[The Editors' Verdict] Lessons from the Korean War

[Asia Economy] This year marks the 71st anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. The invasion by North Korea's totalitarian communist regime resulted in approximately 600,000 casualties among South Korean forces, 150,000 casualties among United Nations forces, and 2.5 million civilian casualties.

Despite such devastation, a public opinion survey showing that only 44% of respondents in their 20s believe "the Korean War is North Korea's responsibility" is shocking. This reality is the result of distorted history education perpetrated in educational settings and a warped perception of North Korea created by left-wing governments and scholars under the guise of "understanding North Korea correctly." The reality of North Korea's totalitarianism has been concealed, and North Korea's various atrocities have been twisted to appear as if they were our fault.

Statements about the Korean War by the Moon Jae-in administration have also fueled this erosion of perception. In his Memorial Day address, President Moon praised Kim Won-woong, who received a medal from Kim Il-sung during the Korean War, as the root of the South Korean military, but never once mentioned North Korea, the war criminal.

Furthermore, leftists are unjustly labeling Baek Seon-yeop, a war hero who defended the Nakdong River line and led the recapture of Pyongyang during the Korean War, as a pro-Japanese collaborator, thereby denying his patriotic defense. This is a repeated regression against the constitution, civilization, and history.

The Korean War was a conflict in which the forces of liberal democracy stopped the expansionist attempts of totalitarian communism by the Soviet Union and China. That is why we call the Korean War a patriotic defense. It has also been proven that our patriotic defense, which rejected totalitarian communist forces and chose liberal democracy during the post-World War II global order restructuring, was the right choice.

Patriotic defense became the cornerstone of industrialization and democratization, enabling us to leap from one of the poorest countries to an advanced nation. However, since the Korean War, there have been persistent efforts to undermine the greatness of patriotic defense. Anti-communism, opposing communism, was disparaged as McCarthyism or a color-based political attack. Perhaps because of this, anti-communism became fixed as a negative image in our society and turned into a taboo topic that should not be mentioned.

The lesson of patriotic defense proves how important it is to choose the right system and ideology. The 71 years of development disparity between South and North Korea also confirm the importance of system and ideology.

It shows that the liberal democratic system we chose was a superior system and ideology, while the totalitarian communist system was an inferior one. Therefore, there is no room for debate that the superior system must be strengthened and developed.

However, we have exploited the communist system by disguising it as "progress" and using it as a tool to undermine and contaminate liberal democracy. Especially after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union in the 1990s, under the banner of post-Cold War, we created opportunities for communist ideology to infiltrate. The post-Cold War era also led us to belittle the issue of value erosion as trivial.

But now, the issue of value erosion has reached a point where it can no longer be ignored. The new type of major power relations proposed by China in 2013 centers on the idea that the world order (or ideological order) is divided and exercised by the United States and China.

In particular, China has shown ambitions for exclusive dominance in Asia and Africa. In 2014, China ambitiously launched the Belt and Road Initiative (一帶一路) worth $380 billion.

The problem with the Belt and Road Initiative is that capital-poor countries lack the capacity to respond to the debt trap, leaving them unable to escape the invisible "red hand" of China’s snare.

This indicates that communism has not disappeared into the annals of history but has revived, ushering in a post-post-Cold War era. The characteristic of the post-post-Cold War era is that the international order is being reorganized around values such as ideology and economy.

Our national strategy must also be restructured toward liberal democracy, and this is the lesson the Korean War imparts.