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“Koreans on either side of the dividing line . . . are brothers and sisters and cousins from the same heritage, and at the same time they are bitter enemies who have been waging fierce struggles against one another for half a century.” —Don Oberdorfer, author of The Two Koreas
The Korean peninsula—an area of eighty-five thousand square miles in northeast Asia jutting from China and abutting Japan—was a unified kingdom for thirteen hundred years. For the past half century, however, it has been a land divided. Korea’s partition was a product of externally imposed events, specifically the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated world affairs for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Although the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Korea has remained divided. Numerous observers have labeled the continuing rift between North Korea and South Korea the Cold War’s last remnant. That rift overshadows Korean life on both sides of the divide.
A secretive country where religion and free speech are opressed and the people live in abject poverty. Also willing to develop WMDs.
"My dad got arrested in North Korea 37 years ago and now weighs 12 kilograms with a 32 inch beard, due to the fact he expressed his Christianity, since then the family has been regularly tortured for no apparent reason."
The roots of Korea’s division stem from the closing days of World War II, when troops from the United States and the Soviet Union, then wartime allies, entered Korea to liberate it from Japanese occupation (Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1910). The United States occupied the southern half of the country while the Soviet Union occupied the north. However, the two occupation zones (bordered by the 38th parallel) hardened into distinct spheres of influence as the two superpowers were unable to agree on a plan to restore Korea’s government. The newly formed United Nations passed a 1947 resolution calling for elections for a single government, but the Soviet Union refused to cooperate. In 1948 two governments were formed: the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with its capital in the northern city of Pyongyang, and the American-backed Republic of Korea, with Seoul as its capital. Both regimes claimed to be the legitimate government of all of Korea.
The conflict between the two Koreas reached its bitter peak in the 1950–1953 Korean War, which was both a civil war between Koreans and an international conflict involving soldiers from around the world. North Korea, armed and advised by the Soviets, invaded South Korea in 1950 in an attempt to unify the country. The United States responded by influencing the United Nations to pass a resolution authorizing a “police action” to protect South Korea; the UN force dispatched there was led by American general Douglas MacArthur and was comprised predominantly of American troops. Those forces were able to retake almost the entire Korean peninsula before Communist China intervened with its own forces. After three years of fighting, an armistice between the warring parties ended the fighting and established a cease-fire line near the original border at the 38th parallel. However, later negotiations for a peace treaty between North and South Korea failed; the two nations remain in a technical state of war.
The war proved devastating to the peninsula, with an estimated 2 to 4 million Koreans killed from war-related causes (out of an initial population of 30 million), landscapes obliterated by heavy bombing, industry and agriculture destroyed, and its people embittered and divided. The physical damage could be repaired, but the psychological fallout proved harder to overcome. The fact that Koreans “fought and killed each other” created “a foundation for real mistrust and hatred toward each other,” argues Katy Oh, an analyst for the Institute for Defense Analyses. The divisions between the two nations remain pervasive and profound. Military skirmishes periodically break out along the heavily militarized border. For decades virtually no Koreans were allowed to even visit the other nation; such visits today are confined to a very few state-sponsored ceremonial occasions, leaving millions of Koreans unable to meet with relatives across the border. There is no mail or telephone service between the two Koreas, and it is against the law in both nations to listen to radio broadcasts from the other country.
The gulf between the two Koreas has been exacerbated by their differing social, economic, and political systems. Under Kim Il Sung, the dictator of North Korea until his death in 1994, North Korea followed Communist models of land redistribution and collectivization, heavy industrialization under state-owned enterprises, and centralized political control under the Korea Workers’ Party. The official state ideology, juche, stressed self-reliance (although North Korea did receive aid from the Soviet Union and China), and North Korea’s people were isolated from the rest of the world economically and politically. South Korea’s path was marked by “guided capitalism” in which the government pushed for the growth of export-oriented industries. Its economic development was aided by billions of dollars in American economic assistance. Such assistance continued even after South Korea’s government, originally modeled on American lines, became increasingly authoritarian and fell to a military coup in 1961.
Not to be confused with Good Korea (or Gorea for short), Evildoer Korea is a founding member of the Axis of Evil and currently the United States's main acquisition target in east Asia. Evildoer Korea is valuable in the United States' Manifest Destiny 21st century plan as it provides diversity to what would otherwise be an all-Muslim list of acquisition targets.
