u/Fun-Discount-4U

Bruce Cumings basically flipped the traditional story of how the Korean War started. He's a revisionist historian, meaning he didn't go along with the standard western narrative. Among people who defend North Korea, he's probably one of the most beloved historians out there. His two-volume book The Origins of the Korean War came out in 1981 (Vol. 1) and 1990 (Vol. 2).

Then in 1991 the soviet union collapsed. A bunch of secret soviet documents about the Korean War started coming out. Stuff western scholars had never had access to before. These documents showed that beginning in 1949, Kim Il Sung repeatedly asked Stalin for permission to launch a military attack on South Korea. Stalin eventually said yes, and North Korea's army got a huge boost of soviet weapons: tanks, artillery, aircraft, the works.

1. Based on this new evidence, Cumings made it pretty clear in his 2005 book Korea's Place in the Sun (A Modern History) that Kim Il Sung bears significant responsibility for turning what was a civil conflict into a full-blown war with consequences, some intended some not that nobody could have fully predicted.

2. In his 2010 book The Korean War: A History, Cumings wrote that the soviet documents make it clear Pyongyang had decided to escalate the civil conflict into conventional warfare months before June 1950 actually happened. He also said there's no real evidence backing North Korea's claim that the South launched a full invasion. At most there might've been a small clash across the border, the kind that happened repeatedly in 1949. But whatever happened, the North responded with a full-scale invasion. In other words, he's clear that the war started with a planned invasion from the North.

3. Cumings also writes about the massacres and atrocities North Korean forces committed in the South. He notes that captured documents show high-level officials actually warned against executing people. For example, handwritten minutes from a Workers' Party of Korea meeting on December 7, 1950, apparently at a fairly senior level, said not to execute "reactionaries" out of pure vengeance. Legal authorities should carry out the purges instead. Even so, the number of people North Korean forces killed in the South is estimated to be in the tens of thousands.

4. He also gives credit to South Korea's liberal governments after democratization, for actually investigating civilian massacres committed by state power during the war. Things like the Jeju and the Bodo League massacre. He describes South Korea as the only East Asian country that's been willing to use "the scalpel of truth" on itself: to look honestly and thoroughly at its own history and conflicts, without flinching.

5. He then contrasts that achievement with both North Korea and the US. On North Korea specifically, he points out that the regime has never shown any willingness to revisit its own past, especially the political retaliation against people branded as wartime collaborators, in any kind of open or democratic way.

6. He writes that when the communists took back their territory after China entered the war, even Kim Il Sung himself had to condemn how extreme the political retaliation against alleged collaborators had gotten. But we barely know anything about this dark chapter, because North Korea has never shown the slightest interest in examining it openly, democratically, or through any serious investigation. Which, Cumings suggests, makes it fair to assume they have plenty to hide.

So I'm curious. For those who defend North Korea, how would you respond to points 1 through 6? Genuinely want to know your move.

For nearly two years, researcher Vangelis Stykas has maintained access to North Korean hackers’ servers. His work shows they pulled off intrusions in a shocking number of systems across the globe.

North Korea's tungsten exports to China have gone up a lot. They increased by about 13 times and have become North Korea's biggest export to China, passing wigs and fake eyelashes. This is happening because China is buying a lot more tungsten to make up for supply shortages at home. Another reason is that tungsten is not currently banned under U.N. sanctions.

"The Russians have twice requested the exchange of two North Korean prisoners of war who were captured by the Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region. The Russians are not interested in other foreign prisoners of war who fought on the side of the Russian Federation."