North Korea without the Kims

samcster94

Banned
Let's say Kim Il Sung dies in WWII and someone else runs the Communist North. How does this alt NK develop??? I don't know this era well, but I can't really imagine the same level of totalitarianism and the racist(even compared to SK or Japan, as North Korea actually bans interracial marriage) personality cult around its leaders would be absent. I also imagine it'd be less hostile to the world and probably not start a war in the way Kim Il Sung did.
 
Let's say Kim Il Sung dies in WWII and someone else runs the Communist North. How does this alt NK develop??? I don't know this era well, but I can't really imagine the same level of totalitarianism and the racist(even compared to SK or Japan, as North Korea actually bans interracial marriage) personality cult around its leaders would be absent. I also imagine it'd be less hostile to the world and probably not start a war in the way Kim Il Sung did.
Regarding North Korea's hostility...it would depend on several factors, mainly, does a Korean War occur?

If it does, does the United States bomb the country massively as in OTL?

While there are several reasons for North Korea's behavior in the world stage, one important aspect to consider is the lesson they had after the Korean War. Their country was destroyed after it, most of the industry was useless and their few suitable farming lands (if compared to South Korea) were so affected by it.

North Korea's reconstruction involved several countries, the ones standing out: Soviet Union and China.
It took a long time to rebuild the country after the utter devastation caused by the war.

While we can't only point to that (as it would be too simplistic), we must acknowledge that the Korean War surely determined how would the regime act.

And right now, when analysing North Korea's behavior we can notice that the hostility is the product of their main interest: surviving.

I totally think that neorealist theory is quite good to explain the situation regarding North Korea's aggressive foreign policy.

Sooo, coming back for your question...
It will depend on:
A) If a war takes place.
B) How does this war develops.
C) And yes, a different leadership may totally butterfly away the aggressive stance, as his replacement could totally avoid starting the war in the first place.
 
We would not speculate upon possibility of having "The Kims meet The Kardashians meet The Trumps" reality-TV series
 

samcster94

Banned
Regarding North Korea's hostility...it would depend on several factors, mainly, does a Korean War occur?

If it does, does the United States bomb the country massively as in OTL?

While there are several reasons for North Korea's behavior in the world stage, one important aspect to consider is the lesson they had after the Korean War. Their country was destroyed after it, most of the industry was useless and their few suitable farming lands (if compared to South Korea) were so affected by it.

North Korea's reconstruction involved several countries, the ones standing out: Soviet Union and China.
It took a long time to rebuild the country after the utter devastation caused by the war.

While we can't only point to that (as it would be too simplistic), we must acknowledge that the Korean War surely determined how would the regime act.

And right now, when analysing North Korea's behavior we can notice that the hostility is the product of their main interest: surviving.

I totally think that neorealist theory is quite good to explain the situation regarding North Korea's aggressive foreign policy.

Sooo, coming back for your question...
It will depend on:
A) If a war takes place.
B) How does this war develops.
C) And yes, a different leadership may totally butterfly away the aggressive stance, as his replacement could totally avoid starting the war in the first place.
That is blatantly obvious, the DPRK without the Korean War would be a different country. OOTH, the DDR, a "regular" Communist nation(and a European one), never had such a conflict and reunified in the 90's.
 
That is blatantly obvious, the DPRK without the Korean War would be a different country. OOTH, the DDR, a "regular" Communist nation(and a European one), never had such a conflict and reunified in the 90's.
Well, I was just answering to one of your questions.
Guess next time I'll pass, sheesh, people these days.
 

samcster94

Banned
Well, I was just answering to one of your questions.
Guess next time I'll pass, sheesh, people these days.
Sorry to sound that way, but I am curious to see how a NK with a "sane" leadership would develop. I am not expecting a "nice" country, but a regular dictatorship is what I'm aiming for.
 