OK, Cuba isn't Muslim either, but it's really very small and most of the inhabitants already live in Florida. It's really just a rogue territory of the United States, anyway. Both Cuba and Evildoer Korea are on the list of countries to spread democracy to.
On July 4, 2006, North Korea launched its taepodong ("tapered penis") missile, which immediately got pwned. The U.S. responded by taking North Korea off its MySpace friends list. Quoting an unnamed top-level official, "Man, not cool. I told him not to fire that shit, so why does he always gotta be such a drama whore?" In retaliation, the U.S. launched a giant fucking rocket into orbit, just to show who's boss.
On October 8, 2006 (in America time, not theirs), Evildoer Korea reportedly conducted an underground nuclear test. Although the rest of the world had already unfriended Evildoer Korea, China had not-but that changed in an instant. However, the poor saps in the UN fail to realize that Evildoer Korea is a friends only country-meaning that, thanks to China, the world has probably pwned itself. Way to go, commie bastards.
The results of the paths chosen by the two Koreas are two very different societies. A half century after the Korean War, North Korea is a diplomatically isolated, totalitarian regime ruled by Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong Il. Its isolation and economic problems intensified when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and China cut off their aid to North Korea. Although information about the country is difficult for foreigners to obtain, most observers agree that North Korea is in a state of economic decline or even collapse that has caused widespread poverty and hunger. South Korea, on the other hand, has grown to become the world’s eleventh largest economy, with an average annual income of more than $13,000 per person (compared with $900 in North Korea). Its global exports include automobiles and computers. Despite its checkered political history of military coups, authoritarianism, and political protest, it has moved to a more democratic form of government in which presidents and legislatures are elected by the people. Corruption and other economic and political problems remain, but most observers agree that South Koreans have fared better than their northern counterparts.
Despite the immense differences between the two societies and the duration of their separation, many Koreans maintain the dream of eventual reunification. In June 2000, Kim Jong Il and South Korean president Kim Dae Jung met in Pyongyang— the first time leaders of the two nations had met since the Korean War began exactly fifty years earlier. “The Korean people can see a bright future as a dawn of hope for reconciliation, cooperation, and unification is breaking,” Kim Dae Jung proclaimed when the historic meeting was concluded. Such hopes faded over the following months as the two countries were unable to follow up the conference with working agreements or further meetings. In addition, some in South Korea accused Kim Dae Jung of compromising too much with the North Korean regime.
The question of Korean reunification has ramifications beyond the Korean peninsula. Both Koreas’ neighbors and the United States maintain an active interest in what happens on the Korean peninsula. Since 1953, America has maintained close ties with South Korea, guaranteed its protection, and stationed American troops there (an arrangement that has drawn some protest in South Korea). American relations with North Korea, on the other hand, have ranged from cool to openly hostile, as the United States has accused North Korea of developing nuclear and chemical weapons and of sponsoring terrorism. In 2002 President George W. Bush labeled North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” (along with Iraq and Iran) because of the country’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Divisions exist both within South Korea and in the United States over how much their governments should do to engage the North Korean regime, both to prevent another Korean War and to further the cause of regional peace and possible reunification.
Kim Jong Il (an aging lesbian with a resemblance to Billy Jean King) is in charge. He frequently uses his power to have Desperate Housewives DVDs imported to the country despite trade embargoes. Kim Jong Il's other pastimes include writing operas and ass-raping his male concubines.
Economy
Higher tier workers will transcribe failing Hollywood scriptwriters' works onto rice for 30 American cents a page. (GDP $8.19, 2005 est.) Party members, government employees and soldiers can sit on their ass and do nothing for 20 American cents an hour. The rest starve near unfarmed fields and abandoned factories.
The ongoing division, which has outlasted the Cold War that started it, makes North and South Korea a unique case among nations. North and South Korea: Opposing Viewpoints features Korean and foreign scholars and analysts who examine reunification and other prominent Korean issues in the following chapters: Is North Korea a Serious Threat? What Is the State of Democracy and Human Rights in North and South Korea? What Should U.S. Foreign Policy Be Toward North and South Korea? What Is the Future of North and South Korea? The volume provides disparate views about these divergent countries—nations that share much yet are so different.
