The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (79 page)

South Korean troops quickly began killing suspected collaborators in the newly reoccupied territories. Although the American high command usually ignored these actions, the British eventually intervened. “On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21 civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean officer responsible. Later that month, British troops seized ‘Execution Hill,’ outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there.”
⁹

Counter-counterattack

An American army pushing toward their border worried the Communist Chinese. Mao knew there was strong sentiment in the West for crossing the Yalu River and taking care of China while they were at it, so he began shipping troops into Korea to stiffen the remnants of the North Korean army. The first waves of these troops were fanatically committed young volunteers who had known nothing but war in their lifetimes. They had grown up in the Communist enclaves that Mao had defended from the Japanese, and they had wrested control of China from Chiang Kai-shek.
¹⁰

Within a week, 100,000 Chinese veterans of the People’s Liberation Army managed to slip across the border undetected by Western intelligence. The first hint that the war had changed came when American and ROK forward units were overrun and chased into panicky flight by fresh soldiers wearing strange quilted uniforms. Then a few of these mystery troops began to show up among the North Korean prisoners, speaking an odd tonal language that confused and worried the first interrogators. Pretty soon, the Chinese forces had massed enough to counterattack in force, driving the Americans south again.
¹¹

The northernmost UN forces pulled back to the east coast to be evacuated by sea, while the rest began the long march south. The Chinese attackers were relentless and numberless. The bitter cold destroyed soldiers’ fingers and toes and froze the blood in wounds. In late November, the Chosin Reservoir and the swarming enemy blocked the American retreat in the far north and center of the peninsula. Twenty thousand American marines had to run a gauntlet of 200,000 Chinese; however, the previous months of combat had taught the Americans how to successfully withdraw from a bad situation. The Americans grimly fought their way out of the pocket and escaped south, orderly and largely intact—morally if not physically.

The American field commanders tried to stabilize the line near the old border on the 38th parallel, but the necessary reinforcements were being held up. Washington worried that the Chinese intervention in Korea was just the first stage in an all-out Communist assault across the globe. Although the United States was hastily boosting its military strength by calling up reserves and expanding the draft, the new troops were being held in reserve against possible Soviet invasions of Germany, Turkey, or Iran, rather than being sent to Korea.
*

Washington even considered following MacArthur’s suggestion of taking the war directly against China with a naval blockade, air strikes, and an attack from Taiwan by the Nationalist army. After much debate, the idea was dropped. President Truman certainly didn’t want to expand a war the Americans were still losing. Unfortunately, MacArthur continued to push this plan in public, undermining Truman’s effort to wrap up the war quickly and favorably by diplomacy. The war of words escalated until finally Truman fired MacArthur.

In the meantime, a Communist assault on New Year’s Eve pushed across the old border and Seoul fell again. The Americans secretly resolved to abandon the peninsula entirely if they found themselves backed up to Pusan again. Finally, after taking half of South Korea, the Communists overreached their supply line and foundered. American patrols soon discovered how disorganized the enemy was. The United States counterattacked, inflicting heavy casualties.
¹²

Stalemate

The American counter-counter-counterattack pushed the front back to the 38th parallel and then across again, until the Communists stiffened, stopped, planned, and counter-counter-counter-counterattacked. The front line eventually settled down near the old border again.

In a year of fighting, the front line had rolled up and down Korea like a windshield wiper, even sweeping the entire peninsula once from Pusan to the Yalu, so it’s no surprise that there were horrendous collateral casualties. No one will ever know for sure, but somewhere around 2 million civilians died in the war, most by general hardship rather than actual malice.

It took a few months of little battles for the Americans to fine-tune the new front line, code-named Kansas-Wyoming, in their favor. This was mostly a matter of taking the high ground from entrenched Communists. The last adjustment to the Kansas-Wyoming line was fixed by June 1951, and after that, with the South Koreans holding the tactical advantage all along the line, the UN forces just settled in and waited for diplomacy to do the rest.
¹³

Peace negotiations snagged on the question of returning prisoners of war. The West did not want to repeat what had happened after World War II, when reluctant Soviet prisoners held by the Germans were forcibly repatriated, only to be punished as traitors by Stalin. It was found that many prisoners of war held in South Korea were conscripts who did not want to go back into Communist hands. North Korean soldiers were often South Koreans grabbed by the Communists during the northern occupation, and Chinese soldiers were often Nationalists captured by Mao during the Chinese Civil War and now forced to fight for the People’s Republic.
¹⁴
The United Nations insisted on giving every prisoner the choice of staying. Almost half of the North Koreans in southern hands eventually chose to remain in the South.
¹⁵

The North Koreans stalled as best they could, but after two years of arguing, they accepted that nothing was going to change. All fighting stopped on July 27, 1953, although technically, the war has merely paused, not ended. No peace treaty has ever been signed.

