Why Are There Two Koreas?

This video is made possible thanks to Audible. Visit audible.com slash cogito or text cogito to 500 500 to start your 30 day free trial. One name for Korea in Korean is Chosun, land of the morning calm. But if you know anything about the Korean peninsula then you'll know it's anything but calm. For over a thousand years Korea was a united and culturally distinct nation. With one people sharing one language. But today there are two Koreas. And they look like this. That dark spot? That's North Korea. One Korea is a wealthy and vibrant democracy exporting phones, cars, and K-pop. While the other has devolved into a totalitarian nuclear monarchy ruled by the iron-fisted Kim dynasty. So why are there two Koreas? Who divided them? And how can you win an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii? Well let's find out. It's the late 19th century. For about a thousand years Korea has been a unified kingdom. And it's royal family has been ruling for centuries. Which is surprising because tiny Korea is surrounded by three of the most aggressive and powerful empires in history. China, Russia, and Japan. But somehow Koreans managed to pick up writing, culture, and religion from China and Japan while maintaining their own distinct language, culture, and customs. But then in the 19th century Japan fell in with a bad crowd. The Europeans. Japan started smoking and talking back to China. And soon Japan wanted its own cool colonial empire like Britain and France. And then boom. Japan starts to modernize like crazy. They build up this incredibly powerful military and use it to wreck China in 1895. And then they do the same thing to the Russians in 1905. With Russia and China defeated the Japanese began colonizing Korea. By 1910 they had annexed a whole country into the Japanese empire. Under Japanese rule Korean culture was suppressed. All opposition was crushed and the Korean language was outlawed in schools. In 1937 Japan invaded China in what many see as the actual beginning of the Second World War. During the war the Japanese used Koreans as forced labor. Sending millions to slave away in mines and factories. And then thousands of Korean women were forced into prostitution rings for Japanese soldiers. As Japan began to lose the war in 1942 conditions in Korea only got worse. On August 15th 1945 after being devastated by two American atomic bombs and with the Soviet Union landing troops in Korea the Japanese surrendered. For the millions of Koreans listening to the Japanese Emperor's surrender on the radio this was a moment of pure joy. They paraded through the streets with Korean flags celebrating that 35 years of colonial oppression was finally over. Or was it? As the Soviet army surged into northern Korea the Americans panicked. The Soviets might take the whole peninsula before American soldiers even set foot on it. So they sent them an offer to split Korea between them. The task of carving up Korea fell on two American colonels. Armed with no knowledge of Korea, a pencil, an old National Geographic map, and very little time. They wanted the Korean capital Seoul on the American side. Looking up from there they picked the first thing that jumped out at them. A circle of latitude 38 degrees north of the equator known as the 38 parallel. Stalin accepted the offer and on the 17th of August 1945 with a stroke of a pencil one Korea became two. Both powers were really happy with this decision. You see the Cold War was just heating up. Actually that doesn't make sense. Whatever. Things were getting chilly and the United States didn't want a Soviet influence next to their new ally, Japan. And the Soviets didn't want the United States right on their border. So Korea became a buffer. For these empires Korea was a strategic piece of land that just happened to have people on it. The Americans arrived in the south and immediately got off on the wrong foot. They outlawed the People's Republic of Korea, a government Koreans had set up for themselves. And then they announced that the Japanese colonial government would remain intact. The Koreans were furious. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans went on strike. And so the US military government made strikes illegal. Then the Koreans were like, we don't care if it's illegal. And then the military government brought in martial law, fired into the crowds of protesters, and killed hundreds. More uprisings, arrests, tortures, and killings followed and would become a frequent occurrence in the south. Up in the north the Soviets had also found a Korean government and local committees. Instead of banning them they worked with them. The occupying Soviet army also contained thousands of communist Korean rebels that had been fighting against the Japanese for decades. These were heroes in the eyes of the Korean people. And one of these fighters was Kim Il-sung, who the Soviets handpicked to be the leader on their side of Korea. By the first half of 1946 Kim and the Soviets had arrested thousands of Japanese officials and Korean collaborators. They took all the Japanese owned land and gave it back to the Koreans. They brought in an 8 hour working day, passed gender equality laws, and banned child labour. Landlords, Japanese officials, and anti-communists all fled down to South Korea. This removed all of the communist opposition and left behind a population that really liked them. So while the south was stuck in a violent cycle of uprisings and crackdowns, the north was stabilising under Kim Il-sung. The Americans also picked their own man for the south. Syngman Rhee. 72 year old Rhee was a Harvard graduate, Protestant Christian, that had spent the last 40 years living in the United States and was a staunch anti-communist conservative. To the Americans he was perfect. Rhee was elected president of the newly declared Republic of Korea in the south in July 1948. Most of his opponents turned up dead before election day. Which is strangely convenient. Under Rhee anti-communism dominated the south. But Rhee had his own definition of