The Korean peninsula—an area of eighty-five thousand square miles in northeast Asia jutting from China and abutting Japan—was a unified kingdom for thirteen hundred years. For the past half century, however, it has been a land divided. Korea’s partition was a product of externally imposed events, specifically the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated world affairs for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Although the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Korea has remained divided. Numerous observers have labeled the continuing rift between North Korea and South Korea the Cold War’s last remnant. That rift overshadows Korean life on both sides of the divide.
A secretive country where religion and free speech are opressed and the people live in abject poverty. Also willing to develop WMDs.
"My dad got arrested in North Korea 37 years ago and now weighs 12 kilograms with a 32 inch beard, due to the fact he expressed his Christianity, since then the family has been regularly tortured for no apparent reason."
The roots of Korea’s division stem from the closing days of World War II, when troops from the United States and the Soviet Union, then wartime allies, entered Korea to liberate it from Japanese occupation (Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1910). The United States occupied the southern half of the country while the Soviet Union occupied the north. However, the two occupation zones (bordered by the 38th parallel) hardened into distinct spheres of influence as the two superpowers were unable to agree on a plan to restore Korea’s government. The newly formed United Nations passed a 1947 resolution calling for elections for a single government, but the Soviet Union refused to cooperate. In 1948 two governments were formed: the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with its capital in the northern city of Pyongyang, and the American-backed Republic of Korea, with Seoul as its capital. Both regimes claimed to be the legitimate government of all of Korea.
The conflict between the two Koreas reached its bitter peak in the 1950–1953 Korean War, which was both a civil war between Koreans and an international conflict involving soldiers from around the world. North Korea, armed and advised by the Soviets, invaded South Korea in 1950 in an attempt to unify the country. The United States responded by influencing the United Nations to pass a resolution authorizing a “police action” to protect South Korea; the UN force dispatched there was led by American general Douglas MacArthur and was comprised predominantly of American troops. Those forces were able to retake almost the entire Korean peninsula before Communist China intervened with its own forces. After three years of fighting, an armistice between the warring parties ended the fighting and established a cease-fire line near the original border at the 38th parallel. However, later negotiations for a peace treaty between North and South Korea failed; the two nations remain in a technical state of war.
The war proved devastating to the peninsula, with an estimated 2 to 4 million Koreans killed from war-related causes (out of an initial population of 30 million), landscapes obliterated by heavy bombing, industry and agriculture destroyed, and its people embittered and divided. The physical damage could be repaired, but the psychological fallout proved harder to overcome. The fact that Koreans “fought and killed each other” created “a foundation for real mistrust and hatred toward each other,” argues Katy Oh, an analyst for the Institute for Defense Analyses. The divisions between the two nations remain pervasive and profound. Military skirmishes periodically break out along the heavily militarized border. For decades virtually no Koreans were allowed to even visit the other nation; such visits today are confined to a very few state-sponsored ceremonial occasions, leaving millions of Koreans unable to meet with relatives across the border. There is no mail or telephone service between the two Koreas, and it is against the law in both nations to listen to radio broadcasts from the other country.
The gulf between the two Koreas has been exacerbated by their differing social, economic, and political systems. Under Kim Il Sung, the dictator of North Korea until his death in 1994, North Korea followed Communist models of land redistribution and collectivization, heavy industrialization under state-owned enterprises, and centralized political control under the Korea Workers’ Party. The official state ideology, juche, stressed self-reliance (although North Korea did receive aid from the Soviet Union and China), and North Korea’s people were isolated from the rest of the world economically and politically. South Korea’s path was marked by “guided capitalism” in which the government pushed for the growth of export-oriented industries. Its economic development was aided by billions of dollars in American economic assistance. Such assistance continued even after South Korea’s government, originally modeled on American lines, became increasingly authoritarian and fell to a military coup in 1961.
Not to be confused with Good Korea (or Gorea for short), Evildoer Korea is a founding member of the Axis of Evil and currently the United States's main acquisition target in east Asia. Evildoer Korea is valuable in the United States' Manifest Destiny 21st century plan as it provides diversity to what would otherwise be an all-Muslim list of acquisition targets.
