Free The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings Page A

bandit leaders were shot to death or forced to submit. 20
     
    In other words, massive counterinsurgency punctuated the last two years of this conflict, which lasted until the eve of the German onslaught against the Soviet Union. Kim Il Sung’s unit had grown to 340 fighters by July 1940, when it again became the target of GeneralNozoe’s expeditionary force, but soon many of his comrades were killed and Kim was forced into “small-unit” operations thereafter. 21 Thousands of guerrillas were wiped out, and could be added to the estimates of about 200,000 guerrillas, Communists, secret society members, and bandits slaughtered by the Japanese going back to the Manchurian Incident in 1931.
    The disunity of the Korean diaspora—ordinary farmers seeking their livelihood, merchants trying to start a business, lesser and greater collaborators with the Japanese, a resistance made up of Communists, nationalists, bandits, and criminals—left Kim Il Sung with a conviction: unity above all else, and by whatever means necessary (taking Brecht literally). From then onward the North Korean leadership promoted a totalized politics: no dissent, no political alternatives, our way or the highway. Almost as soon as they came into power they put key guerrilla leaders in charge of almost everything (Choe Yong-gon, for example, was installed as head of the main Christian democratic party in the North). However lamentable outsiders may find this, it has been a core element of North Korean politics since the 1930s. The dilemma of political means and ends, for them, is defined by being at war with either Japan or the United States ever since. “Nothing is more important than learning to think crudely,” Brecht once said. “Crude thinking is the thinking of great men.” So was the milieu of crisis in which he wrote, and Koreans fought: crude, illiberal, murderous.
    Kim Il Sung, Kim Chaek, Choe Hyon, Choe Yong-gon, and about two hundred other key Korean leaders were the fortunate survivors of pitiless campaigns that dyed the hills of Manchukuo with Korean blood. But in 1945 these guerrillas came back to Pyongyang, colonized the regime, and in typical Korean fashion began intermarrying, producing children, and putting them through elite schools. Their descendants are the power holders in North Korea today. Regardless of Pyongyang’s preposterous and ceaseless hagiography, in short, Kim Il Sung has an impeccable pedigree in the resistance. So did his family: his father was jailed foranti-Japanese activities in 1924; he died soon after his release two years later. Kim’s middle brother, Chol-ju, reportedly died at the age of twenty in Manchukuo after his arrest in 1935 by the Japanese. Kim’s uncle Kang Chin-sok, elder brother to his mother, was arrested in 1924 and served thirteen years in a Japanese prison. The North foregrounds hundreds of similar family stories. Chu To-il, subsequently a vice-marshal of the KPA, lost one of his brothers in a Japanese “pacification” campaign, two others died as guerrillas on the battlefield, and his mother starved to death at a blockaded guerrilla base. Yi O-song’s father also starved to death in a guerrilla base, even though he was in charge of food supplies. Yi’s brother-in-law was executed, and his two sisters, part of his guerrilla group, both died of starvation. Extremely malnourished himself, Yi never reached full adult growth. In 1971 Yi, by then a lieutenant general in the KPA, became headmaster at the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, successor to the School for the Offspring of Revolutionary Martyrs first established in 1947 for the hundreds of orphans collected by then. The devastation of the Korean War sent many more thousands of children to this parentless haven, and into the leadership. This is the central educational institution for the North Korean power elite, and the symbolic crucible for molding the astonishing “family state” created out of the ashes of two devastating