A Bitter Harvest
Sinchon Museum of American War AtrocitiesNorth Korean image depicting purported crimes perpetrated by U.S. soldiers during the war.
Since the end of the Korean War’s hostilities — an armistice was signed but no peace treaty — in 1953, we’ve been left with an uncomfortable stalemate and the parties involved have gone their separate ways over how they tell the story of the war.
For many decades, South Korea’s policy was to obscure and deny everything, threatening witnesses to the massacres with blacklisting and prison if they talked.
Britain and the United States went into an oblivious information blackout, with virtually none of the gory details of the Korean War finding their way into school textbooks or popular histories of the war.
The Korean War itself even earned the nickname “the forgotten war” because of the neglect it faced among average Americans and because of the dismissive veterans’ policies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For most Westerners, it’s as if the mass graves and firebombed cities never happened, and the grievances that North Korea keeps harping on might as well be the rantings of lunatics.
In North Korea, the guardians of popular history took a dramatically different tack.
Every child in North Korea is given extensive instruction in the Workers’ Party-approved version of events, where the dastardly United States invaded peaceful Korea for no reason at all, and where U.S. Imperialist Aggression Forces (the name the U.S. military has in North Korean media) gratuitously butchered innocent children to satisfy their bloodlust.
All visitors to North Korea are marched through multiple museum exhibits and shown photographs and artifacts of the slaughters. The museum even includes one exhibit in Sinchon that goes out of its way to slander U.S. General William Harrison by blaming him for a mass shooting, despite the event taking place before he was even deployed to Korea.
In all, so many lies and exaggerations have been told on the North Korean side, seemingly to counter the suppression and secrecy perpetrated in the South, that the honest truth may never be known about the atrocities committed and suffered during the Korean War.
Today, as the two countries gird themselves for another round of fighting, Westerners would do well to remember that the North Korean soldiers they may soon face have all been raised on the North Korean version of history, however much fact or fiction that happens to contain.
Next, check out how Americans are depicted in North Korean propaganda. Then, check out these photos of what life is like inside North Korea.