OK, Cuba isn't Muslim either, but it's really very small and most of the inhabitants already live in Florida. It's really just a rogue territory of the United States, anyway. Both Cuba and Evildoer Korea are on the list of countries to spread democracy to.
On July 4, 2006, North Korea launched its taepodong ("tapered penis") missile, which immediately got pwned. The U.S. responded by taking North Korea off its MySpace friends list. Quoting an unnamed top-level official, "Man, not cool. I told him not to fire that shit, so why does he always gotta be such a drama whore?" In retaliation, the U.S. launched a giant fucking rocket into orbit, just to show who's boss.
On October 8, 2006 (in America time, not theirs), Evildoer Korea reportedly conducted an underground nuclear test. Although the rest of the world had already unfriended Evildoer Korea, China had not-but that changed in an instant. However, the poor saps in the UN fail to realize that Evildoer Korea is a friends only country-meaning that, thanks to China, the world has probably pwned itself. Way to go, commie bastards.
The results of the paths chosen by the two Koreas are two very different societies. A half century after the Korean War, North Korea is a diplomatically isolated, totalitarian regime ruled by Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong Il. Its isolation and economic problems intensified when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and China cut off their aid to North Korea. Although information about the country is difficult for foreigners to obtain, most observers agree that North Korea is in a state of economic decline or even collapse that has caused widespread poverty and hunger. South Korea, on the other hand, has grown to become the world’s eleventh largest economy, with an average annual income of more than $13,000 per person (compared with $900 in North Korea). Its global exports include automobiles and computers. Despite its checkered political history of military coups, authoritarianism, and political protest, it has moved to a more democratic form of government in which presidents and legislatures are elected by the people. Corruption and other economic and political problems remain, but most observers agree that South Koreans have fared better than their northern counterparts.
Despite the immense differences between the two societies and the duration of their separation, many Koreans maintain the dream of eventual reunification. In June 2000, Kim Jong Il and South Korean president Kim Dae Jung met in Pyongyang— the first time leaders of the two nations had met since the Korean War began exactly fifty years earlier. “The Korean people can see a bright future as a dawn of hope for reconciliation, cooperation, and unification is breaking,” Kim Dae Jung proclaimed when the historic meeting was concluded. Such hopes faded over the following months as the two countries were unable to follow up the conference with working agreements or further meetings. In addition, some in South Korea accused Kim Dae Jung of compromising too much with the North Korean regime.
The question of Korean reunification has ramifications beyond the Korean peninsula. Both Koreas’ neighbors and the United States maintain an active interest in what happens on the Korean peninsula. Since 1953, America has maintained close ties with South Korea, guaranteed its protection, and stationed American troops there (an arrangement that has drawn some protest in South Korea). American relations with North Korea, on the other hand, have ranged from cool to openly hostile, as the United States has accused North Korea of developing nuclear and chemical weapons and of sponsoring terrorism. In 2002 President George W. Bush labeled North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” (along with Iraq and Iran) because of the country’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Divisions exist both within South Korea and in the United States over how much their governments should do to engage the North Korean regime, both to prevent another Korean War and to further the cause of regional peace and possible reunification.
Kim Jong Il (an aging lesbian with a resemblance to Billy Jean King) is in charge. He frequently uses his power to have Desperate Housewives DVDs imported to the country despite trade embargoes. Kim Jong Il's other pastimes include writing operas and ass-raping his male concubines.
Economy
Higher tier workers will transcribe failing Hollywood scriptwriters' works onto rice for 30 American cents a page. (GDP $8.19, 2005 est.) Party members, government employees and soldiers can sit on their ass and do nothing for 20 American cents an hour. The rest starve near unfarmed fields and abandoned factories.
The ongoing division, which has outlasted the Cold War that started it, makes North and South Korea a unique case among nations. North and South Korea: Opposing Viewpoints features Korean and foreign scholars and analysts who examine reunification and other prominent Korean issues in the following chapters: Is North Korea a Serious Threat? What Is the State of Democracy and Human Rights in North and South Korea? What Should U.S. Foreign Policy Be Toward North and South Korea? What Is the Future of North and South Korea? The volume provides disparate views about these divergent countries—nations that share much yet are so different.