Post by lordroel on Aug 14, 2016 17:51:27 GMT
What If: North Korea wins the Korean War
The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, and by late August the North Korean armies controlled some 95% of the Korean Peninsula. The North Koreans were pushing toward Busan, the last refuge of the badly outnumbered and demoralized South Korean forces. Had the Americans chosen not to join the fighting, the collapse of the Southern defenses was only a question of time, and not a long time at that.
Thus we can imagine how on some day in October or November 1950 the North Korean tanks would have fought their way to the streets of Busan. President Syngman Rhee and the luckier (or better connected) people from his entourage would have been flown to Japan and then to the US, to create an increasingly impotent government-in-exile while the less fortunate would have fought for a space on board the last crowded ships hastily leaving the Busan harbor under the heavy fire of the Reds' artillery.
And then what? All of Korea would have been united under the auspices of a Stalinist regime, initially led by Kim Il-sung. Severe waves of terror were certain to follow: the like-minded regimes in Europe were killing people in the tens of thousands, and in Korea a recent war with all its atrocities would have made the winners even more inclined to settle scores. I would say that 100,000 killed in action or dead in prison camps would appear to be a relatively small number for the early 1950s.
Kim Il-sung would have remained the leader of the unified country, at least for the first few years, but his grasp on power would have been precarious. In real history, the Korean War helped him a lot. First, it led to Chinese involvement, so the Chinese could be manipulated to neutralize the Russians, who once were masters of the North.
Second, the permanent division of Korea, which is what happened in reality, also meant that domestic communists lost their power base south of the 38th Parallel, and thus could be easily slaughtered from 1953-55. And, last but not least, the war experience produced a number of people who were dedicated personal followers of Kim Il-sung and his system. The combat experience, the desire to avenge fallen comrades, and intense ideological indoctrination made many a former soldier into the "steel warriors of the Great Leader".
In our hypothetical case, things would be slightly different. The South Korean communists, the major group of internal opposition within the party leadership, would get a significant boost from such a victory, re-establishing control over their power base in the South with its far greater population. In real history, the Southerners were mercilessly slaughtered just after the war.
In our counter-factual story, Kim Il-sung would still do his best to undermine their influence, and the Russians (for a while more powerful in post-1950 Korean affairs than was the case in real history) would probably side with him - as they sided with the established regimes in Eastern Europe when the East European leaders began to hunt down and kill all their potential rivals among the communist leaders.
Still, this would be a difficult power struggle with a rather uncertain outcome. There were some real chances that Kim Il-sung himself would end up being executed as an "unmasked spy" on the US Central Intelligence Agency payroll from 1940 (never mind that there was no CIA in 1940), and a "Japanese agent in colonial times".
Does this sound absurd? Well, perhaps, but definitely not more absurd than accusations Kim Il-sung himself leveled against purged communist leaders in real history.
How would a unified communist Korea have dealt with the two major challenges of the late 1950s - de-Stalinization and the split between China and Russia? Most likely, the reaction would have been very similar to what really happened. De-Stalinization and associated hopes about "socialism with a human face" won remarkably weak support in communist East Asia, then drunk with dreams about an egalitarian paradise and national greatness.
The milieu of East Asian communism of that era produced tyrants, not reformers: in other words, Maos and Pol Pots, but not Khrushchevs or Dubceks. The time of Deng Xiaoping came later, when the utter failure of utopian dreams became very easy for everybody to see.
None of the communist countries of the region chose to liberalize themselves along Soviet lines in the 1950s (Mongolia was an exception but, frankly, in those times it was a Soviet republic in everything but name). In all countries of East Asia the supporters of mild democratic reforms were crushed and sent to prison camps, and a cannibalistic version of communism reigned supreme until the late 1970s.
I do not have much doubt that the fate of democracy-minded dissenters in a unified Korea of the 1960s, be this state led by Kim Il-sung or by any other communist strongman, would have been as sad as was actually the case in the northern part of divided Korea.
The Sino-Soviet split would have been a boon for every rational Korean communist government. It would have given unified Korea room for complicated diplomatic maneuvers. In real history, Kim Il-sung's government did what any decent government would and
should do - it exploited to the fullest the ambitions and phobias of quarreling giants while quietly milking both of them. Any other Korean government would have attempted to do the same, with less or greater success.
But what would have been different? Would it mean that a unified Korea would have become just another version of Kim Il-sung's North? To an extent, yes. The 1960s would have been a time of frantic mobilization drives, mass brainwashing and political persecution on a grand scale. However, two things would have been different.
First, without bitter war experience, without an ample supply of the battle-hardened zealots and without daily confrontation with the rival (and also increasingly successful and free) South, the all-Korean communist regime might have been somewhat less murderous, although this might not have been the case in the 1960s, when insanely radical plans were in vogue across East Asia.
If simultaneous Chinese experience is a guide, I would suspect that those times would have added another few tens of thousands or so dead people to the regime's body count. Without the South across the border, the Pyongyang leaders would have behaved a lot more recklessly in the 1960s, as China did in the bloody decade of the Cultural Revolution. But in the course of time, liberalization would have come easier - as happened in China.
