Disclaimer: If you don’t wanna read my yap, here are some great resources to learn about the history of the Korean War and DPR Korea.

A comprehensive video

Does North Korea Hate America?.

Books

1. Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom .

2. The Korean War: A History. (The author Bruce Cummings is a liberal academic. The liberals can’t even claim it’s tankie propaganda)

3. The Origins of the Korean War, Vol 1.

4. The Origins of the Korean War, vol 2.

Podcast series

Blowback: Season 3 - The Story Of The Korean War (highly recommended.)

After Korea’s war of independence against the Imperial Japan, Koreans were ready to build a democratic socialist nation. They already started setting up soviets in the North and people founded People’s Republic of Korea.

But the United States and its allies didn’t want another country in Asia to become socialist because the capitalists were subscribed to and afraid of the ‘domino communism theory’.

So the US military occupied South Korea and placed a fascist dictator named Syngman Rhee in power. Rhee and US military committed several crimes against humanity during their occupation of the South. Surveilling, arresting, and murdering thousands of socialists, labor Union members, and sovereignty advocates (look up Autumn Uprising of 1946, Jeju uprising, Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, Mungyeong massacre, Asan massacre, Goyang Geumjeong Cave Massacre, Namyangju Massacre, December Massacres, No Gun Ri Massacre, Bodo League massacre, Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, Geochang massacre, Ganghwa massacre)

Then, in 1948, the South Korean government did the Jeju Island Massacre. 14,000 to 30,000 men, women, and Children were murdered, and several more were arrested and tortured by the South Korean forces with the full blessings of the US military. This incident serves as the premise of the Korean War, not the invasion by the KPA in the South (Koreans invaded Korea, lol) that is written in all western history books and said in the mainstream media. In the war. The US and UN forces committed several warcrimes against Korean civilians in the North. From the massacres of Villagers to the intentional destruction dams and bridges. A vast majority (over 70%) of North Korea’s aerable land was destroyed. It was a systemically planned genocide of Korean people in the North.

The US and the UN still failed to capture the North because of the military support that arrived from China and the USSR.

Even after all of that, the west wasn’t satisfied with their bloodbath. After failing to topple DPRK, they placed the most brutal and inhumane sanctions, embargoes, and blockades the world had ever seen on the DPR Korea. Those sanctions only kept getting harsher with time.

As a result DPRK developed a generational distrust of the west and the international law, and turned into the hermit nation we know of today.

Blowback podcast did a season on Korea. I recommend it. It’s hard to listen to at times knowing how the empire brutalized Korea, but it explains a lot about the historical context and how things went down. You can find it unofficially hosted on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/@redpylon/playlists

And to be clear, in spite of being a “podcast”, it’s more like an audio essay series than what you might typically think of as a podcast. They aren’t just casually bullshitting about it. They’re going over it in a lot of detail from event to event, more like telling a story, citing various sources along the way.