North Korea makes more sense when you know its roots

Yeah, 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.

I 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.

This 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

[2] http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-dialect-as-a-sovi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee

It 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).

What 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.

All of the western political ideology (Colonialism, Communism, Fascism, Democracy) that came to Korea (and China) came by way of Japan. The Japanese Empire was the first polity in East Asia to adopt and apply Western political concepts to their government. Large numbers of Korean and Chinese scholars went to Japan to study and brought these concepts (as well as the vocabulary itself) from Japan back to their native countries with them. As a result, essentially all modern political thought in East Asia was tinted by Japanese imperialist ideology.

Not that it is the root of China's and Russia's cults of personalities, just specifically that it inspired North Korea's.

The Khmer Rouge also indulged notions of racial and ethnic `purity' as they persecuted Chinese, Vietnamese and others. Shall we imagine the Khmer Rouge was also some heretofore unrecognized manifestation of `fascism'? Attempts to salvage the intellectuals' opiate produces a great deal of nonsense.

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.

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.

It's certainly true that you didn't see the deification of the head of state as part of Nazism or Italian fascism. But it was very much part of the imperial Japanese ideology which might or might not be fascist depending on how you define the term. So you could easily argue that Japanese or North Koreans aren't really fascists. You can even argue about whether the Nazis were truly fascist but where their own thing.

I can't say I'm particularly familiar with Yukio Mishima and his coup attempt but I imagine the ideologies have to evolve when they don't have a Kempeitai working on their side behind the scenes.

I can't speak to all your points: but yes, the Japanese were racist against the Koreans.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Investigation_of_Global_Pol...

>A a family has harmony and reciprocity, but with a clear-cut hierarchy, the Japanese, as a purportedly racially superior people, were destined to rule Asia "eternally" as the head of the family of Asian nations.

And also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperit...

>It explicitly states the superiority of the Japanese over other Asian races and provides evidence that the Sphere was inherently hierarchical, including the Japanese Empire's true intention of domination over the Asian continent and Pacific Ocean.

> The militarists saw everything only in a Japanese perspective and, even worse, they insisted that all others dealing with them should do the same. For them there was only one way to do a thing, the Japanese way; only one goal and interest, the Japanese interest; only one destiny for the East Asian countries, to become so many Manchukuos or Koreas tied forever to Japan. These racial impositions... made any real understanding between the Japanese militarists and the people of our region virtually impossible.

Interestingly, even Japanese propaganda asserting racial harmony itself was tinged with racism. Compare this picture of an imaginary pro-japanese chinese demonstration,

http://chineseposters.net/gallery/e27-165.php

with another picture of japanese soldiers rescuing the chinese:

http://chineseposters.net/gallery/e27-166.php

The faces of the Chinese are ugly; nowhere near as refined or as elegant as that of the depicted Japanese in the second. One could argue this is style, but in a work that's intended to be seen by huge volumes of people, this particular detail is one of many that points to overwhelming racism.

Edit: made a content edit upon further research.

Japan after ~1900 very much flip-flopped in their policy between playing the anti-imperialist liberator of Asia and its first colonial power and equal to western colonial powers for some time. Of course there was a political power struggle within Japan about this direction. Defining moment was the victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, which was the first victory of a "3rd world" country against a traditional colonial power.

Likewise they partially treated Koreans as lost brothers that needed to be elevated and integrated into their empire and an inferior race that was to be exploited colonial style. Note that even the "integration" strategy showed some similarity to what the Nazis later (after 1938) did with their "Heim ins Reich" strategy (which included "reintegration" of ethnic Germans on foreign soil by territorial annexation).

In practical terms both policies were put into measures sometimes simultaneously, but the colonialism supporters grew stronger over time. The famous "Greater Asian Welfare Sphere" rhetoric was a perverted remains of the "liberator"-style agenda. (I read a history book on the topic many years ago, but unfortunately can't find a reference, sorry.)

Whether the Japanese empire of the time should be classified as fascist seems to be at least highly controversial among historians. I had the impression the majority see it as a nationalistic (and after the putsch 1936 also military) dictatorship.