communism. Disagreeing with Syngman Rhee? That's a communism. Protesting? That's a communism. Sharing a cookie with a friend? That's a communism. No seriously, they executed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children suspected of doing communism. It's very very dark. In the north, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was declared on the 9th of September with Kim Il-sung as its leader. With the Koreas divided, the American and Soviet troops pulled out in 1948 and 1949 patting themselves on the back for an amazing job well done. But these two Koreas weren't evenly matched. The South Korean military was weak, untrained, and was under-equipped. The North Korean army was larger and made up of hardened veterans that had fought against the Japanese or had served in the Chinese Civil War. And on their way out, the Soviets had left behind tons of weapons, equipment, and tanks with a wink and a nod saying now don't you go starting any wars now bud. On the 25th of June 1950, known as 625 or Yu-Gi-Oh in Korean, the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel and launched an invasion of the South. Within two days they had taken the South Korean capital, Seoul, and forced Rhee and his cabinet to flee. Now Rhee made sure to order the massacre of 200,000 suspected communists before leaving. This pattern of people ordering the execution of people they don't like will happen a lot during this war. The North Korean army took 90% of the country, trapping the South Korean army in Busan. As they made their way south, the North Koreans executed any anti-communists they could find and aided any communist sympathizers. In Busan, the South Korean army held off the North Korean advance until the United Nations organized a counter-attack led by the United States and joined by 20 other nations. Now all the world's great imperial powers, the USSR, the United States, the British Empire, Mighty Luxembourg, and others were all involved in a war on the tiny Korean peninsula. In September 1950, the United Nations forces landed at Incheon and pushed the North Korean army back up the peninsula, recapturing Seoul and executing anyone deemed a communist sympathizer. Yeah, I know, it happens a lot. This is what I said would happen. By October, they had taken the North Korean capital Pyongyang. They continued to push the North Koreans back until they reached the border with China. The United States assumed China would never dare engage them in war. In November 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers poured across the border, taking the US-Korean forces entirely by surprise and pushing them back over the 38th parallel, taking back Pyongyang and Seoul. It wasn't long before the UN-Korean forces pushed the North Koreans and Chinese back past the 38th parallel and retook Seoul. This was Seoul's fourth time changing hands in nine months. The city was in ruins. The war had reached a stalemate. The battle line would remain mostly in the same place for the rest of the war. Now, stalemate did not mean peace and quiet. As the battle line froze, the United States military dropped over 600,000 tons of bombs and napalm on North Korea. By the end of the war, there were essentially no buildings left standing in the North. After two and a half years of slow negotiations, on July 27, 1953, North Korea, China, and the United States signed an armistice agreement. The North Koreans agreed to dividing the country along the current battle line, not the 38th parallel, creating a 250 km long and 4 km wide buffer zone between the states, called the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ for short. The Korean War took over 3 million lives and ruined countless more. This was a civil war put on steroids by outside powers. As armies hunted each other up and down the peninsula, they committed horrific war crimes in an attempt to exterminate ideological enemies that were once friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The raw brutality of this war carved deep, hateful, and polarizing scars into the minds of generations of Koreans, all to move a border slightly further north. The war's devastation leveled North Korea, which let Kim Il-sung rebuild it according to his own vision. Using the carnage of the war, Kim Il-sung built a propaganda campaign that claimed that all of Korea's problems came from foreign powers that wanted to colonize, divide, and bomb them. Only Kim Il-sung could protect them. Through propaganda, purges, assassinations, and arrests, Kim Il-sung became the sole power in North Korea. Statues of Kim rose up across the country, along with prison camps for dissenters. Chinese and Soviet-influenced Koreans were purged. And while claiming to still be a communist state, Kim Il-sung had begun to build a kingdom for himself and his sons. To kickstart the devastated economy, Kim Il-sung invested in industries like construction, steel, coal, and agriculture. Surprisingly, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, North Korea's economy was performing better than South Korea's. People had access to free healthcare and housing, illiteracy was eliminated, and the life expectancy rose to 72 years old. So what's going on down in South Korea? Oh, everything's on fire. Great. Ri's dictatorship grew so violently oppressive that the people rose up. But before the people could get their hands on him, the US military flew him away. He spent the rest of his life in horrific, painful, and unbearable exile in Hawaii. Ri was almost immediately followed by Major General Park Chung-hee, who came to power through a military coup on the 16th of May 1961. Park is probably the most controversial person in South Korean history. His dictatorship ushered in a new era of authoritarianism and anti-communism. He created the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, which spied on, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered anyone that questioned his role. All Korean media was heavily censored. Musicians like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash were banned