Without Kim, I don't see the Korean War happening. The butterflies for that are massive. No American presence in South Korea lessening tensions with China. Japan recovers slower due to no American cash flowing in to support the war. The Americans also don't support the South as much as they did OTL which may lead to some interesting political developments (will it still liberalize and what does it do without all that American aid to bolster it against the North?). The North is definitely not as xenophobic (Kim and the war really turtled them up) and likely becomes a puppet of the Soviets (Kim was skilled at playing powers off against one another; very unlikely whoever replaces him is as skilled). There will be no Juche reinforcing their integration into the Communist Bloc and DEFINITELY no insane hereditary cult rule.

Now will the Soviets fall? With no Korean War, the US will not start an arms race. That saves the Soviets from their insane military spending which would support a move to consumer products. North Korea's raw materials and intact industry would certainly slot into that economic order.

A liberal socialist state to the north with a military dictatorship in the south. Interesting.
 

samcster94

Banned
Without Kim, I don't see the Korean War happening. The butterflies for that are massive. No American presence in South Korea lessening tensions with China. Japan recovers slower due to no American cash flowing in to support the war. The Americans also don't support the South as much as they did OTL which may lead to some interesting political developments (will it still liberalize and what does it do without all that American aid to bolster it against the North?). The North is definitely not as xenophobic (Kim and the war really turtled them up) and likely becomes a puppet of the Soviets (Kim was skilled at playing powers off against one another; very unlikely whoever replaces him is as skilled). There will be no Juche reinforcing their integration into the Communist Bloc and DEFINITELY no insane hereditary cult rule.

Now will the Soviets fall? With no Korean War, the US will not start an arms race. That saves the Soviets from their insane military spending which would support a move to consumer products. North Korea's raw materials and intact industry would certainly slot into that economic order.

A liberal socialist state to the north with a military dictatorship in the south. Interesting.
It's be ironic if SK ends up being a colder, more monocultural Burma of sorts(in terms of how the world sees it) and NK ends up more like OTL Vietnam.
 
Let's say Kim Il Sung dies in WWII and someone else runs the Communist North. How does this alt NK develop???

That obviously depends to some extent on who that "someone else" is.

The usual analysis is that there were four factions in the Korean Workers' Party: "the so-called “Soviet faction” composed of ethnic Koreans who lived in the Soviet Union and were sent to serve in administrative positions in northern Korea after 1945; the “Yan’an faction,” made up of those Koreans who lived in China during Japan’s colonial rule over Korea; the “domestic faction” of veteran communist Bak Heonyeong; and Kim Il Sung’s own “Gapsan faction” of former anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters." http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CWIHPBulletin16_p51.pdf

(The article incidentally argues that the emphasis on factional rivalries is misplaced and that it "to a large degree mirrors North Korea’s official historiography in that it is narrated “in terms of Kim Il Sung’s supremacy over all […] political challenges, from within and without.”8 Factional rivalries, the documents suggest, were exaggerated by Kim Il Sung as a pretext to purge policy opponents..." However, while these factions might not be an adequate explanation of the events of 1956, it doesn't follow that they didn't exist ten years earlier.)

According to Wikipedia, "In the first politburo of the party the Soviet faction had three members, the Yanan faction had six, the domestic faction had two and the guerrilla faction had two. The guerrilla faction was actually the smallest of the factions in the Central Committee but they had the advantage of having Kim Il-sung, who led the North Korean government and was highly influential within the party. Moreover, Kim Il-Sung was backed by the Soviet Union." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_Party_of_North_Korea

It might be thought from the composition of the Politburo that the Yan'an faction had the advantage in 1946. However, the Soviet Union had far more influence in North Korea at that time than the CCP did--the latter was still three years from winning power. One might think that the Soviets would prefer a Soviet Korean like Alexei Ivanovich Hegai (Ho Ka-i). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Ka-i Yet Hegai might have been too blatantly "Soviet" for the USSR's own taste; their choice of Kim seems to indicate they wanted someone with more plausible "nationalist" credentials to appeal to Koreans. The Domestic Faction in OTL was strengthened when Pak Hon-yong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Hon-yong moved to the North but that was not until 1948.