Second, without a powerful South sitting just across the border, the North would have been more willing to experiment and reform. Perhaps it would have started Chinese-style reforms at an early stage - maybe even earlier than China itself. In real history, the North has been afraid that its populace would learn too much about South Korean prosperity and that this would result in the regime's collapse. Without the South hanging around and being so provocatively prosperous and free, bolder domestic policies would have become possible.
In the long run, it is a big question whether the regime would have collapsed around 1990, or would have survived, like those of China and Vietnam. I suspect that the second option would have been more likely.
What would Seoul have looked like? Pretty much as Shenyang or Hanoi looks now (or as Seoul looked in real history back in the 1970s): crowds of cyclists on dirty streets, a few highrise buildings, an occasional slogan about the greatness of "socialism with Korean characteristics", and an occasional chauffeured car of a local cadre-turn-capitalist: light-years behind the current South Korean prosperity, light-years ahead of the current North Korean destitution.
The intellectuals would be unhappy, of course, and I imagine them secretly talking about the horrors of torture chambers of the 1960s and mass executions of the 1950s - pretty much as dissenting intellectuals in Moscow did in the 1970s and Chinese intellectuals do right now. Some dissenting writers would even secretly collect materials about the dirty linen of the regime, to be later smuggled overseas and broadcast by the Voice of America.
For them it would mean real but not certain risk of imprisonment, of an involuntarily trip to the mines somewhere in North Hamgyong province, but moderate dissent would probably be tacitly tolerated, much as it was tolerated in post-Stalin Russia or present-day China.
The actual number of political prisoners would be far smaller than in present-day North Korea, but far greater than at any period of South Korean history (do not tell this to a young South Korean intellectual, but as dictators go, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, South Korean strongmen of the 1960s and 1970s, were very moderate dictators with really impressive economic records). And, of course, there would be none of those countless dead of the Great North Korean Famine.
In a nutshell, "a great victory in the autumn of 1950" would probably have made life for the North Korean minority (one-third of the peninsular population) much more agreeable, but only at the expense of the lives of South Korean majority. The entire country would have been pretty much like Vietnam nowadays: a combination of a still poor but fast-growing economy, with an authoritarian but relatively permissive political regime.
The North Korean military victory in 1950 would probably have put many millions of South Koreans through very tough times, killing a significant part of them in the process. But it also would have saved many North Koreans and probably have made their lives much better.
Well, we should not be surprised too much: it is increasingly clear that the interests of two Korean peoples are not necessarily congruent, as the more than real events of the past decade clearly demonstrate.
Previous published in the Asian Times Online with a article called: If the North had won the Korean War ...
The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, and by late August the North Korean armies controlled some 95% of the Korean Peninsula. The North Koreans were pushing toward Busan, the last refuge of the badly outnumbered and demoralized South Korean forces. Had the Americans chosen not to join the fighting, the collapse of the Southern defenses was only a question of time, and not a long time at that.
Thus we can imagine how on some day in October or November 1950 the North Korean tanks would have fought their way to the streets of Busan. President Syngman Rhee and the luckier (or better connected) people from his entourage would have been flown to Japan and then to the US, to create an increasingly impotent government-in-exile while the less fortunate would have fought for a space on board the last crowded ships hastily leaving the Busan harbor under the heavy fire of the Reds' artillery.
And then what? All of Korea would have been united under the auspices of a Stalinist regime, initially led by Kim Il-sung. Severe waves of terror were certain to follow: the like-minded regimes in Europe were killing people in the tens of thousands, and in Korea a recent war with all its atrocities would have made the winners even more inclined to settle scores. I would say that 100,000 killed in action or dead in prison camps would appear to be a relatively small number for the early 1950s.
Kim Il-sung would have remained the leader of the unified country, at least for the first few years, but his grasp on power would have been precarious. In real history, the Korean War helped him a lot. First, it led to Chinese involvement, so the Chinese could be manipulated to neutralize the Russians, who once were masters of the North.
Second, the permanent division of Korea, which is what happened in reality, also meant that domestic communists lost their power base south of the 38th Parallel, and thus could be easily slaughtered from 1953-55. And, last but not least, the war experience produced a number of people who were dedicated personal followers of Kim Il-sung and his system. The combat experience, the desire to avenge fallen comrades, and intense ideological indoctrination made many a former soldier into the "steel warriors of the Great Leader".
In our hypothetical case, things would be slightly different. The South Korean communists, the major group of internal opposition within the party leadership, would get a significant boost from such a victory, re-establishing control over their power base in the South with its far greater population. In real history, the Southerners were mercilessly slaughtered just after the war.
In our counter-factual story, Kim Il-sung would still do his best to undermine their influence, and the Russians (for a while more powerful in post-1950 Korean affairs than was the case in real history) would probably side with him - as they sided with the established regimes in Eastern Europe when the East European leaders began to hunt down and kill all their potential rivals among the communist leaders.
Still, this would be a difficult power struggle with a rather uncertain outcome. There were some real chances that Kim Il-sung himself would end up being executed as an "unmasked spy" on the US Central Intelligence Agency payroll from 1940 (never mind that there was no CIA in 1940), and a "Japanese agent in colonial times".