NORTH KOREA

Death toll:
3 million
¹

Rank:
30

Type:
Communist dictatorship

Broad dividing line:
the state vs. the individual

Time frame:
since 1948

Location and major state participant:
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

Who usually gets the most blame:
Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il

Another damn:
insane people’s republic

Great Leader

Sometimes mankind has a really bad day, like April 15, 1912. On that day, the mortally wounded ocean liner
Titanic
sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, taking fifteen hundred passengers to their deaths. Meanwhile, half a world away in Korea, Kim Il-sung was born. Of those two events, the second was probably worse.

Originally named Kim Song Ju, he took the war name Kim Il-sung after a legendary Korean freedom fighter. Kim was one of the few survivors of an army of anti-Japanese guerrillas that had been beaten and driven into the Soviet Union in 1941. After World War II the Soviet conquerors put Kim Il-sung in charge of the northern half of the former Japanese colony (see “Korean War”).

Kim was known to his people simply as the “Great Leader,” and he is everywhere in North Korea. He watches from murals in subway stations, government buildings, and street corners. Quotations of his, both profound and trivial, are engraved into brass plaques or printed on posters. A sixty-foot statue of Kim towers over the plaza of the Museum of the Revolutions, and children bow before it as they pass, chanting, “Thank you, father.”
²

Kim Il-sung started the policy that required every North Korean over the age of twenty-one to wear a badge with his face on it. Eventually, there were twenty different types of badges, each one denoting the social status of the wearer. Koreans soon learned to recognize the important badges and behave accordingly whenever they encountered a stranger. In due course, a line of badges depicting his son, Kim Jong-il, became acceptable as well.
³

Hermit Kingdom

We know very little about what’s been happening in North Korea these past fifty years. In a country of 23 million, there were only three hundred foreigners as of 2003.
⁴
North Korea has an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners at any given time, but until very recently, only a handful escaped the country and told their stories to the Western press. For those who tried but failed, “the police who picked up fugitives held them together by putting wire through the cheeks or noses of these traitors to the nation who had dared to try to leave the fatherland. As soon as they reached their destination they were executed, and their families were sent to labor camps.”
⁵

North Koreans can get thrown into prison for the most trivial offenses—sitting on a newspaper photo of the president, joking about his tiny size, or idly singing a South Korean pop song they might have heard from a friend, for example. Usually an entire family is punished for the crimes of a single member. Parents are imprisoned for having a rebellious son. Sisters are hauled away when a brother they haven’t seen in years is exposed as an enemy of the state. A well-connected model citizen might suddenly be hauled off to jail when a search of old records reveals that his father had committed a political crime many decades earlier.

The classless Communist society is divided into three classes—Central, Undecided, and Hostile—depending on the Communist credentials of one’s forebearers. Lucky descendants of a Japanese-era freedom fighter might be granted all of the benefits due the Central class, while the descendants of bankers, landowners, or southerners are kept out of good jobs and the capital city, like all of the scum of the Hostile class. Nearly a quarter of North Koreans are stigmatized as members of the Hostile class, who are only one wrong step away from a labor camp. Most North Koreans, however, fade into the background of the Undecided class, with neither the privilege nor the disgrace of the more notable classes.
⁶

The slave labor of political prisoners has become a vital part of the economy. They cut timber, dig mines, and manufacture goods for export and domestic consumption. In exchange, they get a daily ration consisting of perhaps a handful of corn meal, some cabbage leaves, and some salt.

As a Communist state, North Korea forbids the practice of religion, but the philosophy of
juche
—self-reliance—fills the gap. In theory, juche is Marxist humanism that declares that man is the master of his own destiny. In practice, juche means putting Korea first. Koreans can be self-reliant individually by not pestering the state for favors or self-reliant collectively by keeping Korea free from foreign influence. Like a child of divorce watching his parents act strangely, Kim was worried by Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent Sino-Soviet split. Since he could no longer trust his giant co-Communists to look out for his best interests, he adopted juche in 1955 to help North Korea stand alone.

Foreign Relations

The phrase “state sponsor of terrorism” has lost a lot of its bite because of overuse, but North Korea really
is
a state sponsor of terrorism. The killing of hated foreigners overseas is planned at the highest levels and executed by trained professionals. Great powers, of course, have always thrown their weight around and meddled in the internal affairs of lesser nations, but it’s less common for a pip-squeak country like North Korea to blatantly provoke the rest of the world and dare them to do something about it.