Obviously which faction takes over can be influential in determining how North Korea will take sides (if at all) in the eventual Sino-Soviet conflict.

OTOH it is hard for me to see *any* alternate Korean Communist leader coming up with the combination of extreme nationalism and glorification of a ruling family that happened in OTL.

Also, it is not clear to me that there would be a Korean War with an alternate North Korean leadership. Kim Il Sung had to go to great lengths to get Stalin's approval for armed reunification. Eventually, he did convince Stalin that he could defeat Rhee's regime before the US could do anything about it. It is certainly conceivable that another North Korean leader would have been just as persistent and successful in getting Stalin's approval, but it is not certain.
 
There's no telling what an alternate communist government for North Korea could look like. If there was no Kim dynasty, perhaps North Korea would pass economic reforms like China, Vietnam, or Russia did to adapt to global capitalism. Though of course, there's the nightmare scenario of someone even worse than the Kims coming to power, a dictator who commits massacres and atrocities comparable to Pol Pot. Though perhaps the end result in either case is that by the end of the Cold War, North Korea will have to reunite with South Korea under the latter's control.
 

samcster94

Banned
There's no telling what an alternate communist government for North Korea could look like. If there was no Kim dynasty, perhaps North Korea would pass economic reforms like China, Vietnam, or Russia did to adapt to global capitalism. Though of course, there's the nightmare scenario of someone even worse than the Kims coming to power, a dictator who commits massacres and atrocities comparable to Pol Pot. Though perhaps the end result in either case is that by the end of the Cold War, North Korea will have to reunite with South Korea under the latter's control.
A "Pol Pot" type would be unlikely but possible tbh. A generic dictator who doesn't have hereditary rule or the extreme xenophobia is more likely.
 
Let's say Kim Il Sung dies in WWII and someone else runs the Communist North. How does this alt NK develop??? I don't know this era well, but I can't really imagine the same level of totalitarianism and the racist(even compared to SK or Japan, as North Korea actually bans interracial marriage) personality cult around its leaders would be absent. I also imagine it'd be less hostile to the world and probably not start a war in the way Kim Il Sung did.
Kim Il Sung was had very little ideological influence on the racism in North Korea. Before 1945, northern Korea was a relatively conservative and Christian area, there was no large communist movement. Kim Il Sung had a few years of education in the USSR, but he probably didn't become fluent enough in Russian during his time there to learn the details of Soviet theory. No one in North Korea believes in Juche, the ideology only exists as a kind of intellectual prop so Kim Il Sung could stock a bookshelf in his office with long books he claimed to have written.

North Korean party members didn't receive a "crash course" in marxist theory from their soviet advisors until '48, by then socialist realism and communist buzzwords were a shallow cover that was there to satisfy the eastern bloc. Kim Il Sung was not a theorist like Trotsky or Lenin who studied dense treatises on marxist theory.

He was closer to Pol Pot, a relatively unintelligent person who claimed "to not understand" Marx's denser writings. The Kims had no ideology, and the vacuum was filled by Korean ethno-nationalism and the symbology of Japanese nationalism, covered by a thin veneer of socialist realism and communist vocabulary.

North Korea is one of the few states to have developed a propaganda outlet (staffed entirely by Japanese collaborators) before an official ideology was established/only later made up The propagandists defaulted to familiar habits. All quotes are from The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters

The North was more and not less hospitable to such collaborators. As a history book published in the DPRK in 1981 puts it, “the Great Leader Kim Il Sung refuted the mistaken tendency to doubt or ostracize people just because they ... had worked for Japanese institutions in the past.”8 Kim’s own brother, it is worth remembering, had interpreted for Japanese troops in China.9

Mount Paekdu is a conscious imitation of Mount Fuji, and Kim Il Sung was an ersatz Japanese Emperor. Both Emperor Hirohito and Kim Il Sung were depicted in paintings riding a white horse, for example. Before the mid-20th century Mount Paekdu wasn't considered sacred or holy, it was just the highest mountain in the Korean peninsula.