because their songs were too communist-y. I walked a line, yeah, the Communist Party line, Mr. Cash. But Park also oversaw the South Korean economic miracle. In the 60s, South Korea was wracked with unemployment, violence, and poverty. Park mobilized the South Korean workforce and put millions to work in factories. Working conditions were awful, the working day was 12 hours long, unions were banned, and the minimum wage didn't exist. But South Korea's stagnant economy began to get going. Using loans from Japan and the United States, the Park government provided no-interest loans to family-owned conglomerates known as chaebols. Some of these chaebols included small companies called Samsung, Hyundai, and LG. The South Korean economy transformed into an export powerhouse, focusing on modern industries like cars and electronics. To understand the impact of the Park dictatorship's economic reforms, we need to look at this graph of South Korea's GDP per capita over the decades. It's pretty much the same as the North until the 1970s and then whoop. Today, South Korea is one of the most developed and wealthiest nations on the planet. But while bringing economic success, Park's South Korea was extremely oppressive. Workers did as they were ordered and dissenters vanished. Park brought in a new constitution that made him president for life. Which turned out to be true, but only because he was assassinated by the chief of the Korean CIA on October 26, 1979, in the middle of massive protests. Park was succeeded by another president who was himself couped by another military man called Chun Do-hwan. The South Koreans had had enough. In 1987, over a million South Koreans took to the streets and demanded a real democracy. Chun agreed to finally hold real democratic elections, ending the last dictatorship and beginning the 6th Republic of Korea on February 25, 1988. The 6th Republic is still ongoing and today South Koreans vote their presidents into power. And each peaceful transfer of power only strengthens their hard fought for democracy. Okay, so it's the 90s now. Let's head back to North Korea and see how things at all. Everything's on fire. South Korea's GDP outpaced the North's during the 70s. North Korea stagnated through the 80s and then in the 90s took a great leap backwards. The USSR collapsed in 1991, which ended the supply of cheap oil and other resources that North Korea relied on. It also removed one of North Korea's largest trading partners and their military protector. Three years later, in 1994, Kim Il-sung died of a sudden heart attack. Since North Korea was now a monarchy, it was his son Kim Jong-il that took control of the nation. And when he did, it was hit with devastating floods, then a drought, and then a massive famine causing the deaths of about 2 million North Koreans. North Korea descended into a living hell. With a starving people, no allies, an economy on life support, and a bloated military budget, it looked like North Korea was about to collapse in the 90s. But then they stumbled upon an exceptionally odd strategy. Nukes. The Kim regime conducted several rocket tests in the 90s and in 2006 held their first successful nuclear weapons test. By isolating the country, controlling information, surveilling everyone at all times, and enslaving thousands in prison camps across the country, North Korea keeps its people over-propagandized, underfed, and so exhausted that rebellion seems impossible. Safe from any opposition within, nuclear weapons defended the Kim regime from any outside intervention. And the threat of nuclear warfare lets them demand international food aid from other countries. 70 years after the Korean War there is still a stalemate. But now it's a stalemate of indifference. The United States, Russia, and China were happy to get involved in Korea when it was politically beneficial. Now that only human suffering is at stake, there is little incentive. Armed with nuclear weapons, the Kim dynasty is more secure than ever. The Korean Demilitarized Zone is one of the most militarized places on the planet and North Korea continues to be a dark spot on the earth. Since the 90s, there have been many attempts to bring about friendlier relations between the Koreas. Without much progress. But Koreans have always seen the division of their nation as unnatural. Both Koreas claim that reunification is their goal. Even after decades of propaganda, threats, murders, and an increasing economic divide, the Korean people still see themselves as one. South Koreans still send balloons with USB drives or letters over the border into North Korea in the hopes of informing them of the outside world. K-pop and South Korean soap operas are still smuggled into North Korea. Showing that maybe the two cultures haven't moved so far apart. In the minds of most Koreans, it isn't a matter of if they'll unify, but really a matter of when. The history of Korea is long, complicated, and fascinating. While researching this video, I listened to A Brief History of Korea by Michael J. Set, which is an excellent bite-sized introduction to Korea's history. It covers everything from ancient times up until today. And the author throws in some random interesting facts along the way. Like Koreans have a weird thing with turtles. And they also consume the most garlic on the planet. Which I didn't know. It was really fun. Audible has thousands of titles. You can jump into books about Korean history or just North Korea. It also has other history books like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Audible has fiction, biography, comedy, and even original podcasts. Audible makes it easier than ever to fit audiobooks into your schedule. Whether you're cleaning your house, cooking, or on a run. I've heard people go for runs. I've never partaken in this practice, but I think it exists. While just going about your day, you can be listening to some of the best audiobooks available. Even offline. With apps on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows phones. 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