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Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

This is actually false. The leaders of North Korea fought to liberate the peninsula from the Japanese, while many of the leaders of South Korea were officers in the Japanese imperial army. For a brief moment after WWII, the North Korean freedom fighters were the good guys. No, obviously, the tables have turned. But that does not remove the stain of collaboration from the South Korean elite.

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The early leaders of the United States fought to liberate their country from Great Britain but that doesn't mean they weren't strongly influenced by British ideas about government and rights.

Those leaders by and large were British. The revolution was essentially about establishing a separate cultural and political identity where there previously was none. That's different from a situation where a foreign invader conquers and occupies the land, and people who already lived there fight to throw them out.

>The revolution was essentially about establishing a separate cultural and political identity where there previously was none.

And banks, don't forget about banks.

The early leaders of the United States originally wanted the rights due them as British subjects. It turned into a full revolution later.

Is that necessarily contradictory, though? It seems quite likely that the North Koreans opposed the Japanese to get rid of the oppressor rather than for ideological reasons. They could quite easily have internalized the ideology of their enemy while they were fighting them.

> The leaders of North Korea fought to liberate the peninsula from the Japanese

What "leaders of North Korea"? The peninsula was not divided until the end of World War II and the surrender of Japan.

This sounds like a fiction invented by the regime.

Read it as "the people who subsequently became the leaders of North Korea," not "the people who led North Korea at the time."

Well, even that sounds suspect. Of course the regime would say that, but is it true?

I recall the Democratic German Republic (DDR) said the same thing.

From a quick browse of Wikipedia, it certainly looks true of Kim Il-sung. I'm too lazy to look up any other early NK leadership, but it certainly seems plausible.

Leadership of a liberated country coming from those who fought against the occupier isn't unusual. China, France, and Yugoslavia all come to mind off the top of my head. China did it twice, with the Communists on the mainland and the Nationalists in Taiwan.

If you're interested in the topic, Bruce Cumings's The Korean War is a good read.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Korean-War-History-Chronicles/

I'm not a professional historian, and just beginning to learn about relations between Korea, Japan and China over the last 150 years. Lots of surprises...

Thanks for the recommendation. Your link is busted, here's a working one for anyone else who happens across this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Korean-War-History-Chronicles/dp/0...

It looks like it's the /dp/081297896X part that's important, and the title in the URL can actually be deleted.

Anyway, I grabbed the Kindle sample and will see how it looks!

Yes. Kim Ilsung did fight against Japan. (Whether his fight had any effect on Japan is a separate matter; I don't know history well enough to answer that.)

While South Korea's first president Rhee Syngman was a leader of the "Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea" (which later became South Korea), he did not fight Japan in the battlefield, and his role in the independence movement was limited. Worse, after Japan surrendered he actively made friends with former traitors, assassinating political opponents and murdering people for being communist. He is almost certainly behind the assassination of Kim Gu, a right-wing leader of the independence movement and one of the most respected Korean politicians during the 20th century.

History of North Korea is probably the most extreme case of a young revolutionary turning into a despot himself.

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