In 1974, North Korea tried to kill South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, but the assassins killed his wife instead. In 1983, North Korean operatives exploded a bomb at a conference in Rangoon, Burma, intending to kill another president of South Korea. They killed seventeen high officials in the president’s entourage, including four cabinet officers, but missed the president. In 1987, another bomb planted by North Korean agents blew up a South Korean airliner, killing all 115 people aboard. Over the years, North Korea has kidnapped hundreds of random, ordinary South Koreans and Japanese. They are imprisoned in the North and forced to teach the subtleties of pop culture to North Korean spies so they can blend into the outside world.

Since punishing North Korea would only reignite the Korean War, the world has had little choice but to ignore these provocations. Juche means that North Korea has few imports or exports that can be stopped, plus they are the world’s most militarized country, with a million armed men. Any punitive attack would likely fail and provoke an angry counterattack with screaming Commie hordes swarming over their southern neighbor.

Dear Leader

When the elder Kim died in 1994, his title was boosted to “Eternal Leader,” which makes North Korea the only nation on earth whose president is a corpse. The daily operation of the government, however, was put into the hands of his son, Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader.”

Kim Jong-il was probably born in 1943 in the Soviet Union during his father’s exile, but the official story is that he was born at a secret rebel camp on Korea’s sacred mountain amid glorious omens. “At the time of his birth there were flashes of lightning and thunder, the iceberg in the pond on Mount Paektu emitted a mysterious sound as it broke, and bright double rainbows rose up,” according to an official biography.
⁷
In 1992 Kim Jong-il’s official year of birth was moved to a year earlier so that North Korea could celebrate both his fiftieth birthday and his father’s eightieth in the same nationwide gala.

The rest of Kim Jong-il’s family died off as he got older. When Jong-il was five, his younger brother Shura drowned while they were both playing in a pond. Their mother died in childbirth a year later, along with the boy she was carrying. Jong-il also had a sister, Kim Pyong-il, but her story and whereabouts are unknown.
⁸
For some reason, I’m reminded of family life among hyenas, cuckoos, and other unpleasant animals, where the strongest offspring will kill its rival siblings in the nest—not that we can prove anything.

Since Communist theory favors meritocracy over monarchy, it was tricky justifying passing the throne from father to son. The younger Kim was gradually inserted into the leadership through an escalating series of positions in the government—but what he really wants to do is direct. An avid cinephile, Kim has a massive collection of thousands of films. He had his agents kidnap a prominent South Korean actress and her film director husband so that they could make wonderful movies for him.

At first, there was some hope that conditions would improve with the passing of the Great Leader. Kim Jong-il had a reputation as a lightweight and a playboy. With luck he would be corruptible and would evolve into a run-of-the-mill dictator, more interested in collecting a harem than in enforcing merciless ideology. Another possibility was that the military would overthrow him, which would deal a wild card on the table but still leave open the possibility that the new boss would prove more flexible than the elder Kim and ease off the totalitarian repression.
⁹
No one anticipated what really happened, which was that the new Kim would hold onto power and become a clone of his father.

Going Broke

In the original split, the urbanized North got most of the mines, dams, and factories, while the rural South got most of the crops and livestock. In fact, until the 1970s, the industrial economy of North Korea maintained a higher per capita income than did the peasant-heavy economy of South Korea. Then, over the next generation, the South Korean economy took off, producing world-class cars and electronics, crossing the threshold from Third World to First World, while the North Korean economy stagnated in the age of concrete and smokestacks.

The gap grew wider after Communist regimes all over the world collapsed in 1989–92. With fewer Communist trading partners like Russia to prop them up, the North Korean economy shrank by half in the 1990s. The government in Pyongyang, however, puts a special effort into keeping the people ignorant of how bad their life really is. They are told that things are even worse outside North Korea and that they are lucky to be living in a land where the Dear Leader will take care of them. To maintain this fiction, the people are not allowed to have any contact with foreigners. Radio dials are fixed so that they can receive only North Korean stations. All foreign visitors surrender their cell phones at the border and must keep two Korean escorts with them at all times.
¹⁰

North Korean agriculture had been heavily industrialized and subsidized. While it had produced adequate food for decades, the tractors, combines, and harvesters were fueled by cheap gasoline from the Soviet Union. When the new capitalists of the Russian Federation started letting the free market rather than ideology set prices, North Korean agriculture sputtered to a halt. All it took was one spell of bad weather (heavy rains in 1994) to turn general hardship into a deadly famine that decimated the population over the next few years.
¹¹
Eventually, China picked up the task of subsidizing North Korea, and the famine eased.