Does this sound absurd? Well, perhaps, but definitely not more absurd than accusations Kim Il-sung himself leveled against purged communist leaders in real history.
How would a unified communist Korea have dealt with the two major challenges of the late 1950s - de-Stalinization and the split between China and Russia? Most likely, the reaction would have been very similar to what really happened. De-Stalinization and associated hopes about "socialism with a human face" won remarkably weak support in communist East Asia, then drunk with dreams about an egalitarian paradise and national greatness.
The milieu of East Asian communism of that era produced tyrants, not reformers: in other words, Maos and Pol Pots, but not Khrushchevs or Dubceks. The time of Deng Xiaoping came later, when the utter failure of utopian dreams became very easy for everybody to see.
None of the communist countries of the region chose to liberalize themselves along Soviet lines in the 1950s (Mongolia was an exception but, frankly, in those times it was a Soviet republic in everything but name). In all countries of East Asia the supporters of mild democratic reforms were crushed and sent to prison camps, and a cannibalistic version of communism reigned supreme until the late 1970s.
I do not have much doubt that the fate of democracy-minded dissenters in a unified Korea of the 1960s, be this state led by Kim Il-sung or by any other communist strongman, would have been as sad as was actually the case in the northern part of divided Korea.
The Sino-Soviet split would have been a boon for every rational Korean communist government. It would have given unified Korea room for complicated diplomatic maneuvers. In real history, Kim Il-sung's government did what any decent government would and
should do - it exploited to the fullest the ambitions and phobias of quarreling giants while quietly milking both of them. Any other Korean government would have attempted to do the same, with less or greater success.
But what would have been different? Would it mean that a unified Korea would have become just another version of Kim Il-sung's North? To an extent, yes. The 1960s would have been a time of frantic mobilization drives, mass brainwashing and political persecution on a grand scale. However, two things would have been different.
First, without bitter war experience, without an ample supply of the battle-hardened zealots and without daily confrontation with the rival (and also increasingly successful and free) South, the all-Korean communist regime might have been somewhat less murderous, although this might not have been the case in the 1960s, when insanely radical plans were in vogue across East Asia.
If simultaneous Chinese experience is a guide, I would suspect that those times would have added another few tens of thousands or so dead people to the regime's body count. Without the South across the border, the Pyongyang leaders would have behaved a lot more recklessly in the 1960s, as China did in the bloody decade of the Cultural Revolution. But in the course of time, liberalization would have come easier - as happened in China.
Second, without a powerful South sitting just across the border, the North would have been more willing to experiment and reform. Perhaps it would have started Chinese-style reforms at an early stage - maybe even earlier than China itself. In real history, the North has been afraid that its populace would learn too much about South Korean prosperity and that this would result in the regime's collapse. Without the South hanging around and being so provocatively prosperous and free, bolder domestic policies would have become possible.
In the long run, it is a big question whether the regime would have collapsed around 1990, or would have survived, like those of China and Vietnam. I suspect that the second option would have been more likely.
What would Seoul have looked like? Pretty much as Shenyang or Hanoi looks now (or as Seoul looked in real history back in the 1970s): crowds of cyclists on dirty streets, a few highrise buildings, an occasional slogan about the greatness of "socialism with Korean characteristics", and an occasional chauffeured car of a local cadre-turn-capitalist: light-years behind the current South Korean prosperity, light-years ahead of the current North Korean destitution.
The intellectuals would be unhappy, of course, and I imagine them secretly talking about the horrors of torture chambers of the 1960s and mass executions of the 1950s - pretty much as dissenting intellectuals in Moscow did in the 1970s and Chinese intellectuals do right now. Some dissenting writers would even secretly collect materials about the dirty linen of the regime, to be later smuggled overseas and broadcast by the Voice of America.
For them it would mean real but not certain risk of imprisonment, of an involuntarily trip to the mines somewhere in North Hamgyong province, but moderate dissent would probably be tacitly tolerated, much as it was tolerated in post-Stalin Russia or present-day China.
The actual number of political prisoners would be far smaller than in present-day North Korea, but far greater than at any period of South Korean history (do not tell this to a young South Korean intellectual, but as dictators go, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, South Korean strongmen of the 1960s and 1970s, were very moderate dictators with really impressive economic records). And, of course, there would be none of those countless dead of the Great North Korean Famine.
In a nutshell, "a great victory in the autumn of 1950" would probably have made life for the North Korean minority (one-third of the peninsular population) much more agreeable, but only at the expense of the lives of South Korean majority. The entire country would have been pretty much like Vietnam nowadays: a combination of a still poor but fast-growing economy, with an authoritarian but relatively permissive political regime.
The North Korean military victory in 1950 would probably have put many millions of South Koreans through very tough times, killing a significant part of them in the process. But it also would have saved many North Koreans and probably have made their lives much better.
Well, we should not be surprised too much: it is increasingly clear that the interests of two Korean peoples are not necessarily congruent, as the more than real events of the past decade clearly demonstrate.
Previous published in the Asian Times Online with a article called: If the North had won the Korean War ...
