.... is very fascinating, but what's also fascinating is how their propaganda machine actually can sound justified given said history, with the right modifications.
Japan became their occupiers/colonial overkords over 100 years ago. Then after WWII the US and the USSR partitioned them off and used each side against the other, their land and lives for outsider's proxy wars. They felt no loyalty to the USSR, and little to China, and propagand co-opting Japanese superiority ideas for the "entire Korean people" over China, then excluding the Japanese as being Koreans, was part of the Revolution in the North. The South Koreans weren't as "pure", they let themselves get corrupted by the US and Japan both.
But instead of "purity" being tied with power and a desire to conquer like Nazi Germany, or "selflessness/equality of all men" like the USSR and China, virtue and "purity" for Koreans in their propaganda during the Revolution was from victimhood and martyrdom -- powerlessness. Childlike innocence, and childlike need for a strong parent (the military) to protect them from the outside world.
They'll gladly accept help from the people that hurt them, but it incurs no obligation because it's never done with pure motives. Still, without that help, they'll make do, even if they starve. It's noble sacrifice for the "military first" attitude so necessary because the world is out to get them. And they're used to it, because the first Kim decided it was easier to control people when you didn't give them an overabundance of food.
But to keep a state in constant war, people need victories and to fear the outsiders. Films showed Korean babies getting "injected with gerns" to kill them, propaganda against vaccination. Sick people are easier to control than healthy people, too. There's the balance of fear of the enemy and confidence that the military really is worth all this sacrifice that must be made for them to remain in current equilibrium.
I hope this is just another way to get back the aid taken in sanctions and use it internally as "Our mighty military protected you again, forcing the devil to capitulate and stop trying to starve you, my children", and not Un deciding that to really prove the value of both himself as successor to his father and grandfather and the "military first" strategy he must actually give Korea a proven aggressive victory in the modern age. His predecessors could invent their "victories", but he can only invent so much now.
= new reply since forum marked as read