By the mid '30s most Korean nationalists had come to terms with Japanese rule after brief prison sentences, and the educated Korean upper classes saw themselves as Japanese Imperial subjects. Tokyo didn't push for the end of Korean-ness (the traditional Ying-Yang Korea flag was even shown in school textbooks), and Korea was just one half of a greater "Japanese race" (like being a proud Texan and a proud American). Propaganda showed Japan and Korea as two brothers tied together, running a three legged race across the globe.

It asserted that Koreans shared the same ancient progenitor, bloodline and benevolent ruler as the Japanese themselves; both peoples thus belonged to one “imperial” race morally (if not physically and intellectually) superior to all others.3The dominant slogan of the day was naisen ittai or “Interior [i.e. Japan] and Korea as one body.” While intent on undermining their subjects’ sense of a distinct nationhood, the authorities emphasized that naisen ittai did not mean the end of Koreanness, and even posed as champions of a culture that had languished too long in China’s shadow. Koreans were encouraged to cherish their “region” and its “dialect,” even its yin-yang ag (which was printed in school maps and atlases right up to liberation), as long as they remembered that the peninsula was but one part of a greater Japanese whole.4
After the war ended the Korean propagandists kept the "pure race" idea but effectively kicked the Japanese out of it. The country never saw itself as part of a world revolution, it was almost as isolated from the rest of the eastern bloc as it was from the west.

For better or worse Kim was the closest thing to a resistance fighter the Koreans had. He is said to have wanted a military career, but the Soviets, finding no more appropriate person to work with, persuaded him to assume leadership of the new state. Yet Kim was by far the least educated of all the leaders in the socialist world. His spotty schooling had ended at seventeen, and although he had spent a year at an infantry officer school in the USSR, it is unlikely that he understood enough Russian to grasp anything theoretical. None of his writings evinces an understanding of Marx.† Equally ignorant of communist ideology were the guerilla comrades who comprised the core of Kim’s power base. Andrei Lankov, a prominent Korea researcher, has written that “with the exception of the Soviet Koreans, no top cadres had undergone training in ... Marxism- Leninism.”7 It is no wonder that instead of guiding the cultural scene in ideological matters the party allowed itself to be guided by it.
 

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A liberal socialist state to the north with a military dictatorship in the south. Interesting.

I know people tend to assume the Rhee regime to be a monolithic dictatorship ran by the military; it wasn't. In fact the general election of May 1950, which was held just a month before the Korean war, was the death warrant of his administration. In a country where the President is elected by the National Assembly, if you're the President and your party have 24 seats in out of 310 total seats in the Assembly, you're doomed. And indeed, Rhee's address on June 8, where he disavowed his relationship with the badly-defeated Korean Nationalist Party, was essentially a capitulation note to the newly-elected Assembly.

Then the Korean war came, and that's how his regime of terror began. Rhee may have owed his survival to American supports, or maybe to the RoK military, but the primary factor in the establishment of the Rhee dictatorship was Kim and the Communist invasion.
 

samcster94

Banned
Kim Il Sung was had very little ideological influence on the racism in North Korea. Before 1945, northern Korea was a relatively conservative and Christian area, there was no large communist movement. Kim Il Sung had a few years of education in the USSR, but he probably didn't become fluent enough in Russian during his time there to learn the details of Soviet theory. No one in North Korea believes in Juche, the ideology only exists as a kind of intellectual prop so Kim Il Sung could stock a bookshelf in his office with long books he claimed to have written.

North Korean party members didn't receive a "crash course" in marxist theory from their soviet advisors until '48, by then socialist realism and communist buzzwords were a shallow cover that was there to satisfy the eastern bloc. Kim Il Sung was not a theorist like Trotsky or Lenin who studied dense treatises on marxist theory.

He was closer to Pol Pot, a relatively unintelligent person who claimed "to not understand" Marx's denser writings. The Kims had no ideology, and the vacuum was filled by Korean ethno-nationalism and the symbology of Japanese nationalism, covered by a thin veneer of socialist realism and communist vocabulary.

