Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin Read Free Book Online

that sending a message through me and my newspaper would be an efficient way to reach people in high places in Washington.
    When I visited So Tong-bong, an editor of the Workers’ Party newspa-per
Nodong Shinmun
(Workers’ Daily), he told me that North Koreans “want the United States not to put obstacles in the way of reunification. So we hope the U.S. will withdraw American troops from the South and give a good atmosphere to create favorable conditions for reunification.” Improved U.S. relations with communist China had blunted the old justification that American troops were in the South to contain communist expansion, he observed—but still the troops remained, with the excuse of deterring North Korean aggression. “As you know, so many times we have clarified our position that we have no aggressive designs on South Korea,” the editor said. “War will not break out even if U.S. troops withdraw from South Korea.” (Seoul and Washington, of course, had plenty of doubts on that point. “They’ve got an awfully big military force for a country of peaceful intentions,” as one American official observed.)
    So Tong-bong told me that Americans should understand Koreans’ desire for unification. After all, our own Civil War had been fought over the question of unity. Nice try. But North Korea and the capitalist South, during the thirty-four years since the division of the country, had grown into societies differing from each other far more profoundly than the Union differed from the Confederacy. North and South Korea both talked a lot about unification, but it seemed that each wanted it only if its own system would rule on the united peninsula. Pyongyang wanted to reunify quickly while it still held the stronger hand—but Seoul wanted to obtain world recognition of two Koreas for the time being, and delay reunification for long enough to build the South into a position of potential dominance.
    The editor insisted that North Korea would not force South Koreans to live under the North’s system, and he added that Northerners had nothought of living under the South’s bourgeois system. In that case, I asked, how could the mere presence of U.S. troops in the South be blamed for preventing reunification—the sort of reunification he claimed he wanted, with the two Korean systems remaining mutually exclusive? “I think you know the answer,” he replied, in what I found to be a typical North Korean rhetorical device. He added, “We are insisting that reunification should be done by the Korean people themselves. If foreign interference exists, independent reunification is impossible.”
    That was a reference to the longstanding North Korean position that the Seoul government was not a true representative of the South Korean people but merely a puppet of the United States, cruelly repressing the people, keeping power and maintaining national division with the backing of American troops. I had spent enough time in South Korea to know that this was a crude caricature. The South Koreans in general very much liked the wealth and opportunities their system was bringing them. Their complaints arose from uneven distribution of those gains, the dizzying pace of social and economic change and Park Chung-hee’s determination to stay in power without holding democratic elections.
    The sentimental appeal of the idea of reunification remained potent—and the Seoul regime was finding it difficult to reconcile that with its de facto policy of “two Koreas.” Nevertheless, having experienced North Korean rule briefly in wartime 1950 and 1951, South Koreans hardly wished to replace their lot under a merely authoritarian regime with the North Koreans’ fate under the totalitarian Kim Il-sung regime. Thus, I was not convinced that removal of U.S. troops from the South would aid the cause of reunification— except, perhaps, by enabling Kim Il-sung to impose his will upon the South.
    As the time for my departure drew near, I got word