winning.
The war has not ended between North and South Korea yet, they are still in a state of armistice. The “win” claim is nonsense. North Korea normally propagated through its media, saying, “Without the great victory of July 27, we could not imagine today’s pride and self-esteem,” and “The reason why all the people today absolutely support our party’s measures to strengthen self-defense is because they have clearly engraved in their mind the aggressive and beastly instincts of the U.S. Empire of the 1950’s”.
They also held various commemorative events. Through various promotional activities, propaganda, military parades, and mass gatherings, they tried to elevate the atmosphere of ‘Victory Day’ while also inciting hostile anti-American sentiments. In short, they are utilizing Victory Day to foster regime solidarity and to encourage support for the military adventurism policy. However, it remains questionable whether such methods can enhance the sense of unity between the party and the people.
The ground for the existence of a regime is to improve the lives and welfare of the people. However, North Korea ignores this and prioritizes the allocation of resources towards the development of weapons such as nuclear missiles, etc. They also invest a vast amount of finances in regime propaganda. In 2022, North Korea launched missiles more than 60 times.
They spent nearly 10 million dollars for the launch of the Hwasong-17, the world’s longest intercontinental ballistic missile(ICBM). The total cost of the missile launch is said to have exceeded 720 million dollars. North Korea is a country where the food situation is one of the worst ones, yet missile launches are the most, which is the current state of North Korea.
In 2010, Professor Vitit Muntarbhorn of Thailand, the first UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, urged the North Korean regime to abandon the ‘Military-First Politics’ that fixates on weapons development and instead perform ‘People-First Politics’ that prioritizes the well-being of the populace. Unfortunately, such demands and aspirations of the international community have not been realized yet.
A country cannot be sustained and managed solely through empty show and bravado. North Korea’s supreme leader must abandon the obsession with weapons development and Russo-North Korean military cooperation and start by genuinely addressing the hardships of the people’s lives. The pride of the “North Korean people” can be maintained by solving the “food problem” on their own and by acting as a responsible member of the international community through sincere adherence to international norms. In this regard, Kim Jong-un, should take the concerns and warnings expressed by the international community about the arms trading and strengthening of military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, which threaten peace in Northeast Asia, very seriously. Now it is time for North Korea to change, too. Seong-ho jhe – (JHE, Seong-ho, Professor Emeritus of Graduate School of Law in Chung-Ang University)
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