North Korea is one of the few states to have developed a propaganda outlet (staffed entirely by Japanese collaborators) before an official ideology was established/only later made up The propagandists defaulted to familiar habits. All quotes are from The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters



Mount Paekdu is a conscious imitation of Mount Fuji, and Kim Il Sung was an ersatz Japanese Emperor. Both Emperor Hirohito and Kim Il Sung were depicted in paintings riding a white horse, for example. Before the mid-20th century Mount Paekdu wasn't considered sacred or holy, it was just the highest mountain in the Korean peninsula.

By the mid '30s most Korean nationalists had come to terms with Japanese rule after brief prison sentences, and the educated Korean upper classes saw themselves as Japanese Imperial subjects. Tokyo didn't push for the end of Korean-ness (the traditional Ying-Yang Korea flag was even shown in school textbooks), and Korea was just one half of a greater "Japanese race" (like being a proud Texan and a proud American). Propaganda showed Japan and Korea as two brothers tied together, running a three legged race across the globe.


After the war ended the Korean propagandists kept the "pure race" idea but effectively kicked the Japanese out of it. The country never saw itself as part of a world revolution, it was almost as isolated from the rest of the eastern bloc as it was from the west.
Kim Il Sung just copied and pasted Japanese Imperial ideas, while basically making himself the equivalent of Japanese emperor. The racist idea the Koreans and Japanese were the same race was kept(with different languages ofc) but the Japanese were dropped.
 
Kim Il Sung just copied and pasted Japanese Imperial ideas, while basically making himself the equivalent of Japanese emperor. The racist idea the Koreans and Japanese were the same race was kept(with different languages ofc) but the Japanese were dropped.
Yeah, the rest of the communist world was pretty disturbed too. In the late '40s Korean women who married eastern european aid workers/advisors that arrived postwar were declared race traitors and pressured to get divorced. East German diplomats compared it to the Nazi period in their home country.

In the mid '60s the Cuban ambassador (happened to be Afro-Cuban) had his car surrounded by a mob and was almost lynched in Pyongyang.
 

samcster94

Banned
Yeah, the rest of the communist world was pretty disturbed too. In the late '40s Korean women who married eastern european aid workers/advisors that arrived postwar were declared race traitors and pressured to get divorced. East German diplomats compared it to the Nazi period in their home country.

In the mid '60s the Cuban ambassador (happened to be Afro-Cuban) had his car surrounded by a mob and was almost lynched in Pyongyang.
Exactly, the DDR and Cuba, while hardly models of tolerance, lacked the same extreme racism of North Korea.
 
There's no telling what an alternate communist government for North Korea could look like. If there was no Kim dynasty, perhaps North Korea would pass economic reforms like China, Vietnam, or Russia did to adapt to global capitalism. Though of course, there's the nightmare scenario of someone even worse than the Kims coming to power, a dictator who commits massacres and atrocities comparable to Pol Pot. Though perhaps the end result in either case is that by the end of the Cold War, North Korea will have to reunite with South Korea under the latter's control.

I can't even imagine someone worse than the current bunch of assholes.
 
Exactly, the DDR and Cuba, while hardly models of tolerance, lacked the same extreme racism of North Korea.
To be fair, North Korea is extremely ethno-nationalist*, but it doesn't seem to be expansionary in the classical fascist sense. While domestic policy and the official ideology/propaganda in North Korea is more similar to fascism than the eastern bloc, the North's propaganda has never advocated empire-building or the conquest/settlement of non-Korean territory the way Nazi Germany and Japan went after lebensraum.

Would a North Korean regime that had conquered the peninsula (let's say more direct Soviet involvement means the Busan pocket is closed and the war is basically over in a year) feel it had enough security/space to reform, or just maintain the same military-first isolationism?

In theory, the North would see its conquests as complete once the Koreas reunify. The Korean peninsula is kind of like Asia's Belgium, expansionism isn't really an option with so many great power neighbors.

*ethnic nationalism=/= fascism, but whether North Korea qualifies as fascist is a separate matter
 
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